ABENA: My guest today is Deanna Manson. Her love for music set her off on a path that has taken her from small town Ontario to destinations around the globe. Deanna, can you tell me about yourself?

DEANNA: I was in the military for 28 years. For the past three years and a bit, I’ve been working for the United Nations and about to embark on another career change. So that’s a little bit about me. Outside of work, I’m a musician. I play the classical base violin and that influenced a little bit how I chose my career path back in high school when I joined the military. It’s something that I keep up on the side. 

ABENA: Classical bass violin, I love that. So I’d love to hear how playing that instrument informed your career because I think that’s actually quite fascinating considering that you didn’t, you know, become a professional musician, it wasn’t the crux of your career.

DEANNA: So no, and I had started playing quite late. So I didn’t Start playing an instrument until Grade nine in high school, but I had some amazing opportunities in high school. I was a member of an international youth orchestra, and went away a couple of summers when I was 16, 17. I spent one summer in New York City and another summer in Detroit playing with this youth orchestra. And I got the idea that I would become a professional, that I would pursue music in university. But by the time I got to grade 13 I started to get cold feet – grade 13 in Ontario, back in those days. I had applied to a few schools for music, had some auditions scheduled and then I realized gee am I actually going to be able to make a living doing this.

And Military College kind of came onto my horizon. Royal Military College was just down the road in Kingston and I thought about going there. But first of all, I went to the recruiting center to inquire about becoming a musician in the military.

DEANNA: And when I had gone in to talk to them, they looked at my marks, I guess and whatnot and said, Hey, never mind being a musician in the military.

How about going to military College and pursuing a career in something else. So that’s how I ended up joining the military.

ABENA: That’s amazing. But clearly you never abandoned it. I’m stuck on this music thing. That’s really cool. Uh and so you continue to play today? 

DEANNA: Yeah. I played through university, you know, stage band and whatnot. And then when I left school and anywhere I’ve been posted, anywhere that I’ve lived across Canada, and even in New York after my military career, I’ve always been a member of community orchestras. Very amateur orchestras filled with people who are lawyers and doctors and do many other things, but get together once a week to rehearse concerts every now and again.

DEANNA: And, and that’s been true for here. In Calgary, I’m a member of the Calgary Civic Symphony. And as well, I play in the pit Orchestra for community theater group center players. Yeah, so I’ve been able to keep it up all these years.

ABENA: That’s so awesome, so awesome. And so the focus of your military career, what did you end up kind of focusing on, talking to someone who’s not familiar with military as a career?

DEANNA: It’s a great question and a funny story because when I joined the military, they told me that I was going to be a logistics officer and I joined as an Air Force person. But in all honesty, I did not know what logistics meant. It took me many years to figure that out. And I’ve been a logistician throughout my adult life in various jobs and the two major careers that I pursued.

DEANNA: But back then I didn’t know what it was. So I ended up doing all of my training and specialized in transportation and movements. And then I began to figure out that logistics is all about what we know today as supply chain.

So I was specializing in trucks and moving things and people and uh, and later on in air movements and movement control, which is another specialty within that area where you kind of control and coordinate and plan for the movement of people and stuff.

ABENA: And so I’m going to guess that your military career took you places outside of Canada. 

DEANNA: It did, yeah, yeah. I spent four months in Kuwait in 1998. I’m really dating myself now. That was part of the no fly zone operation in that area at the time. And later on I did more disaster response start up operations. So I went to Honduras after Hurricane Mitch hit; I was there for a couple of months and then after the earthquake in Haiti, I ran the staging base on the Dominican Republic side of the border for four months, moving supplies in and out for the troops in Port-a-Prince. 

DEANNA: All of my deployments were really short notice. I didn’t have, you know, months of training leading up to it; I was basically told one day to pack your bags and the next day I was gone. So that certainly had an impact on personal life and relationships and all of that kind of stuff. So a certain amount of instability, but very rewarding work, especially on the disaster response side of things going to help people.

ABENA: And so that kind of picking up and moving around. You mentioned the impact on the personal life and and and all of that. Does that kind of fit your personality, do you think? 

DEANNA: Yeah, I mean that sense of adventure, the experience of going overseas. The experience of moving all around Canada has been great for sure. It’s part of what drives me or did drive me, you know, in my younger days. 

I’m originally from Cornwall, Ontario, a very small town, and my childhood, my teenage years, I just really wanted to get out of there. So the military afforded me that sense of adventure and being able to see other things.

ABENA: I’m sure that I will come back and touch upon your military career, but I’m going to move into your first photo, which is back in 2015. So I know it’s like the cheesiest question, but can you kinda describe that day?

DEANNA: It is hard to describe for me because it was magical; it was just, I don’t know how to explain it, but maybe it would be easier for me to explain if I backed up a little bit and explained how we met. 

Because April and I met doing community theater in Yellowknife. We were in a production of Les Miserables; April was playing fontina and I was chorus member number 45 as I always say.

DEANNA: But we didn’t start dating during the production, it wasn’t until afterwards. But even before we started dating, I said to anyone who would listen to my self proclamation that that was the woman I was going to marry. So, the wedding day the next year was on stage at the theater where we had originally done Les Miz, but this year it was during the production of Mary Poppins. We had the Sunday Matinee and then we cleared everything out and had the wedding on stage. Yeah, so it was really neat to have met and married later in life was a surprise. 

ABENA: So it seems like there’s a lot of stuff that happened fairly quickly in succession, right? You met and then you were married. And you mentioned getting married later in life because it seemed to be around that same time that potentially you were contemplating retiring from the military. And then not only did you retire from the military then you ended up moving to a new city. Had you been to Calgary before? 

DEANNA: Just for visits, very briefly. Never an extended period of time. So the city was a little bit foreign to me. But April’s work brought us here. That’s how we ended up here. But you’re right – it was a lot all at once. We were married in 2015. By 2016, I was wondering where the military would take me next.

And that year I did get a call telling me that I was promoted to full Colonel and the call came really late in the year. I got it in August and normally you would be advised months before the summer that this was going to happen.

DEANNA: But apparently it came as a surprise and I thought about it for a couple of days and turned down the promotion because they wanted me to move to Ottawa within two weeks to take a job.That wasn’t necessarily an attractive one. And I said, you know what I’m thinking about getting out anyway, I don’t want to be away from my partner. So that was when really the decision was firmly made that I would get out the next year.

ABENA: So yeah, so how did you feel about that?

DEANNA: Amazingly, getting out of the military was not an emotional thing for me. It wasn’t a difficult decision. I had a great career; I had seen so many great places. I had loved Yellowknife and thought, hey, you know what, why don’t we finish in this place? And with the most recent experience that I had had there, it’s a good time to just call it. So yeah, it wasn’t difficult.

The move to Calgary in 2017 was a little bit more nerve racking only because I didn’t have a job to go to. Yeah, so I had started job hunting probably six months before releasing from the military and making the move to Calgary. But you know, the Calgary economy is pretty tough, you know, it comes and goes. So I worked pretty hard at job applications and applying to various logistics oriented positions in the city and did some interviews but nothing came to fruition. For almost a year, actually, a little more than a year in Calgary, I was out of work.

DEANNA: I did some other things though. I became a board member for the Military Family Resource Center here in Calgary. I played a lot of music. I did a lot of pit orchestra with this community theater group, did some great shows, kept busy doing some volunteer work here, there and everywhere. So it wasn’t a bad year. It was a little frustrating job hunting. But overall maybe it was a good reset from my military career that had been so busy and tiring. 

ABENA: What was your most salient memory from that year?

DEANNA: I think for me, my favorite memory is all of the music I was able to play. Maybe if I had been working 9-5 it would have been much more difficult. But with my schedule the way it was I was able to go to the theater you know 5:30, 6 o’clock and do the show and come home and rest the next morning kind of thing. So I guess I was able to do some things that would normally have been more difficult if I was working. That’s probably my favorite memory from that time. 

ABENA: Fantastic! This is actually a really good time now to segue into that second photo which is you on your first day of work at the United Nations headquarters in New York City. So we’re going from you in Calgary, where it has been a challenge trying to find work – but you’ve had the amazing opportunity to immerse yourself in music – to standing in New York City. And so, I’d love to know how that happened.

DEANNA: Uh yeah such a great day and I look at that photo and I feel the pride and the love for walking into that building to do good. The transition to the U.N. was a bit prolonged. I had applied in June 2017 and I had gotten a call almost right away from the hiring manager. The job was for pure movement control roles and responsibilities, and I had had so much experience in that area in the military that I got a call right away as soon as they saw my resume. They said they were very interested and was I serious and all of those things and I was but in 2017, we weren’t sure. We were just moving to Calgary for April’s work, so would a job with the United Nations really be the right thing for us? We weren’t sure. But it turned out that the application process, the recruiting, the onboarding took well over 15 months.

DEANNA: So by the time the offer came, April’s work was kind of winding down in Calgary. The company had been sold and she was a little bit uncertain about her future. So we suddenly realized that we could go off to New York together to do a dream job for me.

And so and just by way of background I had been interested in working for the United Nations throughout my adult life. I often scanned the job postings and came to understand that you could work for the U. N. as a military person but you could also work for the U. N. as a civilian person. So I was often scanning the job postings and in the military I was petitioning to go on a U.N. Mission or to be posted to New York as staff there and it just never came to fruition.

DEANNA: It was never the right time. I was being promoted and therefore I couldn’t go at that time, or moving or whatever it was. It was never the right time. While I was in Yellowknife, twice actually, I got a call saying hey, would you be interested in doing a six month stint at the U. N. Headquarters in New York? And I said yes right away but then didn’t end up getting selected to go.

So it was kind of all of these things that occurred, and when the job posting came up in June 2017, I thought wow this one is perfectly suited for me – let’s apply and see what happens.

DEANNA: And my boss at the time discouraged me. He said I was crazy for applying. He said you’re on your way to Calgary for april’s career. Why would you think of applying for a job in New York City? And I mean I took his advice but not to heart. I said no you know what I’m just gonna do this, I want to see where it leads.

ABENA: That’s amazing. Yeah that was one of the things I was going to ask was you know whether the U.N. was always on your radar or if it was an opportunity that just kind of sprung up. But it sort of sounds like both, in the sense that you had potentially a previous opportunity to do it that didn’t pan out. But also just the timing of everything in your life. Just imagine if you hadn’t applied back in 2017, given how long it took to get through that process and everything that occurred in the meantime. Yeah, like just almost serendipity. 

So how much time did you end up spending in New York City? 

DEANNA: We were there from August 2018. (April joined me in October 2018.) She just had some stuff to finish up in her workplace and we were there until COVID hit. And of course, COVID in New York City in those early days was something else. So that was March 2020; by July or August, we decided to come back to Calgary. We’re working from home anyway, let’s just make the move, bring the animals and everybody back to Calgary and then see what the next step is.

ABENA: Yeah, and the next step was pretty epic.

DEANNA: Yeah. Yeah, that’s for sure. That’s for sure. So I was appointed to my current position in Uganda in January 2021. We couldn’t travel to Uganda in those early months. They were in lockdown and very restrictive COVID measures that were in place there. So I didn’t end up actually traveling until September 2021. But I’ve been there ever since. I’ve just completed six months and I’m home in Calgary right now just for a couple of weeks of vacation, then I’ll go back and continue on there until the next thing. Which may also be a big change that’s coming up.

ABENA: So I’m interested to hear about your time in Uganda? And so I asked that question before, like a salient memory from that year when you were in Calgary. So what’s been, I guess your favorite memory or favorite incident in your time in Uganda?

DEANNA: Yeah, the job there is interesting because I’m still doing essentially the same work that I was in New York and my boss and the rest of the team are back in New York. So I’m sitting in Entebbe and kind of trying to work 9-5 in two hours and then having to respond after hours to New York meetings and whatnot. But the most amazing thing about being in the office and Is the people, the group of folks there, there’s about 14 of us total.

There are national staff that are national Ugandans, there are a bunch of people all of us from all over the place and the group there is just amazing. When I came in, I was welcomed with open arms and everyone said, Hey, you’re here, can we work with you? Sounds interesting what you’re doing kind of stuff and we did, yeah, we did a little bit of reorganization and some of the team there started working very closely with me on moving passengers is what we do.

DEANNA: We move soldiers and police personnel in and out of the peacekeeping missions. So we’re moving thousands and thousands of people every week and we managed chartered aircraft to do that. It’s really, really neat work. And so there’s about four or five of us now in the office in Entebbe that are focused on that, so that’s been, I guess the most rewarding thing work wise.

DEANNA: The country’s beautiful. I had again always wanted to work in Africa, my whole, military career again, you know, selected a couple of times to deploy to various parts of Africa and it just never worked out. So here was my chance to go and I really wanted to do it. So there I went. 

ABENA: That’s awesome. And so you’ve been there six months. How long is the total deployment? Is that how it kind of works, in different blocks of time? Or is it kind of an indefinite thing?

DEANNA: Yeah, it’s blocks of time because it’s a temporary appointment against the position in that location. So my appointment goes until the end of June. But the reality of the situation is that I may be leaving sooner and this is a transition that is really difficult for me.

But I have a potential job opportunity back in Calgary. So I’m about to make a big decision. And unlike my time in the military and and releasing from the military, this one is a really much more difficult decision because I love working for the U. N. so much. It is something, you know, in an altruistic way it’s something that I’m quite proud of and leaving the U.N. is difficult but by the same token, family are back in Calgary and my partner’s here with our collection of furry animals and really there’s no…

April is in a new career and she is doing very very well. So she wouldn’t join, wouldn’t be able to join me in Uganda and us both going back to New York is really not in the cards given her work. So this is my opportunity to be at home again. So that’s that’s the next step that’s in the offing.

ABENA: Okay. It’s interesting that you mentioned that. One of the things that I kind of noticed, and even here in what you’re telling me, is that a lot of things just seemed to line up. So I was gonna ask if you ever had moments where you felt stuck, you know, where it was not necessarily challenging to make a decision, but in some ways, yes. Where it’s just like I really want this to kind of move forward. In those types of moments what did you do to move past that?

DEANNA: I would say that there were times in my military career, certainly where that happened and my military career was a little bit funny in that I didn’t have a mentor that was looking after me, I was kind of on my own navigating my postings and my professional development opportunities. So in the times that I got stuck, I wondered about getting out, and this occurred many times over the course of my career. I wondered about taking the step to become a civilian and to look for other work.

But I always just hung on a little bit longer and waited to see what the next thing was that would come to me and, lo and behold, even when I suspected or feared that it wasn’t going to be a good step for me, that it ended up to be very, very fruitful and rewarding.

DEANNA: So I’ll give you an example, um. I had been selected to go to Staff College in Toronto. I was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel and there were excellent job opportunities that were coming up for my posting out of Toronto. And these included the opportunity to become a commanding officer on one of the three major bases in the Air Force. But because I was single at the time, I did not get the opportunity to go to some place like Trenton or Greenwood, which were more popular postings. Because I was single, I was chosen to go to Cold Lake, Alberta, which is a good three hours north of Edmonton. And I was teased a lot for being chosen to go to Cold Lake because it was not an enviable posting and I felt a bit maligned. I didn’t feel that my marital status should dictate where I posted. But it did and off I went and that posting turned out to be amazing. It’s a wonderful place for fishing. I got back into fishing, which I love to do. And the job itself was very rewarding.

DEANNA: I learned so much and my posting to Cold Lake actually led to my posting to Yellowknife. Just because of some of the people that I met who had been up there and because I had taken this unenviable posting to Cold Lake, I had some – what do you call it – I  had some leverage with the powers that be when I wanted to go to Yellowknife.

They said, okay, you went to Cold Lake when you really didn’t want to. So you can go to Yellowknife now because that’s where you want to go.

ABENA: That’s amazing. It’s kind of like joke’s on you. 

And so what would you tell people then, who feel stuck like they want to make a change and they just can’t, or they feel like I just can’t get that traction that movement.

DEANNA: Yeah. Should I go into one of my theories at this point?

ABENA: Yeah, it was great because you actually gave me two, which I love. So I’ll let you pick which one you want to address first and then we’ll go back and hit the other one. 

DEANNA: Okay, so one of my favorite theories is, well, it’s basically a destiny theory which you know those with more pragmatic or scientific minds don’t agree with me that that destiny is a thing.

But basically my theory is that you choose your path. You certainly are in the driver’s seat when it comes to your career and other aspects of your life. But there are forks in the road that present themselves, and sometimes there are external factors that might push you towards one fork or the other when you really didn’t expect it.

So I talked about this posting to Cold Lake? Maybe it wasn’t my choice necessarily. I knew that I wanted this opportunity, but in terms of location, external factors led me to the fork in the road that took me to Cold Lake. But that turned out to be a great thing. So I guess, yeah, if if I were to offer advice to somebody who was stuck, I would say look for those forks in the road and pick one, but also go with those influences that lead you down one or the other because you just never know what’s going to happen.

ABENA: Interesting. Okay, so I have a question around that. So do you have, given those kind of forks in the road, and you may or may not, but I’m curious, do you ever have any regrets?

Maybe regrets isn’t quite the right word? It’s sort of like I’m down this path and not exactly where I want to be and I know I have to kind of trust it’ll get me there. But what if I had taken that other one? 

DEANNA: That’s true. I could say that about the initial decision to join the military. Um, I think back often to, um, whether I could have been successful in music somehow. Military life was hard. Military college was hard. I regretted it, I think, in those early weeks and months and years.

But then I just – for whatever reason I stuck with it, and I thought maybe I’ll just get out after I pay back my time, which is how the contracts worked. You did school and then you paid back five years and I thought, okay, I’ll get out after nine years. And I didn’t. I kept going because it was interesting and fun.

My next contract was at the 20 year mark. Same thing. Okay. I hit 20 years shall I get out? And I didn’t, I kept going because it was still fun. But certainly, you know, sometimes in those early moments of heading down the one path, you still don’t know, you still don’t know if it’s the right decision.

And now as I embark on a big decision to leave the U. N. And to start a new job again, I’m choosing a path and it’s scary. It is scary for sure. So I get it. I get the fear, I get the trepidation, but I stand by my theory.

ABENA: Excellent. Yeah I wasn’t gonna try to change your mind on it.

ABENA: So you actually had a second piece of advice and so this one I’m just gonna read out loud. “I have a pie theory that our lives are divided into parts: work life, social life, family and partners and extracurricular activities. These parts may not all be fulfilled at any one time but you need some to be at least partially fulfilled to maintain your happiness and mental health.” I’d love for you to dive a bit more into that.

DEANNA: Yeah so that’s all about location, location, location. Right now I am separated from my partner and my family work is fulfilling but in Uganda I don’t have any of my extracurricular activities. I don’t have any music or any fishing that sort of thing. You know there’s limitations there. So the pieces of my pie and those areas are depleted and I need a little more in those pieces to really sustain myself. Coming back to Calgary, obviously reunited with family and partner, back to music, back to camping, back to all of these other things, those enrichments will then fulfill me better.

DEANNA: So work wise may be difficult at first and leaving the U. N. may be difficult. I may not have fulfillment in that work piece of the pie. But then the other ones will be fulfilled better you know. So if you’re depleted in two or three of those areas, it’s hard, it’s hard to maintain your overall morale and your mental health for that matter. But if you have most or all of those pieces of pie at least partially filled you, you’re probably doing pretty good.