Mitch Kreps didn’t plan on living and working in the former Soviet Union and in the Middle East for 18 years. He just wanted to see Memphis, Tenn.

In 1994 Kreps was two quarters away from finishing school at the University of Minnesota, Crookston, when two professors informed him that WIC sugar beet agricultural equipment manufacturer Concord, Inc., was looking for an agronomist to help oversee a $60 million project to provide equipment, seed, fertilizer, and chemicals to Turkmenistan, a former constituent republic of the Soviet Union, and a country which borders Afghanistan, Iran, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan. If he landed the job, they said, he would be working in Turkmenistan for Alkhorayef Group, a Saudi Arabian company that oversees agricultural projects across the globe, and which has partnerships with Deere & Company and other major corporations.

“I applied for the job,” Kreps said, “because I figured I’d never been to Memphis before.” He’d go for the interview, enjoy Memphis, come back, “finish my degree, and go work for American Crystal Sugar Company,” he said. “But somehow, I fooled them, and I got the job.”

Or maybe it was the other way around. Alkhorayef provided him with an apartment, a vehicle, and an interpreter, but the conditions in Turkmenistan were horrendous, he said. Kreps and others in his party had dysentery for months, and “in the summer it was really hot,” he said, “and we maybe had electricity for six hours out of the day. We’d go for days on end without any water. Things like that.

“I learned in Turkmenistan that if you have a roof over your head, if you have clothes to wear, and if you have food to eat, then everything else is just gravy. I was homesick, but I lived.”

Kreps said the reason he unwittingly survived Turkmenistan was because “there was very little information available about the country back in 1994,” he said. “I didn’t expect anything, and I think that helped; it helped me to survive. A number of my colleagues had read up on Russia and on the former Soviet Union and they came in with some misconceptions.”

What didn’t help was the fact that the people of Turkmenistan thought he was a criminal. “They figured only a criminal would be sent from the United States to Turkmenistan,” Kreps said, “and so they thought we were criminals sent to serve out a prison sentence.”

The local welcome wagon had a way of making him feel at home, too. After making a seemingly innocent joke about Turkmenistan, Kreps found his phone switched off for two weeks, and he received a knock at the door in the middle of the night. In came agents of the former KGB asking, “Who are you? What are you doing here? We want to see your papers.”

“Just like in the movies,” Kreps said.

He had a hard time making friends in Turkmenistan, too, because the concept of friendship was much different than in the U.S. “For somebody to call you a friend, they had to trust you completely,” Kreps said, “because they had to know that if they shared something with you, that you wouldn’t repeat it.

“I knew people who literally disappeared.”

Nevertheless Kreps, a divorcee, stuck it out to provide for his family. When he took the job overseas, his daughter, Adrienne, 12 at the time, moved in with his mother. “I had the opportunity to do what I did,” he said, “and I really didn’t do it as a lark, or as an adventure, or something like that. I did it as a way to provide for my family, and there were a lot of sacrifices that everybody had to make, but I was able to provide for my family in a way that I never would have been able to had I not done it.” During the early years abroad, he made it back to the U.S. for a month out of the year, he said, but later on, he made it back more often.

After a two-year stint in Turkmenistan, Kreps oversaw more multi-million-dollar projects for Alkhorayef in Kiev, Ukraine, for two years, and then in Moscow, Russia, for five, and eventually in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates for five more. In Ukraine, he helped to set up a John Deere retail sales operation, “which were really non-existent at the time,” he said, “because there was no such thing as retail sales” in the former Soviet Union. He met former Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma, he said, and sometime in 1996 he found himself in Kiev at a restaurant named Uncle Sam’s sitting near a businessman from Bismarck, N.D., and another from East Grand Forks, Minn.; all three men were in Kiev for different reasons. Kreps became a technical director in Moscow until he became the country manager, he said, and then in Dubai, he took care of international business in the Middle East and in northern and eastern Africa. He remembers visiting Khartoum, Sudan, and wanting to get a close-up look at where the White Nile and Blue Nile rivers intersect, but it was too dangerous to go out, he said, and so he stayed in his hotel and ate in the same restaurant for three meals a day. It was miserable.

But Kreps didn’t always go to where he was called. “I said, ‘No,’ to going to Iraq,” he said. “And the guy who did go was captured and held hostage for nine months.”

In 2006, Kreps took a job working for AGCO Corporation, a global manufacturer of agricultural equipment based in Duluth, Ga., that sells the brands Challenger, Fendt, Massey Ferguson, and Valta. He worked for AGCO for two years in Moscow as the head of the representative office for both Russia and Ukraine, and during his last four years overseas, he worked for AGCO out of Kiev as the country manager for Eastern Europe, including the former Soviet Union, with the exception of Russia.

In the process, Kreps learned to speak Russian, he said, and “I can go through a German or French language newspaper and get the gist. I know four or five words in Arabic, and I can speak a number of languages, all of them badly.”

He built up an iron stomach, too. “I can eat almost anything now,” he said. “It’s really got to be going bad before it affects me.”

But more than languages and bad food, Kreps learned about people, he said, and about how much heart they can have, and how hard it is to live in other countries when compared to the U.S. “I learned how people with literally nothing can be so giving,” Kreps said. He saw people doing farm work wearing a suit because it was the only set of clothes they owned. “They didn’t have much,” Kreps said, “but what they had, you were welcome to it—once they figured out you weren’t a criminal.”

And he learned how far advanced we are in the U.S. in terms of agricultural mechanization. “In a number of the countries over there, they could buy every piece of farm equipment that the United States produces today and it would still take 10 to 15 years for them to reach full mechanization as we understand it,” he said. There was a point in the late 1990s, Kreps said, during the Russian financial crisis, when much of the former Soviet Union was at a tipping point, and when they could have gone back to becoming completely de-mechanized.

“When I visited the country of Georgia,” Kreps said, “they were doing things by hand, and hauling by horse cart, and for all intents and purposes they were de-mechanized in some parts of that country. They were poor as church mice, and it was very surprising for me because it was a group of people who were very hospitable and very proud of their hospitality. When we would go someplace in the former Soviet Union, we would always be offered tea or coffee or something like that, but when we would go to Georgia, the lights would be off, and we would all be sitting around in our coats because it was November or December, and they didn’t have the money to buy tea and to offer you tea. This was a place where they had grown tea, and it was one of the major suppliers of tea to the Soviet Union back in the day, but they had shut down a lot of the tea farms and had let them become overgrown, and they just couldn’t afford to buy tea.”

Kreps also learned what it’s like to be a global citizen, he said, and he learned how the U.S. fits into the global economy. “One thing I will always remember,” Kreps said, “is from the gentleman who hired me; he said, ‘Regardless of what it says on your passport, you’re no longer just an American; you’re a citizen of the world. You have to go forth and behave in that manner.”

He did go forth, and during 18 years abroad, Kreps learned how the world’s perception of the U.S. has changed over time. “When I was in Eastern Europe back in the early 1990s,” Kreps said, “we were known as The Superpower. We were seen as something to aspire to. But that started to change a little bit in the late 1990s,” he said, “with the breakup of Yugoslavia. I was in Russia by that time, and that’s when I was told that we had stepped too far; we had interfered too much with their Slavic brothers.

“But on September 11,” he said, “so many people came to me and said, ‘We really feel bad for you,’ and they expressed their sympathies to me.

“But in Dubai it was different,” he said. “They had a sense of indignation about why the U.S. wouldn’t step in on behalf of the Palestinians. A lot of people in that part of the world are Palestinian, and they are wonderful, wonderful people, and they couldn’t understand why the U.S. has a blind spot in that regard. That led to some lively debates.”

Kreps grew to dislike the image that others in the U.S. had about him—that he was overseas to educate people—“because I took away a lot more than I ever could have given,” he said. “With very few exceptions, the people I worked with were much more educated than I was. I was always working with doctors, lawyers, and scientists.”

Kreps’s new job back in The States is as the director of sales and marketing for a joint venture between AGCO and Amity Technology, based in Fargo. Amity grew out of Concord, Inc., and continues to sell sugar beet equipment, and so in a way, Kreps has come full circle.

But he didn’t leave Russia behind completely. His fiancé, Nadezhda, is from Russia, and they plan to be married in a year.

Kreps said he doesn’t have immediate plans to work overseas again, “but there are places I’d like to see,” he said, such as North Korea or Cuba. “I just don’t know if I’ve got enough fire in my belly to learn another language in my lifetime,” he said.

And Kreps never did earn his college diploma. “But just think about what I could have done with my life if I’d just finished my degree,” he said, laughing.