World Cup party reunites librarian, former teacher after 35 years
- Francisco Martinez
- 18 hours ago
- 2 min read
Ivan Silva was chatting with Jill Tucker at a soccer watch party for Cape Verde on June 21 when she asked if he was from the island nation, which was playing in its first World Cup. He said he was. When she added that she used to teach English in Praia, the capital, Silva’s body “was completely stilled,” she says. He asked for her name.
“By the time she finished the introduction, I knew exactly who she was,” says Silva, the technology and learning initiatives librarian at the Belvedere-Tiburon Library. “It was like, ‘Oh yeah, you were my teacher. … You’re my English teacher.’”
The two hadn’t seen each other in 35 years. They were standing in Oakland’s Open Test Kitchen at a gathering Silva had organized for the team’s second group-stage match, against Uruguay, an effort to bring a piece of home to the Bay Area.
The 49-year-old Oakland resident is a native of the Atlantic Ocean archipelago, which sits about 385 miles off the coast of West African nations Mauritania and Senegal.
Tucker, a longtime education reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle, was also eager to celebrate Cape Verde, home to roughly 530,000 people, where she spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer from 1990 to 1992, teaching high-school English in Praia. She and her husband had been searching at the last minute for a watch party to attend and ended up at Silva’s event, with Tucker donning a new shirt reading “Cabo Verde,” the country’s name in Portuguese.
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