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The voice on the other end of the phone was Bill Jensen, a former business dean at Viterbo University who had married a Russian woman and moved to Moscow.
He was calling from Kazakhstan in central Asia, with a job offer for Knight, his former boss at Viterbo as academic vice president from 1989 to 1993.
By April, Knight was in Kazakhstan for an interview. By mid-April, he and wife Linda were off to central Asia.
Knight became provost, then manager, for Education Network academies in four countries: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.
All were former Soviet states, three bordering China to the east, made up of a wide variety of ancient ethnic influences and groups: Turkish, Mongolian, Persian, Slavic, Middle Eastern and Chinese, to name just a few.
Knight’s program primarily offered master’s degree level training in business management and economics for university professors who had been schooled in Marxist rather than free market practices.
He would wind up spending two years on the project, living six months in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, then a year in Almaty in southeastern Kazakhstan.
While in Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan, Linda Knight volunteered to teach elementary classes, which she had done in years past in the U.S.
She found the students eager to work on their English skills — and curious about America, especially holidays.
One lesson centered on the origins of Thanksgiving, Linda Knight said. When she showed up at the school, a television crew was there to cover her presentation for its newscast.
“I thought, boy, I’m glad I did a little reading and research on the Internet,” she said.
The children would pepper her about minute details of American history, such as the date when George Washington married. “I often couldn’t answer those,” she said.
Their teachers were proud when the students managed to stump her, but Linda Knight pointed out it highlighted the difference in teaching and learning styles. In their system, lecture and memorization were the focus, but not the “why and how” behind the facts.
Unlike a later stint in Afghanistan, the Knights were free to travel, shop and dine out without fear they might become targets as Americans. Bishkek and Almaty are relatively modern cities, they said, and the apartments where they lived had most of the conveniences available in the U.S.
The couple was able to visit some of the natural areas and ancient cities in each country, such as Uzbekistan’s Bukhara and Samarkand, which dates back to the 5th century B.C. and has the tomb of legendary conqueror Timur, or Tamerlane. On another trip, they rode three days down the fast-moving, glacier-fed Ili River outside Almaty.
Linda Knight said she did become a target for friendly residents who wanted to test their English. She had weekly meetings with university students for coffee and conversation in Bishkek, she said, and rarely could sit in a park or in public without someone asking her the time — a subtle way to determine if she spoke English.
She also enjoyed the “very busy, very noisy” open markets and bazaars, where vendors would offer produce and other goods. It gave her the chance to practice her admittedly poor Russian.
“I enjoyed bargaining with them, and they had more fun bargaining with me, especially if I would try to use my Russian ... they’d try to help me with it, and end up laughing at something I said.”
Betsy Bloom can be reached at bbloom@lacrossetribune.com or (608) 791-8236.
