A local author is getting set to publish a sequel to a book he wrote two years ago, based on his experience volunteering overseas.

Former flight instructor, turned accountant, turned author Doug Morrison has lived in Lacombe since 1992, and has made 15 trips to the Ukraine and Moldova through his church group helping with kids camps.

“I kept going back to work with the children and the young people, and probably started writing a book after about seven or eight trips over there… I was thinking back to my first trip and how uncomfortable I was, and I started thinking what it would be like for a Canadian to be plopped down in the middle of the county, completely unaware of the situation, the country, the culture, the language. The characters and the events are all fiction, but every place in the book is a real place and where I’ve actually been, right down to the bridges, dumpsters and bus stops.”

He says a couple interactions with local mafia groups and the KGB made for some tense situations, but in the end provided some interesting content from a unique perspective for his story.

“The first trip I went alone, and wound up in some very uncomfortable situations. One morning one of the kids told me that they KGB was coming in half an hour, and I kind of laughed it off, and sure enough in half an hour there they came. So they took our passports, questioned us, told us we were having illegal meetings. It all worked out fine obviously, I’m not in Siberia right now, but some anxious moments. Had some dealings with the mafia, sometimes the easiest way to get something done is to work through them, in fact we used to exchange money with them because they gave us a better exchange rate than the banks did.”

Morrison's book, Course Correction, is available wherever books are sold, including the Lacombe Library, and Second Glance Books.

Morrison submitted his sequel to his Edmonton based production company Stonehouse Publishing, and will hit the shelves sometime in the next year.

(Photo courtesy of Doug Morrison)