NETWORKING AS A WAY OF LIFE IN SUPPORT OF A CIVIL SOCIETY AND A SOURCE OF GREAT PERSONAL SATISFACTION

Dimitar, Anne and Roy in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, 1995.

By Roy N. Freed
Much to my delight, I was asked to share my ideas about networking, which I do now by this paper. Being well into my retirement, I cherish the opportunity to network actively and to encourage others to network also, either with me, which I prefer, or at least just with others.
I have networked throughout my long adult life. Through necessity, I did it only part time while I was gainfully employed, but my retirement lets me indulge in it to its fullest.
Now, networking has become my major activity. The fact that I have become so avid and even notorious as a networker is why I was called upon to share with mental health care professionals my insights into the very enjoyable, satisfying activity.
Have you thought yet about your engaging in networking, as you already are, or potentially might be, doing it, both now and later in life? Specifically, have you thought about how the activity is carried out and what benefits it holds in store, not only for you but for others in your network as well? If you haven't, you should start now, and I am ready to advise you how, if you read on. While you absorb this admonition, let me tell why I earnestly believe that you should network and how to go about it, just in case you need some guidance.
I provide my suggestions for networking techniques largely by giving a number of random examples from the intensive networking experiences of my wife of over 60 years, Anne, and myself around Bulgarian projects. I believe that it is ideal to do this through a bit of joint, but slightly disjointed, autobiography.
Of course, first, I should tell who we are so that you can surmise our respective points of view. When I write this in early 2001, Anne is 83 and I just turned 84. I am a lawyer who retired in 1986 after a private practice that involved handling legal questions that arise from the distribution and use of computer technology. Anne is a clinical social worker who retired in 2000, after a career that included the practice of child placement for adoption and mental health therapy, administration at a large mental health agency, and teaching, interrupted by a short period of service in the agency of the U.S. Government that administered the relocation centers at which people of Japanese ancestry lived when they were forced to leave the West Coast during WW II.
Both of us have traveled together extensively throughout much of the world, starting in 1960, preferably staying for a short period to teach, lecture, attend conferences, or carry out projects and to gain insights into the local culture. We visited practically all countries of Western Europe (starting in 1960), the Czech Republic, Hungary, former Yugoslavia (late 1989), Bulgaria (thirteen times between 1987 & 2000), Russia, Finland, Greece, Turkey, Israel (three times starting in 1968), the Phillippines, Hong Kong, Thailand, Taiwan, Japan (many times between 1967 & 1988), and China (1980 & 1988). In addition, we traveled abroad even more widely vicariously by entertaining visitors from many other countries and plying them with questions about their cultures and the like.
Our joint travel was preceded by Anne's extremely significant, for us, solo trip to Europe in 1937, during the summer after her junior year at Connecticut College, to attend an international school in Geneva, Switzerland. This normal student activity turned out to play a major, seminal, role in our foreign travel, as we point out below. At the very least, she made many friends there with whom both of us have maintained contact to date. Moreover, that trip led to our first visit to Bulgaria and then to this story about our joint networking.
Specific live examples we give here of our foreign and domestic networking should be far more meaningful than only abstract general principles. And they are invaluable as a foundation for those necessary principles, which we set forth at the end.
Moreover, our examples should be particularly pertinent for Central and Eastern Europe for people who are interested in cultural and other factors there. And, they show many things that can be done there right now in the economic, political, and social reforms now in process. I suggest that you look for examples that are particularly applicable for you in light of your interests, personality, and the like.
Finally, our experiences should put to rest any lingering doubts about the ability of many people there to network through the Internet to enhance their reform efforts more rapidly than would be possible by using other modes of communication.
Let me start with some brief general observations, before I get into our examples. Then, I will conclude with some generalizations that I believe that my examples support. Thus, our examples are the meat in this sandwich review of our networking, which we hope that you will find figuratively delectable.
Networking can be important to you in many stages of your life in a number of different ways. First, pure reason confirmed by lots of experience tells me that people who still are working should network by all communication means as much as they can fit into their schedules, as we did, especially with contacts in professional and other associations and similar activities. They should do this not only for the current, often significant, possible benefits of expanding their useful knowledge and multiplying their professional and social contacts but equally for the sheer pleasure of helping others.
Networking altruistically in order to help others is one of its crucial functions. People also should network in earnest as early as possible to develop the technique and create a network base to build on to prepare for when they have more time for the activity and possibly even greater need for it to maintain their psychological well being, such as to keep their minds functioning and to avoid loneliness, because all people should plan for busy, fulfilling retirements. Networking can prevent psychological problems that ordinarily might arise from reduced constructive, stimulating contact with people.
Speaking of retirement, my wife and I are aware of how remarkably fortunate we are to have extremely active ones, especially ones that are built largely on networking during the Internet Age. That Age's E-mail enables us to network inexpensively, primarily from home, with people we turn up throughout the world who share some of our broad interests, and there are many of those people. We use it dynamically extensively for two-way messages individually to specific people and as mass simultaneous messages to and from often unidentified members of egroups. In contrast, its World Wide Web makes available to us statically information-related resources to enjoy ourselves and to share with others through networking that are far richer and much easier to get than from traditional information sources by old-fashioned means, such as books and journals.
Recently, a social worker who was making a survey of the ways of life of older people asked me if I was lonely. I assured her immediately that I was not, because I have lots of face-to-face interactions with people. But then I added that I also avoid loneliness by using E-mail extensively. That response gave her the idea to add that factor to her questionnaire, in light of this new way to communicate, especially for older people who are open to use it. By bringing up the use of E-mail, she undoubtedly will plant the wise idea among many seniors. By the way, when I exchange messages with people whom I have met in person, I enhance the impact of those contacts with their images in my mind.
Speaking of images, I might be able to provide a mental picture of an active networking system for those of you who are visually oriented to build on. Maybe it will help if I tell how I visualize my remarkable network for myself to enrich my verbal description of it for you. I like to picture my network as a virtual inverted cone that is delicately, but firmly, balanced upright on its sharp pointed tip and packed to overflowing with information energy signal symbols for the names and addresses of my ever increasing participants and for details about who they are and what makes them tick and interact with me. In contrast to my enjoyable experiences with constantly shrinking edible baked sugar cones filled with ice cream or frozen yoghurt that have to be held gingerly and licked assiduously to avoid dripping, I have my imaginary gossamer networking virtual cone.
This cone feeds my mind with information input signals and, by being filled with my output signals, is constantly growing in height and expanding in diameter and kept upright by the figurative gyroscopic force of its swirling interacting information signals.
I hope that you find this fanciful metaphor for my network that works by reciprocal mental stimulation and dynamic ever-growing relationships to be useful in at least two ways. First, it might provide a mental image for the physically-minded of the way a successful dynamic networking can originate and flourish. And secondly, it might provide a structure on which I can hang my presentation of the origin and growth of our remarkable personal networking experience that might guide others who are receptive to the activity.
Now, let me tell you some of the myriad networking experiences of my wife and myself, as examples to show how my current primary inverted cone expanding network originated in 1987 and continues to flourish as I put my energy signals into it and get my reciprocal stimulation out of it. Because my wife and I always have functioned inseparably as a team, especially in our work in Bulgaria, the examples are from our joint, overlapping network.
I hope that you can identify yourself with many of the examples.
I apologize that we cannot present our examples chronologically. They simply do not fit together that neat way. We have to resort to cinematographic flashbacks and jumps forward, as the various topics dictate for coherence.
Our network started largely with a chance encounter in Sofia, Bulgaria with a Bulgarian graduate student in philosophy in mid-1987 whom we did not know before, during a completely unrelated social visit there to see Nevena Geliazkova, 50 years after Anne and she were classmates in Geneva and 40 years after we saw her last, which was in the U.S.A. While that visit also was an opportunity for us to be in Sofia for our first, and then probably only, time, during the then unrecognized receding years of totalitarian Communism, it inadvertently set the stage for us to begin, completely unexpectedly, to spin our current networking cone, starting at its very tip, that led to twelve more visits.
Let's start by building up from that tip. One afternoon in June 1987, while searching for a cultural attraction in central Sofia, my wife and I tried to go into an active open door in a very large, Greek revival multi-columned building with a Cyrillic name I could not yet read. Just as we stepped inside, a doorman told us very firmly, in perfect English, that we could not enter because the building was only for students. My wife suggested audibly that we might be eligible because she was a professor, but to no avail. Little did we know then how fortunate it turned out for us and apparently for Bulgaria, too, that we were so barred.
Having no choice, we retreated to the sidewalk. When we reached it, we noted that that young, as yet unidentified and previously unnoticed, graduate student was running toward us. Having overheard our brief exchange inside, he came to apologize, in perfect English, for our being denied admission to the National Library. He felt that, as foreign visitors, we should have been welcomed, and he was correct. Finding him engagingly earnest and open, particularly during Communism, we invited Zlatko Enev to breakfast with us the next day and then two days more, at the modest buffet at the Grand Hotel Sofia, then an unwarranted euphemistic name.
As I look back, the open sesame for our current networking came when he asked if we could help him find funding for study in the U.S.A., which continues to be a not uncommon request by students abroad. Fortunately overlooking our knowledge that he had to apply for a Fulbright Fellowship in Bulgaria, when I returned home, I called the Center for the International Exchange of Scholars, in Washington, DC, to explore his possibilities. After telling me that he had to apply in Bulgaria, which was unrealistic for him during Communism, the staff person asked me who I was and why I was interested in Bulgaria. Obviously satisfied by my explanation, he suggested that I apply for a Fulbright Fellowship to Bulgaria, a thought that never entered my mind. Practicing our commitment to togetherness, both my wife and I applied, and we became Fulbright Teaching Scholars at Sofia University in our respective fields of clinical social work and law in early 1989. Being there for that teaching gave us our first real broad exposure to Bulgarians and whetted our appetite for more. Remarkably resourceful Zlatko really made this teaching opportunity feasible by finding us the needed sponsors, who were people he did not already know. He found Prof. Krum Krumov, a professor of psychology at Sofia University, for Anne, and for me, he found Prof. Evgenii Tanchev of the Law Faculty at Sofia University. But more below about our experiences with them when our Fulbright Fellowships began in 1989.
In hindsight, I see that Zlatko, the young man from the very old northeastern country town of Preslav and the first in his family to attend a university, just by being the innately attractive, considerate fellow he was, unknowingly for all of us, firmly fixed the point of my present Bulgarian-oriented inverted networking cone. By trying to help him, we inadvertently started our remarkably diverse, extensive contacts in Bulgaria.
Zlatko was almost like Dukas' sorceror's apprentice for us, but in such a very positive way that we would never think of stopping him. And we have not stopped being in contact with him. We visited him and his family in Berlin a few years ago to maintain contact. And, in 2001, we are in touch with him over his effort to produce, with the help of Bulgarian programmers, and market a family-oriented computer game, the idea for which he got from his young son. In fact, while I am writing this, he sent us a very positive report on his apparent progress with this ambitious business project. We never let go when we want to continue a relationship.
As I look back, I see that Zlatko has an innate invaluable entrepreneurial streak that enabled him to help us from the start so effectively and to help himself through his activities after he married and started to live in Berlin and still stands him in good stead. In early 1989, he taught himself how to use a computer by working on the simple one in the smoke-filled, dimly lit students' room in the basement of Sofia University. That advance initiative enabled him to get his first position in Berlin, which was to perform graphic design by computer to create illustrations for educational books. After a short time, he set up his own business to offer that service broadly, as well as to his former employer. Now, he is promoting an ambitious computer game and many related items, and I am helping with some insights into intellectual property law and how to secure legal advice, which is a new challenge for him Would that more Bulgarians had this developed entrepreneurial quality to grease the ways for their country during their trying economic reforms.
Now, we flash back to mid-1988, when we had to return to Bulgaria to firm up arrangements for our Fulbrights the following year, simply because we couldn't accomplish that by means of its Communist non-functioning postal mail or telephone systems. Then, we met Zlatko's roommate, Avram Agov, during an unenthusiastic discussion of Bulgarian Communism at their apartment. As I point out below, Avram entered our network actively the next year, without our or his suspecting that at this first meeting.
Also in June 1988, we added Inna Vlasseva to our network when Anne's Fulbright sponsor picked her to interpret for him. She introduced us to her sister Valentina and her brother-in-law, Boyan Stoev, who later set up a tour company in Sofia, called Magic Tours, after the start of the reforms. I digress a bit to tell about my interaction with Boyan. Believing for some time that the myriad Bulgarian touristic resources made tourism a natural means to promote the Bulgarian economy and simultaneously to acquaint Americans with the Bulgarian people whom my wife and I found attractive, I tried in vain to interest Bulgarian officials in marketing a number of features in addition to inexpensive summer stays at the Black Sea that attracted primarily Eastern Europeans. When I met more openminded and professional Boyan, I was able to help him design a number of varied itineraries that should attract Americans. My reasoning proved correct when, after five years of effort, I persuaded Elderhostel, the major marketer of educational tours for older Americans, to adopt its first Bulgarian tours in 2000, which Boyan managed to great acclaim.
Moreover, as I write this, I discovered an unexpected bonus. I just read a comment by a judge in Norfolk, Virginia who took the first Elderhostel tour during which he went reluctantly to the American College in Sofia, an old English-language high school founded 140 years ago. The College so impressed him that he wrote later, "The work of the American College in Sofia must continue. It is dispensing knowledge and ideas, which are the most successful and lasting foreign aid we can give. The College is an oasis filled with determination, purpose, and hope . . .." >From that unexpected visit to it as a tourist, he became an enthusiastic member of the Board of Trustees of the College!
Speaking of tourism to Bulgaria, also as I write this, I am working with Boyan and Albena Taneva, who, with her husband Todor, set up and directs the Center for Jewish Studies at Sofia University, on a Jewish-oriented tour to Bulgaria. For that tour, we are using the saving of the Bulgarian Jews within the country's pre-WW II borders as a prime example of Bulgarian civility in accepting readily ethnic and religious differences, except for the almost universal exception of the Roma, and in avoiding significant anti-Semitism.
Apropos of the problems of Roma people, a team made up of two Bulgarian friends of ours connected with the Bulgarian Institute of Human Relations at the NBU, an American social worker, and a Roma teacher, acting on their own initiative, started a successful project to enable some Roma people and social workers in the Ministry of Social Care to meet together over serious discrimination by those social workers. The result was a program set up at the NBU to train Roma to be social workers in that Ministry. We point to this ongoing Bulgarian project as a model of positive action to improve relations between Roma and the society in which they live.
And, I also am working on a film scriptwriting tour to Bulgaria for mid-2002 to enable Bulgarian and American professionals to share ideas on that basic subject while the Americans are introduced to the country and its people. The idea for this tour arose from my extensive interactions with Dimiter Dereliev, the husband of Galina Markova, who presently is the Director of the masters degree program at the NBU's Social Work Department. I discuss this tour below when I describe our very interesting involvements with both of them.
In addition in June 1988, we added Nellie Lozanova to our network, again amazingly fortuitously. While waiting for tardy Inna Vlasseva on the steps of the first-class then Lyudmilla Zhivkova International Art Gallery, Nellie, a vivacious young staff member there, came out to ask if we were the Americans she was to meet, which we were not. Engaging her in conversation inside, while we enjoyed paintings by a Bulgarian expatriate artist in France, we initiated a friendship that flowered starting when we returned the next year as Fulbrighters. Nellie later worked for the American Culture Center, which is an adjunct of the Embassy.. We have remained intimate friends of Nellie and her daughter since, especially now that she immigrated to the U.S.A. Because Ambassador and Mrs. Polansky also were attracted by Nellie's wonderful qualities, we now share her with them in our deep interest in her wellbeing and that of her daughter, Milla. Because Nellie was widowed at an early age to become a single mother of a young daughter and struggled to make her way in New York on an inadequate income, our interaction provided her with much needed emotional support. She has been very helpful to us by providing leads to significant people in the Bulgarian community in the U.S.A. For example, she introduced me to a person who is trying to help Boyan Stoev market his tours in the U.S.A.
For a change of scenery, we made our second trip to China in October 1988, for me to teach contracting for complex transactions and lecture on legal protection of software program subject matter, at the Business Administration School of Tongji University in Shanghai. That great opportunity was arranged by our dear friend, Yunbin Tang, a native of Shanghai whom we met completely by chance at a workshop of the Boston Bar Association on doing business with China, while he was attending Harvard Law School. At Tongji University, we befriended Guoyong (Americanized to Roger) Wu, a very outstanding young undergraduate student who caught my attention when he audited my law courses for graduate students. We suggested then that he consider law or business management as a career instead of his choice of construction management, because of his very sharp, analytical mind. A couple of years after graduation, Roger set up a private ocean shipping agency in Shanghai, drawing on his short, frustrating experience at his first job with a government agency and writing us at the outset that he hired ten young men. We arranged for Chris Arnold, our dear London lawyer friend, to send Roger publications about that business. Roger conducted a very interesting, warm correspondence with us, in handwriting, during the ten years until he came to Boston in 1998, with his very special wife, Margie, to get an M.B.A. degree at Babson College, which he did with distinction despite the fact that English is not his native language.
Despite their initial plan to return, the blandishments of the U.S.A. are inducing them to try to remain here, which we and many others would like. Through a series of fortuitous events, they have joined with us in becoming integral parts of the expanding emigre Bulgarian community in Boston, as I describe below. We were thrilled when, in May 2000, Roger and Margie finally were able to meet Chris in person when he visited us in Boston. After that detour to China, we finally returned to Bulgaria in May 1989 as Fulbright Scholars, where our teaching experiences differed widely. Anne was kept very busy by Prof. Krumov to give a wide variety of courses, including particularly the first course in Bulgaria on Western, psychodynamic psychology, which she taught in the U.S.A. to clinical social work students. Because of the novelty of either that subject or her being an American, Anne attracted a large attendance of not only students but also outside professionals in various related fields. Her interpreter was Stefanka Nikolova, a very bright young lady with whom we are still in contact while she lives in Germany. She was particularly helpful when Anne introduced role playing as a teaching technique and also required students to interact with her in the classrooms instead of just passively listening to lectures. Those teaching methods reduced substantially the normal absences of the students.
In contrast to Anne's experience, my sponsor, Prof. Tanchev, did not keep me busy with assignments to lecture on American law. Enterprising Zlatko Enev admirably filled the breach by finding Nedko Ionkov, the director of continuing education at the Federation of Scientific and Engineering Unions, who set up a number of workshops for me on legal protection of computer programs and contracting for complex transactions, that were attended by many bright computer specialists and lawyers. My interpreter was young Petya Kolcheva, who then was finishing at the Law Faculty of Sofia University. At the end of the program, she told me that, being introduced to business law by working with me convinced her to go into that field in private practice, even though Communism was still in effect. She became very successful with her own law firm. She and her husband, Kamen, a banker, remain our friends.
A person who attended my workshops was Ivan Panchev, a lawyer for a Sofia bank. Later, at a gathering set up by Petya Kolcheva for me to meet with Bulgarian lawyers, he asked me to introduce him to Mr. Perry, an American who was in Sofia to advise on how to consolidate banks there and whom I did not know. Learning that he had Mr. Perry's telephone number, I suggested that he simply call him. Being typically Bulgarian, he could not do that without an introduction. As a typical American, that task did not faze me at all. When I told Mr. Perry why I called, he immediately said that he was waiting to hear from Mr. Panchev. I hope that Mr. Panchev learned from this incident and that many others will learn from this example. In the Spring of 1989, Anne and I attended Avram Agov's wedding in Sofia, and eventually became very close friends of his young wife, Marina, her parents, and her Chinese paternal grandmother and her Bulgarian Sephardic Jewish doctor paternal grandfather, who met each other at a Chinese Red Cross Camp in Kweeyan, Southern China in 1939, during the war between the Red Army and the Kuomintang. We were delighted to be able to help Marina later as she impecuniously secured her undergraduate education at Columbia University with flying colors. Ten years later, she continues to be a very warm young friend, despite our substantial age disparity, while she is successful in the securities business in New York, in spite of her degree in international relations and Chinese studies.
In fact, I interrupted writing this paper while we stayed with Marina in New York for us to attend an annual conference at Columbia University of the Association for the Study of Nationalities I learned about over the Internet. There, we renewed contact with Bulgarian Ambassador Philip Dimitrov and reminded people, a number of times, of Bulgaria's notable domestic and international civility, in sharp contrast to some of its neighbors. Our hearing Ambassador Dimitrov's very succinct talk there on the impressive civility of Bulgarians induced us to try to get an opportunity for him to give a similar talk about Bulgaria at Harvard University this coming fall to tell people that Bulgaria is a shining light in the Balkans and its people are very different from those of its uncivil neighbors. We also met Toni Petkovic there, a young Serbian psychologist, who reported on his study of discrimination against Roma. We just sent him a copy of an article by Anne on mental health care in Eastern Europe, on the chance that he might value an insight into the use of pschodynamic psychotherapy there. Now, back to Avram Agov, whom we figuratively stumbled on in 1987. His major contribution to our network occurred in early 1989 and grew out of his negotiations to become the East Asian specialist at the Institute of the History of the Bulgarian Communist Party, the euphemistic name for a key social sciences think tank for the Central Committee, during which he told of his knowing us Americans, who were still a novelty in Bulgaria. With the prescient belief that we might help them finally start making contacts with American scholars, key members of that Institute asked Avram to introduced them to us. I met them on a bench in the park, in central Sofia, next to the Russian Church. Up to then, they were isolated from the West and confined to the Soviet Union's orbit. Finding them bright, open young people, we socialized with them with great delight. Occasionally, they even arranged for us to be driven in the official black Volga cars by drivers who probably came from the Bulgarian Army Tank Corps. They had me tell about legal protection of software programs at an intimate conference at the infamous Communist Party enclave at Pioneerski Put in Sofia, where others trained Arab terrorists among many other Communist activities and which, as an exercise of poetic justice, is now the site of the outstanding New Bulgarian University (NBU). They gave us, to take to scholars in the U.S.A., a unique limited-circulation book in Russian that reported on discussions they had in Moscow with Russian counterparts on the introduction and significance of glasnost and perestroika. Because the people at the Russian Research Center at Harvard University were so blinded by the complexities and challenges of the Soviet Union that they could not focus on little Bulgaria, I gave it to a professor at Boston University instead. By the way, probably because they initiated the contact with us, we were spared being accused of being C.I.A. agents, which never concerned us anyhow because their Communism at the time resembled for us, in contrast to the Bulgarians, a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta. Our friends preferred to talk with us outside, in the streets or parks. During one of our gambols with our young scholar friends, we obviously planted a fruitful seed in their minds when we described, without having a specific purpose, the critical positive roles American non-government research groups and self-help and advocacy organizations play in our civil democratic, market-economy society. As I point out below, some of these scholars picked up the idea when the time became ripe. Two people in that group who became key for us in our network, with whom we still are in touch and whom I tell about below, were George Prohasky, an economics teacher who later became the first director of George Soros' Open Society Fund--Sofia and now is a banker, and Evgenii Dainov, a man who wears many important hats, including being a leading political analyst and an objective public figure during the current reforms. Remember that this incipient, unplanned, informal exercise in citizen diplomacy that flowered beautifully in 1989 was merely incidental to our being Fulbright teachers at Sofia University in May and June 1989. In that primary capacity, we befriended two bright young assistant professors in cognitive or social psychology, Zlatka Russinova and George Pashev, who came to play important roles in our lives to this day in North America. Zlatka introduced Anne, through her physician brother Dimiter, to Dr. Andriana Anadoliiska, devoted head of the Pediatric Renal Clinic where he continues to work. Imaginative, highly professional Dr. Anadoliiska, a respected educator of Bulgarian pediatricians, had Anne acquaint her doctors with psychosocial considerations in dealing with the parents of their young renal dialysis patients. Anne introduced one of those doctors to that subject so that she could take responsibility for leading groups of parents to educate them about their children's illnesses, and gave talks about it to the entire medical staff and later to groups of pediatricians in the community. During later years, we arranged for Dr. Dimiter Russinov to come to Boston twice to observe the practice of pediatric nephrology at a leading Boston hospital under the guidance of a very hospitable physician we found simply by a telephone call and who gave him a major reference book for his Clinic. On one of those visits, he refreshed his recollection of peritoneal dialysis, which can be performed at home, and introduced it at his Clinic in Bulgaria as a way to expand its services. Also, as a member of the Board of Directors of the Bulgarian American Society in Washington, DC, Anne persuaded her colleagues to donate to the Clinic the receipts from concerts the Society runs annually in that city. But more below about our intensive later involvements with Zlatka and her family in Boston. George Pashev introduced us to his parents, Rossy and Stefan Pashev, with whom we remain very close friends to this day and whom we have introduced both to other friends in Sofia, with whom they identify themselves as Friends of the Freeds, and to many visitors from America. Rossy graduated from the American College formerly in Lovech and speaks and writes English with remarkable proficiency and a decided poetic quality. In late October 1989, when we returned to Bulgaria on our own instead of going to Shanghai for me to teach again because the Tiananmen Square incident made us reluctant to go there, we were able to advance the desire of the social scientists at the Institute of the History of the B.C.P. for eventual American scholarly contacts, little knowing how soon that actually would occur. When then American Ambassador Sol Polansky, a notably open, friendly diplomat, invited us, as Fulbrighters, to lunch, we nominated three of them to join us, as a bold exercise of citizen diplomacy in Communist Bulgaria. They included Evgenii Dainov, who then probably was known as much for his addiction to jazz performance and his pony tail as for his sophistication in political science, which continues to be notable. That was the Ambassador's first opportunity to meet Bulgarian officials below the very top Ministry level, especially frank ones as our young friends were, and to get a long desired, and much needed, glimpse at the thinking and power structure at the top. At that time, Bulgarians still were discouraged from having contact with Americans. Building on that major contact, Ambassador Polansky later made funds available for some of them to travel to the U.S.A., especially George Prohasky, once the Bulgarian economic and political reforms started in 1990. In 1990, when those reforms started, some of our friends from the Institute of the History of the B.C.P. picked up the idea we dropped entirely hypothetically during one of our social visits back in 1989, probably on Mount Vitosha, about research groups and other NGOs in the U.S.A., and established the Center for the Study of Democracy, which probably was the first such entity in Eastern Europe. A few years later, we helped it became the distributor in Bulgaria of new books made available free by the Sabre Foundation of Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the U.S.A. This affiliation came about when, noting in an article on the editorial page of The New York Times that Sabre was distributing books to Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, I called it to ask why highly literate Bulgaria was not included. Being told that it would be added if it could find a partner there, I found the Center to be eager for that role. I had quite a task to interpret for it the provisions of the legal agreement Sabre needed in order to preserve its tax-free status as a charity in the U.S.A. That action of mine continues to bring millions of dollars worth of academic and other books to Bulgaria for free distribution to professionals and others. Through our resulting positive relationship with Sabre, it also ships for us large quantities of books on social work and other mental health subjects to the NBU without charge, as I explain below. Leading a group of Bulgarians on an introductory, exploratory trip to the U.S.A. in 1990 through the good offices of Ambassador Polansky after the end of Communism, George Prohasky stopped in Boston, where we lived. Very auspiciously, as it quickly turned out, he brought with him Dr. Toma Tomov, the most outstanding psychiatrist in Bulgaria and the head of the Bulgarian Institute of Human Relations in the newly established NBU, the first Bulgarian private university. Upon learning, while sitting on our sofa, of Anne's skill with clinical social work education and practice, Dr. Tomov told her that had he secured a contract with the Bulgarian prison system to teach its untrained social workers how to interview their clients, and he invited her to give a two-week course on this subject in Sofia in 1992. So many outsiders also attended that course that Anne had to conduct it in two sessions. A very significant outsider was Galina Markova, then a school teacher. By being curious about interviewing by social workers and being introduced to an aspect of professional clinical social work there, she soon came to play a truly major role in establishing Bulgarian clinical social work education, as I explain right below. Noting the great success of that course, Anne suggested to Dr. Tomov that there be set up in the Bulgarian Institute of Human Relations of the NBU what soon became a very successful and significant masters degree program in clinical social work, based on the American model, that was entirely new to Bulgaria and sorely needed there. Anne and the late Nancy Cook, a wonderful social worker from San Francisco who happened fortuitously to be in Sofia then to visit friends, designed its curriculum and concurrent internship program. By the way, in the course of these developments, we became very close friends of Dr. Tomov, and then his wife, Ivanka, and their son, Vesko, who is studying medicine at Harvard Medical School in Greater Boston and whom we see there, with his nice Australian wife. Galina was such an outstanding participant in the interviewing course that Anne persuaded Dr. Tomov to recruit her for the new NBU masters degree program. Later, noting her notable performance as a teacher there, Anne suggested to Dr. Tomov that he name her its Director, in order for him to get relief from that demanding responsibility. That turned out to be a very wise step. Graduates of the masters degree program of the NBU's Social Work Department continue to distinguish themselves as devoted, committed, altruistic, skilled clinical social workers. They teach in that department and other schools of social work in Bulgaria, perform psychotherapy in numerous clinics and agencies, and work in newly established social institutions, known as NGOs, that provide a variety of much needed social services. Jumping a few years ahead to 1999, when the NBU's Social Work Department set up a doctoral program of its own, Anne arranged for Galina to enroll also in the doctoral program at the Smith College School for Social Work, where many decades before, she studied social work and later taught. Galina is distinguishing herself there, despite the fact that English is not her native language. In 2001, Anne arranged for two other masters degree graduates of the NBU's Social Work Department to audit courses at Smith, tuition free, on how to formulate and promote social policy and how to conduct social research, to qualify them to teach those subjects in that Department's new doctoral program. Starting when the Social Work Department was established, we assembled a large English language library for it through generous book and journal donations by the many schools of social work in Massachusetts and of the personal libraries of retiring and deceased mental health professionals in Boston. Those books include classics as well as current literature and materials from the various related mental health fields. Because the most useful literature on that field is in English, the doctoral students there are required to be proficient in English. The value of our considerable onerous efforts in collecting, packing, and delivering them is confirmed when Anne notes references to them in papers students there send her for comments and editing. Visiting Galina at Smith, we befriended Yona Weiss, a classmate from Israel. Anne became a mentor for Yona, helping her by E-mail and telephone, while she completes her research and writes her dissertation in Israel on the impact of the traditional practice at Kibbutzim of caring for children apart from their parents in Children's Houses. For some time, Galina has been invited to go to Kyrgystan and Ukraine periodically to consult and teach social work practice, thus spreading the knowledge she acquired in Bulgaria and the U.S.A. This activity has stimulated interest there in formal social work education. As a then new facet of our involvement with Galina Markova, she introduced us to her husband, Dimiter Dereliev, whom she met when both of them were film scriptwriters and who was then President of the Bulgarian Film Center, a government agency. Becoming acquainted with Bulgarian films through him, I arranged to have some exhibited at the Nortel Annual International Film Festival at Palm Springs, California in January 2000 and to have him present them there. The film entitled, "After the End of the World" was acclaimed there. It wove around a touching love story between a Bulgaria-Armenian woman and a Bulgarian-Jewish man the abuses of Bulgarian Communism, the traditional Bulgarian civility in accepting ethnic and religious differences, and the departure for Israel, in 1948, of 90% of the entire 50,000 Bulgarian Jews who had been saved from deportation to Treblinka that Bulgaria's Nazi ally was pressing for. Those Jews left when Israel was established because they either were Zionists who wanted to live in a Jewish homeland or did not want to live under Communism. My current project with Dimiter Dereliev is getting his help in designing, with Boyan Stoev, the scriptwriting tour to Bulgaria I mentioned, which will be conducted by Prof. Andrew Horton, head of the Oklahoma University's Department of Film. Having befriended Andy at the Palm Springs Festival and learned about his conducting film tours to Greece, I induced him to lead one to Bulgaria. Dimiter will help Bulgarian scriptwriters and film producers participate in the tour. Turning to another involvement, in 1990, Anne secured an American IREX grant to have Zlatka Russinova come to Boston briefly to lecture on art psychology. But she beat us to the punch. When we were on a sojourn in London, we learned by a telephone call that she was in the U.S.A. on a business visa to give a talk on moral psychology at Purdue University. When we returned home, we learned that she hoped to remain. When her efforts to get a professorship in the U.S.A. in social psychology failed as Anne anticipated, Anne helped her get training as a clinical psychologist and become qualified to perform psychotherapy. Simultaneously, through a fortuitous meeting of our daughter with a school psychologist in our town, Zlatka was able to get assignments to administer psychological tests in Russian to Russian emigre children, who are numerous there. Although the school system could not hire her directly, it was willing to contract with Anne for that testing that she could have performed by Zlatka, and Anne set up a business for that purpose, with my help. That entirely unforeseen arrangement enabled us to help G23 eventually become an American citizen. She continues to be one of our very closest friends, as she distinguishes herself as an Associate Researcher at the Institute for Psychiatric Rehabilitation of Boston University and a psychotherapist. Furthermore, she is sharing her knowledge on that subject with a psychologist in Bulgaria who is setting up an agency to provide that service. Also, in Boston in the early 1990s, we were fortunate to be befriended by Tanya Zlateva, who was living there with her two young children, while teaching computer science at the Metropolitan College of Boston University. Later, her husband, Vladi, joined her and became an entrepreneur here, after finding Bulgaria too inhospitable for that activity. Typifying Bulgarian family warmth and loyalty, they tried, in vain, to discourage us from leaving our apartment in their neighborhood, a few years ago, for a retirement community by insisting that they would take care of us whenever we needed assistance. We still remain close despite our moderate physical separation. Vladi Zlatev stands out in our minds as a model of the how Bulgarian emigres who retain their loyalty to Bulgaria, as they should, can, and should, use knowledge, skills, and opportunities they acquire or enrich in the U.S.A. to benefit Bulgaria. People who rightfully bemoan the severe Bulgarian brain drain might take heart from his example to see the potential very significant benefits of that emigration, as least for a reasonable time, although it is no excuse for delaying or foregoing the needed economic and political reforms in Bulgaria. Specifically, Vladi has been teaching his brother in Russe, who is a skilled metallurgist and operates a metal casting foundry, how to comply rigorously with quality standards and delivery schedules to produce products for which Vladi is able to secure significant orders in the U.S.A. Thus, Vladi is instilling much needed entrepreneurship into Bulgaria along with income from manufacturing there. Simultaneously, he is successfully using his entrepreneurial skills for his own benefit here, we are very pleased to note. When Roger and Margie Wu came to Boston from Shanghai, we asked versatile, generous Vladi Zlatev to help them find a modest used automobile. That step brought the Wus and the Zlatevi into a relationship that has flowered remarkably. As I write this, Margie is graduating momentarily with a masters degree in computer science from Tanya's department at Boston University. Tanya helped her get a job there to help cover the tuition. Through their friendship, the Wus entered the fringes of the Boston Bulgarian community, along with us. On an evening in the early 1990s, we invited Tanya and her mother, Dr. Vela Dimitrova, a retired ophthalmologist, to view a film about the forced evacuation, during WW II, of people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast of the U.S.A. to former Army camps inland. Astonished to note that Dr. Dimitrova was weeping, we got a firsthand insight into the remarkable saving of the entire 50,000 Bulgarian Jews within Bulgaria's pre-WW II borders from pressure by its Nazi ally to deport them to Treblinka. She explained that the film reminded her that, when a child, her mother took into their countryside home a Jewish family who they had to evacuate Sofia in one of Tsar Boris III's ploys to fend off that Nazi pressure. Dr. Dimitrova became our dear friend in her own right, and we stayed with her on a number of working visits to Sofia. Upon learning this unique story from her, we decided to record her recollections on videotape. That step led to 28 additional interviews in Bulgaria of a variety of people who had some direct connection with that unique event. We gave copies of most of the videotapes to the archives of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. In Bulgaria, we found people to interview either among our existing friends or with the help of Irina Ouzounova. Among those she found were Dr. Leon Mitrani, who, as a youth, was in a Jewish labor brigade to build roads and railroads, another ploy by Tsar Boris III to fend off the Nazis by claiming that Bulgaria needed Jewish labor, and found the experience unpleasant but tolerable and certainly less oppressive than the Nazi and Soviet type of forced labor. Dr. Mitrani retired as a distinguished psychobiologist, and writes articles on the political situation in Bulgaria and plays that are produced. This experience added Dr. Mitrani and his wife Penka to our roster of close, warm Bulgarian friends. They are loyal members of the Friends of the Freeds in Sofia. Impressed by the valiant parallel actions of the three Metropolitans of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church in vigorously condemning the possible deportation of the Jews both publicly and to Tsar Boris III directly, of Dimitar Peshev in securing a strong petition against that action signed by himself and 42 other members of the Parliament, and of members of various professional associations demonstrating against it, we went public in the U.S.A. about this notable but little known story. We wrote a number of articles about it and gave talks on it at a conference of the Bulgarian Studies Association and at a session of the program on The Jews in Modern Europe at Harvard University, at which a woman turned up who was saved as a child, with her parents, and praised the Bulgarians for their valorous behavior even though her father suffered substantial business losses because of the evacuation. Anne was awarded a second Fulbright in 1993. At the welcoming meeting for her group at the American Culture Center in Sofia, the introductory talk by Prof. Ognian Minchev, probably the most outstanding political analyst and commentator during the reforms, so impressed us that we introduced ourselves to him and asked to meet with him later. Becoming close friends, we have had the privilege to meet with him both in Bulgaria and the U.S.A. and to gain, by E-mail, his valuable insights on the reform efforts and political situation in Bulgaria, which we often share with others through Internet egroups. Prof. Minchev set up the outstanding Institute for Regional and International Studies in Sofia, which, among its other activities, is fostering transparency in an effort to fight corruption in Bulgaria. Through our networking with professors we met at Harvard University by attending public lectures there, we were able to arrange for Prof. Minchev to give a talk there during a visit to Boston. For our first trip to Turkey, Prof. Minchev introduced us to Prof. Gunay Ozdogan, who teaches international relations and nationalism at Marmara University in Istanbul. Finding common interests, we are fortunate to add her as a friend. When she visited Boston a few years ago, we got her an invitation to give a well-received talk at Harvard on the situation of the Kurds. As I write this, she is at Harvard on a sabbatical, and we have the opportunity to enjoy her company. Being aware of the five-decade control by the Ottoman Empire of the Bulgarian lands and knowing Gunay, we have expanded our focus from modern Bulgaria alone to include the history of the Ottoman Empire, especially as it relates to the Bulgarian lands, and the history and culture of Turkey. This seems to be a natural step from our concentration on Bulgaria, especially as Bulgaria plays a laudable very positive role in fostering amity in the Southern Balkans among Turkey, Greece, Macedonia, and itself. This salutary change from the longstanding enmities that prevailed in that area reflects Bulgaria's special ability to avoid the destructive ideological nationalism that infects so many countries in that area and elsewhere, which we explain to people whom we can interest in the subject. Networking can sometimes provide significant narcissistic satisfaction. For example, in October 1999, Bulgarian President Stoyanov named us Cavaliers of the Madara Horseman, First Degree, his country's highest recognition for civilian contributions to it. We had to find a large hall to accommodate our countless Bulgarian friends at our celebratory party in Sofia. We were especially honored that Prof. and Mrs. Sanders of Boston joined us. He started to teach at the American College now in Sofia and then in Samokov, in 1929 (!), and, among his many distinctions, authored the classic sociology book, The Balkan Village, for which the main street in Dragalevtsi, now a part of Sofia, is named for him despite the fact that he is still living. Also, newly arrived American Ambassador Richard Miles and his wife, Sharon, and other embassy officials joined us. In Sofia in October 2000, on our thirteenth visit, we asked for an opportunity to meet with Ambassador and Mrs. Miles, which they graciously granted. They were deeply interested in the various projects we have been able to carry out. When Michael Seidenstricker, head of the American Culture Center in Sofia, heard of our arrangement to have two Bulgarian women with masters degrees in clinical social work audit courses at the Smith doctoral program in the summer of 2001 with a generous tuition waiver from Smith, he graciously volunteered to fund their travel out of his budget. For many years, we have been sending our friends abroad copies of articles in The New York Times and The Boston Globe by E-mail. For example, we send Prof. Yoshiko Terao in Tokyo articles by my cousin Linda Greenhouse in The New Times on the U.S. Supreme Court for her study group on it. Also, we send Prof. Gunay Ozdogan articles about Turkey. And we send Prof. Yoshiko Ito in Sapporo, Japan articles on health care delivery to help her with a book she is writing. By joining the ARP network, we have been able to receive information on mental health care activities and interests of its members and to furnish information to them. Also, by learning through it of the activities of the Geneva Initiative in Psychiatry, Anne secured the opportunity to write an article on mental health care in Eastern Europe for its publication, Mental Health Reforms. A number of years ago in Boston, out of gratitude for having Fulbright Fellowships and wanting to encourage other alumni to continue their Fulbright experiences the way we have, we vitalized the moribund Massachusetts Chapter of the Fulbright Association, the alumni association of American Fulbrighters. We have been members of its Board of Directors ever since. A fellow board member, Bill Pjura, volunteered to create a Web site for the chapter, but could not carry through when he discontinued his business. We introduced him to Tanya Zlateva at the Computer Science Department at Boston University on the chance that she might have a student who might take on the project as a volunteer. Although that goal failed, by meeting Bill, Tanya invited him to become a teacher in her department, which was a new career for him and which he enjoys very much. We made three arrangements for American professionals to share their skills in Bulgaria in 2001. Mina Schwartz, who, with her husband Mort are friends of our son and daughter in law, was in Sofia while he was teaching business administration at Sofia University for a full academic year, volunteered, at our introduction, at the remarkable Center for Independent Living for disabled people established and run by devoted, inspired Kapka Panayotova, who is an innate social worker. We met Kapka in the early 1990s in Sofia, when, while she worked for the Ministry of Finance and was an independent translator, she was the interpreter for Anne's consultation to the Ministry of Social Care and lecturing to its staff. At that time, Roy laboriously edited her translation of the Polish tax laws into English (!), which she tackled because she received a doctorate in economics in Warsaw. And Anne arranged for Prof. Louis Levitt, who just retired from the Yeshiva University Social Work School, to give a series of lectures on social policy and theory in the fields of social services and mental health to teachers and students at the Social Work Department of the NBU and to consult at the Ministry of Social Care. His wife, Sara, a retired teacher, consulted on the education of very young children. I trust that these very diverse examples of the variety of accomplishments that are possible through networking are enough to validate our enthusiasm for the activity and qualifications to show how to practice it. I ask forgiveness of the many other people with whom we interacted with equal productivity and great satisfaction whose work I had to omit arbitrarily from the examples. I simply ran out of the time and space allotted me. Before trying to derive some principles from these disparate examples, reflect for a moment on this apparent jumble of often random interactions to note how they conjure up a metaphor of how a solid, useful structure can be built out of a pile of small stones, with appropriate cement to bind them together. In networking, the cement is sincere good will and a desire to help others by sharing knowledge and experiences. Now, it is time to draw some lessons or general principles from these diverse examples on how to get the most out of networking for yourself and others. While I try my hand at this exercise, you should reflect on what you learn from them yourself to see if you note some additional ones. I derive the following general principles for successful, productive networking, which are not necessarily in any logical sequence, mutually exclusive, or exhaustive: 1. Because countless extremely valuable productive interactions, or opportunities to create them, occur entirely fortuitously, expose yourself to as many of them as possible in which networking interactions might occur, by attending events, using Internet egroups, and expanding your contacts in person and on the Internet, and then act to take advantage of the interactions or contacts that arise. 2. To take advantage of present and potential networking opportunities, take full initiative to identify and reach out to people with whom you might want to network, even if you do not already know them. 3. Do not pass up any opportunity to interact with others, because you always can discontinue the interaction. 4. Develop techniques that enable you to make contact with people, such as ways to start and carry on conversations or other communications with strangers as well as with friends. In conversations, look for common interests to establish a bond. 5. Collect information you might find to be useful for interacting with people, either initially or on an ongoing basis and either as topics of conversation or as items that others might find of interest or even helpful in their activities 6. Try to learn the interests and goals of people with whom you come in contact, especially to find shared interests. 7. When in contact with people, think of their interests and goals and how you can help them advance them. 8. Take initiative to be in touch with people who are already in your network, or whom you might want to join it, when you believe that you have some information that might interest them. 9. Use your network contacts, in person and through the Internet, including both specific people and unidentified people through impersonal egroups, to get information and other types of help for yourself and others. 10. Introduce people in your network to each other, either in person or vicariously on the Internet, as appropriate for their interests and the like, to interweave your network. 11. Try to be as open and enthusiastic as appropriate to people in your network.

- 15:14:01