Andrew Melnyk is a former teacher and college lecturer. For twenty years, he was a high school principal in Canada and in international schools in Spain, Japan and Egypt. He and his wife, Chrystyna, are educational consultants who have also worked in countries as diverse as China, Trinidad, Kuwait and Ukraine. Both were born in western Ukraine at the height of the Second World War and as infants escaped with their families to the American Zone of Austria and Germany as the Red Army approached. Years later they returned to post-Soviet Ukraine under very different circumstances.