The school opening for WAB was a cliff-hanger to the last minute! "Containers arriving on the very last night before the first day of school," said First Director, Ian Rysdale, "with parents, teachers, students and Board members carrying desks, chairs, books and resources up and down three levels". Looking through the WAB box that has accompanied me throughout my many postings since then, I came across a letter sent to the World Bank and the UN asking for assistance to get our furniture and books out of customs. With their help the boxes arrived over the two days before the school opened. I was uncrating boxes of chairs on the driveway when all of the Hook family, newly arrived that week from the United States, cycled in to lend a hand.

Physical pitching in to help the school continued to be a feature of the first year. Clearing rocks from the sports field and planting trees to create a windbreak made a deep impression on Ian, Michael Crook, co-founder, FaRen DaiBiao and WAB teacher, and one of WAB's founding students, Leslie Hook. She recalls "It is all a bit hazy in my mind as I was just ten, but I remember picking up rocks from the soccer pitch during PE class, the Spring garden project, learning Simon & Garfunkel songs in music class and our incredible Albanian gymnastics teacher."

Even though the new campus was beautiful and brand new, I missed terribly all the funky charm and character of our old factory campus. It was a great place to go to school.

Michael adds, "There was a barbed wire fence around the field making it look very stark. We decided trees should be planted along the boundary wall so we chose leylandi, to provide green all year round, and poplars to provide shade in the summer. The trees were pretty cheap and native to North China. The leylandii were prickly and a bit of a nuisance to plant, but the poplars were easy. On Tree Planting Day a truck load of slim saplings arrived, no more than 3m tall, and were planted along the north and west boundary of our new field by WAB's first students and teachers. Some months ago I went by the old school, and found it is now an annex of Huajiadi School. I also found some of those poplars, now several stories high with broad, strong trunks!"

It was not all work though. Ian began the first tree planting with the words "this is where we start!" as Michael ran flying a kite across the rocky field trailed by WAB students, and the rest of the school community.

New parent Kwok To Yue wrote recently, "One thing that impressed me was to see Ian Rysdale out in the field holding a bell and welcoming students (and parents) every morning. He would address each student by name. Sometimes teachers were there too. WAB's environment was so welcoming that both girls were excited to be at school." It was of course a new school for the teachers too. Jo Sargent noted, "In those days we teachers were regularly invited to foreign expert functions at the Great Hall of the People with Michael Crook. I remember being a bit surprised when he just stopped his cranky but faithful Chinese car in the middle of the road and said it was fine to leave it here as there was nowhere else to park – this was long before clamping came into force. After an extravagant dinner we wandered back to the car which was still in the same spot with other cars zooming around it either side!"

Ian captured the zing of those early days in a letter to me on November 3, 1994: "Time has flown by since the opening day. The community has been terrific, and last night's
UN International Food Festival was a sell-out. Enrolment is increasing and we are up to 155 students with at least 15 more expected to start in January."

Around this time we, as Trustees of WAB's Educational Foundation (WABEF) decided to hand over the reins of running the school to WAB's new parents. Kwok To Yue, David MacDonald and Antoine King stepped up to be founding WAB Board Members, along with four WABEF Trustees, Sabina, Michael, Gordon Gurr and Steven Carroll. "The first Board Meeting started early in the evening and ended shortly past mid-night. There were just so many things to cover for a new school," commented Kwok To Yue – who has remained involved with WAB and is currently Chair of WABEF.

These days I doubt that our dream would even get off the drawing board. The barriers to entry would simply be too high. Huge forprofit educational organisations dominate, as international schools are big business. Opening an international school in Beijing today would need much more than the US$1.1 million that WAB started with. As Sabina Brady, cofounder, accounts for it like this, "We faced a serendipitous confluence of events that we did not cause, but were able to harness and take full advantage of."

It is testimony to the unusual times of Beijing in1993, that three individuals with virtually no credentials could achieve considerable corporate backing from Shell, Motorola and GE, combined with the support and expertise from their top executives: Peter Burri and Ronan Cassidy (Shell), Jason Lum (Motorola) and Steve Carroll (GE). Indeed these corporations continued to provide executives to the Founding Board until May 2008.

The unstinting support and help from the expatriate diplomatic and corporate communities underpinned the whole project and ensured its success, and still does.

We were driven by a vision of a school providing a child-centred education encouraging a passion for self-discovery and life-long learning – those hackneyed clichés trotted out by schools. But we believed in it and still do. In our school, every child would be valued and nurtured to achieve their individual potential. Our school would be open to all children irrespective of passport or ability – with a fund, representing 2% of tuition income, available to assist access to the school by those unable to meet the fees.

Our motivation for setting up WAB was never schooling for our own children, but Sabina's two children attended for five and eight years respectively, and my daughter, for her last two years of high school, graduated as Valedictorian, WAB Class of 2010. We have both served on the WAB Board and remain on the WABEF Board today. In 2000, Sabina headed up the quest for the current location of WAB and was Owners' Representative for the design and construction of the buildings. Today, Michael remains as the 'FaRen DaiBiao' (legal representative of the School), founder and teacher of China Studies, a member of both WAB and WABEF Boards, and the new campus building committee for WAB.

Twenty years on, did we achieve our vision? "Perhaps that is not possible, we are WAB's severest critics as we should be," says Sabina. But those experiencing WAB appear to be enthusiastic, and that is at least a measure. Ronan Cassidy, now VP HR Shell, recently wrote, "A Dutch colleague in China was waxing lyrical about how good WAB was the other day...which was rather nice to hear!" Sarah Ye, a founding student, now responsible for China market strategy and business development for a U.S. start-up company wrote, "Even though the new campus was beautiful and brand new, I missed terribly all the funky charm and character of our old factory campus. It was a great place to go to school."

And did we achieve a child-centred education encouraging a passion for selfdiscovery and life-long learning? Impossible toknow without much research and evaluation of course, but two WAB founding alumni, Leslie Hook and Shannon MacDonald, did precisely achieve this.

Leslie, now a Financial Times reporter in Beijing after a sabbatical at Harvard University writes: "Mrs Nojack's classroom was like a magical land where (as a ten-year-old) it often felt like we were playing as much as learning. We were a very small group, maybe a dozen students, and there were different corners of the classroom devoted to different activities so you could roam around during free time, sit in the reading corner or go do math puzzles, my favourite activity."

Shannon, currently studying for an MBA at Saint Thomas University, Minneapolis writes: "WAB had a great impact on me and was a major reason I went to Macalester College for the school's Asian Studies major. After college I moved to Egypt, and received my Masters in Refugee Studies at the American University in Cairo while working for AMIDEAST, an international education and training non-profit organization. I left Cairo in 2010 and served as an AmeriCorps volunteer teaching literacy skills to elementary students at a magnet art school in the Twin Cities. I think that what I learned at WAB informed all of these academic and professional decisions, and influences my decisions to continue learning and working towards bettering my community."

We could not have anticipated the impact WAB would have in China over these years. WAB's vocational teachers' passion for life-long learning led to collaboration with Chinese educational authorities to develop Chinese international and private school accreditation. Founding teachers joining from The International School of Tanzania, invited Dr Jane Goodall, and helped to establish the international environmental movement, Roots and Shoots, in China. Even the choice to introduce Apple computers has resulted in WAB being recognised as an Apple Distinguished School for innovation, leadership and educational excellence. Clearly WABness is contagious!

So I would like to congratulate WAB on its 20th Anniversary. At this end note it is fitting to honour my two co-founders, Sabina Brady and Michael Crook, and the trustees on the WAB Educational Foundation Board: Jim Morrison, Kwok To Yue, Phil Tregaskis, David Wang. It is in no small part due to all of these people that our crazy conviction blossomed into this school.

Finally though I salute the dedicated hard work of WAB's School Board, the students, parents, teachers and non-teaching staff who embody the vision of this amazing school and without whom there would be no school at all.