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BRIDGES UNDER CONSTRUCTION October was a popular month for conferences. Every weekend brought a different subset of people together. Of these conferences, one should have received the award for the Most Potential Unrealized. The annual “Woman in Two Worlds” gathering in Piscataway con sisted of a very impressive group of women and men. From all parts of the US and from Ukraine people came together, essentially to talk about bridges. But com pared to the numbers of bridges that have been extended by the American community to the Soviet Union, the number of specifically Ukrainian-to-Ukraine bridges is small. And given the participants and the program of the “Woman in Two Worlds” conference, the outcome and the impact of this conference was slight. It could have been much more. It had the potential of being one of the most important of the October conferences. “Bridges” became a popular term among diplomacy advocates when they first began extending bridges between Americans and “Russians or Soviets, or who- Таня Б. Хомяк. Tanja В. C hom iak Young Womens Panel. From left: T. Chom iak, N. Ratych, O. Polansky, Ch. Bokalo. ever.” The bridges then, in the early- and mid-1980s, were letters through pen pal organizations, travel ex changes among citizens and even joint projects in the form of conferences in northern California. Today, these bridges have become commonplace. A bridge in the 1990s involves joint US and Soviet organizations shar ing information daily with the help of fascimile machines and electronic mail. It entails Soviet specialists working in American organizations for several months and Amer icans traveling to the Soviet Union to do the same. Children of elementary school age are making trips over to perform in plays, to study, or to attend camps. In Piscataway, we were bridging gaps between Ukrainian-American women and women in Ukraine, between the US and Ukraine, between Urkainian women and American women. The combinations seemed limit less. The people who could discuss these bridges were well-connected in a variety of fields. It was our Ukrain ian background that brought us together, not our pro fession, so the possibilities for developing interesting projects were before us. I was a member of the Young Women’s Panel, where my colleagues and I spoke of our travels to Ukrainian communities in Brazil, to Ukraine, and of Ukrainian community activism in the US. I spoke of my involvement with the Institute for Soviet-American Rela tions (ISAR), which since 1983 has been advocating contacts between Americans and Soviets, and about how I bridge the Ukrainian-American gap every day. When I came to ISAR a year ago, I wondered how the staff there would react to my relentless correcting of misuses of the word “Russia”. Soon, though, ISAR became sensitized. The past few issues of the journal we publish have contained sections or articles dealing with the republics of the Soviet Union and with the activities of the nationality groups in the US. While ISAR and other citizen diplomacy organiza tions were learning about the national minorities, I was learning about the possiblities in citizen diplomacy. Americans with no prior experience or background in the Soviet Union have set up successful joint projects in that country. Foundations have happily supported many 20 ’’НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ”, ЛЮТИЙ 1991 Видання C оюзу Українок A мерики - перевидано в електронному форматі в 2012 році . A рхів C У A - Ню Йорк , Н . Й . C Ш A.
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