About Us

I'm Dave Pearson. I was born in Pittsburgh in the '40s. I played and worked hard as a kid, with a full range of after-school activities including piano lessons, a paper route and weekends caddying at South Hills Country Club.. Baldwin High School led to Carnegie Tech and a degree in Electrical Engineering. I probably would have never left Pittsburgh had not Uncle Sam called me to spend two years in the Army at the Pentagon. I quickly caught Potomac Fever and decided to stay in Washington, working in the computer business, first for IBM, and then for a variety of other competing firms. I lived in town, collected cars, and was heavily invested in real estate when the bust came in the 1980s. It seemed like a good time to move on.

Patti grew up the child of resort hotel parents, moving each spring and fall as the seasons changed. She calls Gloversville, NY home, but spent her high-school years in West Palm Beach. Patti went to GW University in DC during the '60s and worked for a while on Capitol Hill. She met her first husband in the '70s while working on the Governor's campaign of Leroy Collins. Patti and Frank lived in Greenville, SC and Tallahassee, FL until the early '80s when things changed and it seemed like time to move on

I met the newly-single Patti at a young adult's party hosted by Washington's Croquet Society in September, 1983. We dated for a couple years while our relationship developed as our professional lives deteriorated. In 1986, when the computer business collapsed and Patti's position at OAS dissolved, we decided to marry and seek our futures together elsewhere. We moved to Islamabad, Pakistan with the US Government in 1987 and that changed our lives! When it was time to return to DC in 1990 to be near our families, we realized the good life we had gotten used was left behind. Patti took a string of short-term positions, while I bought a failing computer business and set to work. Patti took jobs in Albania and Bosnia while I hunkered in for 10 years of retail in the computer business. We were apart too much. Finally, in 2001, it seemed like a good time to move on..

We sold both houses in January, 2002 and left Washington a few months later. We moved first to Islamabad, then onward to Larnaca, Cyprus to weather the unstable situation in the Middle East. Next stop -- the crisis in Iraq, and an offrice in Amman Jordan on 30 May! But that only lasted a month -- the pot boiled over and we both bailed out. Patti resigned World Vision to take a post in Sarajevo starting in September. After a short 3-month contract as a Systems Analyst with the Office of US Foreign Disaster Assistance in downtown DC, I came to Sarajevo to join her, and we stayed until 2007 when I returned to DC for a government contracts job. She came back in June of 2007 and we rented an apartment in Alexandria. That ended in early 2008 when the world turned topsy turvy on the both of us. We went to Mongolia for ... 2 months and got ousted when the funding was cancelled. I came back and took a job in DC where I've been since, living with relatives. Patti continues her USAID career taking short-term assignments in Islamabad and Tel Aviv. And that's where we are today. Next stop: Retirement, maybe in 2011.