The Manhattan Times

Moving in: Grandkids draw world traveler home to Inwood

by Daniel P. Bader

One of Maria Borger’s first experiences in Iran was embarrassing. She was eating in a cafeteria, and caught the eye of a young man across the room. He smiled at her, and she smiled politely back. On her way out, the young man was waiting for her – apparently they had made a date with that back and forth smile.

She declined, using a phrase which means “go away” – but that particular phrase is meant for pests, animals.

“I doubly insulted this poor man,” Borger said smiling from behind a cup of tea at the Garden Café on Broadway and W. 207th Street.

That embarrassing moment came in 1976, two years before the revolution that made Iran into the state it is today. Borger left Iran just as rumblings of the revolution started.

Over the last 30 years, Borger, a linguistics expert, has used her career to travel across Europe and the Persian Gulf.

She’s back in the United States because of the pull of family.

“It was the draw of my children and grandchildren,” she explained. With summers off, she would return to the U.S. every summer to visit, and after the last trip, something changed.

“Last summer when I went back to Doha [Quatar] I couldn’t reconnect,” she said. “I dearly missed them.”

In September she moved back for good, renting a one bedroom on Seaman Avenue, just down the street from her son, Larry Meyers, and his three kids, all of whom are under the age of six.

After a life of constantly being on the move, Borger is slowly unpacking her treasures from around the world. Living abroad, she said, you become an “accumulator of unique possessions.”

Borger is originally from the small town of Niagara Falls, NY.

“From the time I was 14 I followed the tourists around to hear them speak different languages,” she said. “I couldn’t wait to get out of Niagara Falls.”

After earning a bachelors degree in linguistics from a college in California, her first marriage ended and she decided to “flood the world” with resumes.

“I was looking for the contrast in cultures,” she said, and almost immediately got that first job in Iran.

After her experience in Iran she became a Fulbright Lecturer, teaching in Communist Romania.

“I chose Europe because I wanted to see what Communism was like,” Borger said.

With breaks in between to teach in California, New York and at Harvard, over her extensive career she has taught in Budapest, Hungary, Nuremburg, Germany, and was a Peace Corps trainer in Estonia.

In the last decade, however, she joined the sizable population of expatriates in the Persian Gulf.

“There’s a difference between the Middle East and the Persian Gulf,” Borger said.

The Persian Gulf is incredibly safe and developed, she explained. Wealthy oil states like Quatar, Bahrain and Oman are investing in educating their wealthy class, and hiring people like her to do it.

“They’re implementing the American Education system in the form of American Universities,” she said.

She didn’t need to know native languages, though she has basic Farsi down, because her students already knew English. Her job was to refine their skills and introduce Western values.

Take plagiarism, for example – a highly punishable transgression in the Western world. Her students, however, felt that it was less egregious because they were helping one of their own.

Educators, like herself, work on year-to-year contracts, where housing is provided, as are all the utilities.

“They’re all extremely well paid,” she explained. “Being there I was able to travel extensively because of the money I made.”

Now that she’s back, she’s here to stay.

“I hope I’m done moving. There’s really no place I’m drawn to,” she said with a smile. “I have no bucket list.”

The Manhattan Times is the bilingual newspaper of Washington Heights and Inwood.