My name is Mike Isenberg, and I am originally from the sunny suburban confines of Thousand Oaks, CA. It was in this town where I scored my first soccer goal, had my first kiss, and broke my first curfew. After graduating high school from TO High, I knew I had to get away, so I decided on UC Santa Barbara for college, which was a whopping one hour drive north. At UCSB, I began as a business-economics major, but became quickly bored and switched to a much more useful major, political science. After graduating with a bachelors in 2003, I decided to use the skills I learned in college, and I moved to London to become a bartender. This move started a trend in which I moved city to city, country to country, for the next five years. In 2005, after a year stint in New Orleans, I volunteered in Thailand after the tsunami, teaching English in one of the affected villages. It was here where I met my wife Karin, and after a year in Thailand, we moved to Cambodia where we worked as project managers for Openmind Projects. In 2008, we moved to Sweden, where Karin is from, and I completed a masters degree in International Development and Management from Lund University. I spent part of the second year of my masters as an intern for the Planned Parenthood Association of Zambia, where I worked with kids on issues of sexual and reproductive health, and conducted research for a thesis on parent-teen sexual communication. It was through all these experiences that I fell in love with teaching, weather it was teaching a White Stripes Song to junior monks in Thailand or debating abstinence vs condom use with catholic school girls in Zambia. I could see first hand how education is the the key to a countries development, and I decided that I wanted to be a greater part of it in my own country.
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