Vevonna Marie Clark Kennedy (People only call her that when she is particularly annoying) was raised in part on a farm in the Midwest in the middle of the last century, an environment as strange and exotic to the last four generations as backpacking through Nepal.
Holding degrees from the University of Missouri in Education and Fine Arts, she owned a graphic arts studio in Carlisle, Pennsylvania where she worked for ad agencies in New York and Publishers in Philadelphia as well as local businesses and won a couple of national awards.
Married with two riotous sons and seven crazy grands, her husband has led her around the world for fifty-six years, living for three years in Felixstowe, England and Rome, Italy and in Garmisch Partenkirken, Germany for five.
She has found that along with all the amazing fibers of adventure and drama in life, be it travel, daily life, or history, there is always one staple: THE TOILET.
And she knows toilets: Soviet trench toilets, German outhouses that hang over 1000-foot cliffs, ominous Polish toilet police, toilets on Romanian boats that defied logic, community toilets, toilets you stand on and toilets you dare not sit on, privies guarded by giant roosters with talons like steak knives and the seriously odiferous chamber pot that dwelt under grama’s bed. All became an omnipresent part of her life.
Her introduction to foreign means of, um, elimination, started during the mid-sixties when her job with the Peruvian YMCA took her up and down the coast of Peru, into the Amazon Jungle aboard a military cargo ship, and by train through the dripping jungles of Colombia, north to Cartagena, a now discontinued route, but then just beginning to be known as the drug route.
When the Soviet Union, at the end of the cold war, birthed an amazing fifteen countries from its sprawling womb, and released seven more from its yoke, a German/American coalition created an institution to help those countries establish viable governments. From 1997-2002 her husband was the director of this institution, so visiting officials and the alumni associations in the various countries was paramount — and she went along.
Thus, she found herself on the back roads of Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia, Romania, Albania, Moldova, Belarus, Poland, Hungary, the Baltics, and on and on. Always with them was a fantastic staff: aids that not only kept them from disappearing into the netherworld of emerging countries but were fluent in the languages and remarkably well prepared for cultural traps and linguistic faux pas.
And, she was mostly on her own to discover the amazing world of the former Soviet Empire. At home again, they launched into travels across Russia on the Trans-Siberian railroad, then Mongolia, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, Thailand, China, Southern Africa, Morocco, India, Nepal, Cuba. Most of these they traveled on their own. That’s when you stumble into the good stuff. A total of eighty plus countries on five continents, and their fascinating toilets, tucked under their belts.
And squashed in between all of that, she has returned over and over to art.
In the course of living and traveling, she has at one time or another spoken four languages well enough to get into trouble, and two with what she calls “survival” capability. This has allowed her to plunge a little deeper into the back roads and suffer more unique facilities, and... consequences.
