A late-night call in 1962 offered...

A late-night call in 1962 offered Konrad Facknitz a chance to see the world and, in so doing, changed his career. Fluent in three languages, Facknitz gave up his supervisory job at a steel plant to accept a position first with the State Department, then as a United Nations adviser overseas. He helped build villages in India, quell volatile situations, and worked to expand Mongolian technology. Facknitz, 66, who has a master’s degree in psychology, now teaches business management at Southwestern College. He was interviewed in his Chula Vista home by Times staff writer Terry Rather and was photographed by Marc Yves Regis.

I was sitting at home in Cucamonga doing my income tax when the phone rang. Someone from Washington, D.C., asked me if I worked at Kaiser Steel. He said they were planning to send some people to India to do advising work with the steel industry and asked if I’d be interested.

They were looking for someone who spoke German and was a supervisor of trainees in a steel plant, and that was me. He also said it’s tax free, and that rang a bell.

So there my wife and I went with three kids to India. They hired me as a contract technician to the Indian steel industry.

It was shocking when we first saw India. There were only a few Americans there. They assigned me to work in a place called Rourkela, a small town with a steel mill in it. To the best of my knowledge, it still isn’t on the map.

The plant was built by the Germans, and the Germans and the Indians didn’t get along at all.

There was a big cultural conflict. In fact, that was one of my jobs. Because I spoke German, I was peacemaker and negotiator.

I was there about a year and a half when a riot broke out in India. So at that time I was busy getting my family evacuated and hiding Muslims from Hindus.

Well, I saw all the terrible things, the violence that was happening, up close.

A mob was after me because I had just evacuated my last Muslims to a place where the army was protecting them. On the way back, a mob stopped me. All I had was a water canteen, my dog and a pistol. They stopped the car and said, you’re transporting Muslims. I said no, I’m not.

My dog, a German shepherd, saved me. He sure frightened those guys. He jumped in the car and we took off. In the process, I suffered a couple of broken ribs and a cut on my arm from what they call lathis , bamboo sticks filled with lead.

After the riots, I had an interesting problem. Because I had protected Muslims, there were a lot of Hindus who wanted revenge.

I got a lot of nasty phone calls. I was offered a chance to leave, but I said no, since I was close to the end of my contract.

I came back to the United States in 1964 and went back to work for Kaiser Steel, but I wasn’t satisfied. I wanted to go back overseas, so I applied to the State Department and also to the United Nations. The U.N. job came through in 1966.

With my family along, I spent one year in Thailand, two more years in India and 11 years in Switzerland. I traveled on my own a heck of a lot to Africa and Asia.

I remained a human resources development official the whole time.

Whatever I was working on was for the development of individuals to take an active part in the economy, to employ the unemployed, whatever level they may be at. My job title never changed with each country. However, having said that, the job I actually did changed tremendously.

One time I worked trying to rehabilitate the 50,000 people in concentration camps in Sri Lanka.

In Mongolia we worked on the expansion of the technical institutes so they could take advantage of some of the natural resources they had.

In India, it was taking the landless laborers out of the hands of the landowners and putting them up in their own villages so they could be self-supporting.

We took the poorest of the poor in India and help them set up villages. I couldn’t get to first base on that one until I met Mrs. Gandhi. Once she said that was what Mahatma Gandhi would have wanted for India, everything went swimmingly.

It wasn’t all warfare overseas. I really had some interesting experiences there.

Like one time, my wife and I were having dinner at a hotel in India, and I was talking to the owner of the hotel. I mentioned to the owner that a letter I was expecting from the IRS hadn’t arrived yet. He said, oh, I’ll have the woman send her eyes to find your letter. Then a woman went into a trance and she not only had my Social Security number, which I didn’t tell her, she told me what the IRS has written. Two weeks later, that letter arrived.

I left the U.N. in 1979. That’s when the United States government withdrew funding from the agency we were with. I was tired of constant travel by then.