Maureen spent three and a half very happy years in Thailand, first as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English at what was then the College of Education, Bangsaen (now a university), and then as a Peace Corps trainer.

Since leaving Thailand, she has done teacher education and taught EFL, ESL, English for Academic Purposes, technical writing, business English, and developmental writing and reading-in Kuwait, Iran, Morocco, and the United States-and has been the assistant director of an immigrant and refugee agency's learning center in Hawaii.

After leaving Thailand in 1973, she attended the University of Hawaii and received her M.A. in ESL in 1975. That year, she went to Kuwait to teach English in Kuwait University's Faculty of Engineering. She spent five and a half years there, with a one-year interruption in Tehran in 1976-1977.

In 1982, she returned to Hawaii, and several years later, married a "wonderful
Burmese man who I had the good fortune to meet." She and her husband left Hawaii in 1991 and moved to Jersey City, NJ; Denver; and Ithaca, NY, before settling in Watsonville, in Santa Cruz County, CA.

Maureen now commutes to San Jose State University, where she has been a lecturer in the Department of Linguistics and Language Development since 1998.