Itinerant teacher sets down roots (for now) at Damien

There will come a time in the not-so-distant future when Damien Memorial School chemistry teacher Gerry Sigmon and husband Mike give up the itinerant life and secure for themselves a comfortable retirement niche in a place that feels like home.

Where exactly that may be even Sigmon can only guess.

Perhaps Puerto Rico, where they spent the first four years of their marriage, or Germany, where they made many close friends during a five-year stay.

Who can say? It might even be Cork, the bustling harbor town in Ireland where Sigmon grew up and where the couple’s "30 years of living out of a suitcase" began.

"I haven’t really had a replacement permanent home because we’re constantly in flux," says Sigmon, who has followed Mike’s military career through some 25 stops around the world.

Sigmon recalls an evening back in Cork when a group of American sailors asked her and her friends where they might go once the pubs had closed. Sigmon helped direct them to a local disco. The young men were most appreciative — none more so than Sigmon’s future husband, Mike.

Upon graduation from the University of Cork, Sigmon took off for Nigeria, where she taught chemistry to some 400 young men. Hardly an experienced traveler at that point, Sigmon made the most of her opportunities, hitchhiking her way across the Sahara to explore East and West Africa.

Mike, then stationed in Texas, traveled all the way to Africa to visit. They married not long after and have kept their luggage at the ready ever since.

The Sigmons first lived in Hawaii in the early 1990s when their three children were still toddlers. When they returned a decade later, Gerry Sigmon, who had been working as a medical technician, returned to education as an instructor at Hawaii Pacific University.

This time around, Sigmon is teaching the young men of Damien, who are often left rapt at ways in which she brings staid concepts to life.

As head of the after-school CSI Club, Sigmon recently taught her young charges how to identify a guilty shooter through gunshot residue. This week, she’ll give a nod to the show "House" by having them uncover medical mysteries based on basic blood tests.

"We do experiments to reaffirm the concept," Sigmon says. "That wasn’t done when I was a student and I very much resented it. When I began teaching, I decided to go 180 degrees away from that."

Away from school, Sigmon paddles outrigger canoes, delivers food to the elderly and infirm for Meals on Wheels and volunteers with Habitat for Humanity.

Such things help to fill the time until Mike returns from an extended deployment in Afghanistan. It’s been a tough separation and Sigmon says both she and her husband look forward to the day when they can stay put in the same place together.

It doesn’t really matter where.

Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@staradvertiser.com.