The Global Village is one of the best places to be at the annual ATD International Conference & Exposition. In 2012, my colleagues and I met with other attendees who had traveled from such diverse countries as Canada, the United States, Belgium, Mexico, Germany, France, Brazil, the Netherlands, Denmark, the United Kingdom, and South Africa. I learned so much at the conference that I decided to come back the next year.

I arrived at ATD 2013 on May 18 and gathered my international friends for dinner. It was lovely to reunite after a year of hard work and talk about our experiences and challenges. At dinner, one of my good friends, Shoshanna, introduced a small, fragile lady named Fabiola to our group. Fabiola was a bit lost after arriving from Lima, Peru. (In fact, she told me afterward she had not intended to go to dinner.) I learned that she worked at the Quality Institute of the Pontificado Universidad Catholica de Peru, and she was the only delegate from the university at the conference.

We had a great dinner filled with laughs, jokes, and lots of sharing. Fabiola was quickly accepted into our group. I must admit I thought she was amazing from the first minute I saw her. We quickly became comfortable with each other and took a lot of pictures together. 

While at the conference, we looked for each other during breaks. When it was time to leave, we agreed to see each other again. I went to visit her two months later and we spent three weeks together. We visited the Amazon, the beautiful city of Cusco, Machu Picchu, Arequipa, and Lima—where we live now, as an ATD couple. 

We got married on December 12, 2014. In May, I will attend the ATD 2015 International Conference & Exposition as a speaker, and Fabiola will join me.

I’d also like to dedicate this blog post to a great ATD person—Nicole Washington, a Belgian-American woman who worked for ATD for 17 years and is retired now. Many of you may know her. Nicole: merci, merci pour tout!

See all you lovely folks at ATD 2015 in Orlando, Florida!