Well folks, here we are in 2016. Who would have thunk it would happen so fast?
I’ve had two columns on former Reach For The Top student Pat Churchland. I put out a request for those who knew of or had information on the other three former Reach For The Top students who are Rees Morgan, Gunnar Kuhn and Dittmar Mundel.
Brita Park, talked to her brother Dittmar and he sent me the following letter.
“I am Dittmar Mundel, one of Pat’s Churchland’s ( nee Smith ) Reach For The Top teammates.
After graduating in Oliver, I went to the University of British Columbia for several years, paid in large part by scholarships and with summer orchard work in Oliver.
In 1963, I received a scholarship to study theology in Germany, first in Bethel near Bielefeld, a place also known for having kept handicapped people safe during the Nazi Regime, and then at the University of Gottingen.
In Germany you can choose your first degree, depending on the nature of your thesis which you submit and what comprehensive exams you submit to. I didn’t have the intestinal fortitude to go straight for a PhD, so I decided to do my MA in Theology as my first degree.
Upon returning to Canada in 1969, I served in Lutheran parishes in Edmonton and then Vancouver. In 1975, my wife Pat, who became a development educator and later a special needs teacher and I, and our first born Karsten, headed for California so I could do my PhD in Systematic and Philosophic Theology in Berkeley.
During our first year we had to do a lot of improvising to make ends meet, such as picking up fruits and vegetables discarded by the big grocery stores. The improvising however, was made a lot easier because a friend from Vancouver bought us a house in Walnut Creek California, where we lived free of charge for my four years of Doctoral studies.
From the second year on, I was funded by a Canada Council Grant (which today would be the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council ), as well as scholarships from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.
From 1980 and on, I have been teaching Religious Studies and Global Development Studies at what is now the Augustana Campus of the University of Alberta, but was formerly Camrose Lutheran College.
In 1994, my wife and I started the “Prairies-Mexico Rural Development Exchange” which had ten Canadian and ten Mexican students spend the fall semester in rural Alberta and the winter semester in rural Mexico. Variations of this program have carried on for fifteen years.
Currently, in my “retirement”, I still teach courses in a series we call “spirit of the land”. I am now getting ready for our fifth annual conference, which looks at how we reconnect to the land and how we actively build bridges between aboriginal people and settler descendants.
We have four children who all grew up in Camrose and traveled with us wherever our teaching and studies took us. They are now scattered across the USA and Canada; three have completed PhD’s and one has completed two MA’s.”
Now faithful readers, if we can just get two more siblings to encourage their brothers’ to inform us as to how their lives have been spent, then we will have a full compliment of “Reach For The Top” stories.
ruralreportwithlairdsmith@gmail.com