Living among people who are skeptical of the intentions of your country can make you rethink it too, says Maine.

Question: How did you go from Connecticut to Pakistan?

David Maine: There were several steps along the way. I went to college at Oberlin in Ohio, and after that I went to Boston and then after a couple of years there I went to grad school in Arizona in Tuscon, at the University of Arizona. And I stayed there seven years and I met a woman who was entering the grad program just as I was leaving it and she was from Pakistan. Her name is Uzma Asim Khan, and we ended up getting married and then after staying another year in Arizona after her graduation, we were both eager to go somewhere in and try something different. She had just come into the country to go to university and then grad school, so she wasn’t an immigration thing or something. So we looked around. We applied for jobs overseas. We ended up going to Morocco for three years as English teachers, and that was interesting.