Deo Sookdeo represents District 1 on the Garland Community Multicultural Commission. The two primary reasons I appointed him, besides the fact that he's a genuinely nice person, are his being truly multicultural at heart and experience and his long history working with law enforcement and helping individuals learn from their mistakes. He's a natural on the former and an expert on the latter.
 
Deo retired from Dallas County after a career of service. Since then, he and Lucy, who is retired from Nortel, have traveled many places, including Antarctica, and plan to travel many more. Yet he has not missed one CMC meeting!
 
Connections, a publication of the Texas County and District Retirement System, recently featured Deo on their cover and in a three-page story. We get a unique opportunity to know another District 1 representative a bit better, thanks to Connections.
 

 

From the Connections Newsletter:   Deo Sookdeo’s life has been a journey. The 69-year-old TCDRS retiree blazed his own path from his birthplace in a small village in Guyana, South America, to Dallas, Texas. In between taking care of work and family, Deo has also taken the opportunity to retrace the paths of famous explorers, crisscrossing the globe and visiting places he only read about as a child.   His adventures in travel culminated with what he calls the trip of a lifetime: a cruise to Antarctica and a visit to the tomb of Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton. Deo finds it hard to explain his attraction to travel, but he finds it very satisfying to visit the places where history happened.   "You read about it, you go there and see it," he explained. "It's just a different feeling you get."   Deo was born in a small village called Sofia (pronounced sof-I-ah) on the outskirts of Georgetown, the capital of Guyana. Situated about a mile from the Atlantic Ocean, Deo and his friends spent their childhood days emulating the cowboys they watched on the silver screen. Inspired by the likes of Audie Murphy, Randolph Scott and John Wayne, Deo says they dressed up like cowboys and pretended they were in Texas.   "When I was growing up, I wanted to swim across the Atlantic to be a cowboy," he laughed.   But it was in high school when he really fell in love with the idea of travel. He dreamed of following in the footsteps of the great explorers, such as Shackleton, Christopher Columbus and New World explorer Sir Walter Raleigh.   "I can identify with some of these explorers," he said.   After earning his General Certificate of Education, Deo joined the civil service in 1961, working as a valuation officer with the Ministry of Local Government. It was during his tenure with the Guyanese government that he married his wife, Lucy, and started a family.   [More , including photo of Deo and Lucy in the Antarctic.]