Can you imagine yourself facing the real world after two decades of living behind convent walls? This story reveals the difficulties and challenges faced by a spunky and naIve eighteen-year-old girl who leaves her family to enter the novitiate of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet. Her journey presents many unusual circumstances:
- working with migrant farm workers picking chilies in the fields,
- teaching grades two to eight,
- entering into an improper relationship with a married man,
- wearing a variety of new habits in keeping with Vatican II,
- spending two summers studying Spanish in Mexico.
Finally, she faces the decision to leave religious life. Now the adjustments begin in earnest. Audrey rose to administrative assistant in a software company after just three years in the business world, married, and moved to Reno, Nevada. Her husband opened a deli, and Audrey returned to the classroom teaching Spanish in high school.
Audrey became part of a foreign exchange program for students and had many of them in her classroom. She found temporary homes for them during their year here in the United States and had kept up correspondence with several of them in Spain, Mexico, and Costa Rica.
After retiring from teaching, Audrey and her husband traveled the world, visiting over thirty countries, where they met people from all over the world.
Her adventures are intriguing, and she hopes that her readers will enjoy reading about them as much as she has enjoyed living them.
