Author Description

At the young age of 26, and with nothing to lose, Jason Lockwood undertook an adventure where he would discover not only a new land, but also a new-found resilience and outlook on life. In the autumn of 1992, just three years after the Berlin Wall came down, Jason decided to pack up his life of comfort and head off to Slovakia to teach English for a year. He went with few expectations and too much luggage. What he found there was a torn country grasping at new beginnings, but struggling to recover from decades of oppression and dictatorship. From drunks to Gypsies to unrepentant Communists, he learnt a hard lesson about a country unsure of its future: change does not come quickly or easily. Despite Slovakia's gloomy present and even gloomier past, Jason's story emerges as one of optimism for the future, with prescriptions not only for what ails the former Communist world, but also for the freer Western world.