I didn’t want to stay on one ranger all my life
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Karel Rokyta was born on January 28, 1943 in Jasenná in Eastern Moravia. My father worked as a forester and passed on his love of nature to Charles. In 1949, Karel entered the first grade, and in 1960 he graduated from the eleven-year High School in Vizovice. He wanted to study law, but as a village boy he was only allowed to study at agricultural colleges. Through a small scam, he managed to get to the Faculty of Forestry at the University of Agriculture in Brno, which he successfully graduated from five years later. In 1965 he spent a year in the military service in Šumava with the tank regiment. Then he started working as a taxpayer for Lesprojekt, the Institute for Forest Management. In the forest near Blatná, the news of the occupation of the country by Warsaw Pact troops reached him. At that time, he lived in Prague, where he immediately went with a colleague. He witnessed the liquidation of tanks and the subsequent shooting in front of Czechoslovak Radio; he also encountered soldiers with machine guns in Hradčany. As a result of political events, he decided to emigrate through Austria in 1969, but a number of people who had the same idea and completely paralyzed the embassy in Vienna discouraged him. In the 1970s, he began his postgraduate studies and learned Spanish and Portuguese. His first business trip to Peru was thwarted by a coup d’état in 1979, and three years later he went to Angola for a year, from where he was driven out by the Civil War. In 1985, he went to Mozambique for two years, where he returned from 1989 to 1995 as a teacher at the local forestry faculty. He experienced the Velvet Revolution at the Czechoslovak Embassy in Maputo and returned to the independent Czech Republic. Upon his return, he married and began lecturing at the Agricultural University in Suchdol, briefly also at the University of Brno, and between 2005 and 2015 he taught at the Secondary Agricultural School in Brandýs nad Labem. He returned to Africa several more times for brief examinations, most recently in 2015 to Cape Verde. In 2021 he lived in Brandýs nad Labem.
