Tales from Tripoli: An American Family's Odyssey at a Libyan Boys' School

Kirsten I. Russell spent the happiest and perhaps the darkest years of her childhood in Tripoli, Libya. At the Vocational Agricultural Training Center for Libyans (VATC), a farm school where Kirsten lived with her family for six years during the 1950s, she grew closer to her parents as they created a home school for her and her older sister, but she felt estranged from them when their discipline turned punitive. During her last years in Libya, as her parents tried to restore family harmony, Kirsten and her siblings turned the VATC farm into the biggest, best playground they ever had. Years later, Kirsten learned another story of her family’s years in Tripoli. Her father, Ray E. Russell, on a U.S. foreign service assignment to Libya, helped establish VATC as a joint Libyan-American project to train Libyan boys to become their newly independent nation’s agricultural leaders. As he taught the students better farming methods, he watched poverty-stricken adolescents mature into professional young men. Meanwhile, he struggled with farming problems, language and cultural barriers, and faceless bureaucracies in both the U.S. and Libyan governments. Throughout the Russells’ years at VATC, the family remained the only Americans among Middle Eastern faculty, staff, and students. The experience changed the students as well as the Russells, thrusting them all into a larger world outside their original homes. While Kirsten realizes the terrible cost of that experience to her family, she remembers her childhood home in Libya as a sunlit place where she and dozens of Libyan boys learned discipline, not through punishment, but through education.