—2— President’s Message Georgia: Visitors cautioned to avoid Ossetia continued from page 1 Should the RAPS Web site add more links to a greater variety of Web sites? That question was raised at the December RAPS board meeting. Before deciding on a policy on this issue, I realized I needed to look more carefully at the RAPS Web site. You, too, can check it out at www.raps.pdx.edu. Here is what I found. Did you look at the Web site to find out if the Holiday Dinner, scheduled for December 17, was still on? As soon as the decision was made to cancel it due to inclement weather, a notice appeared on the Web site. Once the board makes a decision to reschedule an event, you will find the announcement under Calendar of Events. Would you like to look up something in an old issue of the newsletter? You will find issues dating back to 2000 on the Web site. Would you like to look at photos from RAPS events? Look at the array of photos on the Photo Gallery link. I found myself in several of Larry Sawyer’s photos from the RAPS hikes, and you can be there, too, if you join one of the hikes. Looking at the photos from the 2007 Holiday Dinner, I especially enjoyed one of my long-time colleagues in the Applied Linguistics Department and current RAPS board member, Jan DeCarrico, raising her wine glass in a toast! There is also a Membership link. If you received a free one-year membership upon retirement in 2006, you can go to that link, fill out a form, and renew your membership. And, if you expect to live another 20 years, or don’t like to keep getting reminders, you will save money by signing up for a lifetime membership. Finally, I looked at the Other Links section of the Web site. There I found links to other PSU sites of particular interest to retirees, including one to the Senior Adult Learning Center. One of the links to government Web sites is for Senior Health Insurance Benefits Association (SHIBA), which provides free counseling on Medicare, prescription drug coverage, and long-term care insurance. At our January board meeting we will consider a policy about links to individual Web sites of PSU faculty. Contact me if you have questions or comments about that. —Marge Terdal because they hadn’t been able to pay their electrical bill for three years. While considering our tourist travel, we were cautioned to avoid the Ossetia region because it was considered “lawless.” In central T’bilisi, the flagship Soviet-era Hotel Iveria, a 20-story, completely balconied structure, was now a vertical refugee camp housing Georgians who had fled South Ossetia in the ’90s. Later we met a vacationing German motorcyclist. While in the South Ossetia foothills, he was robbed by highway bandits brandishing AK-47s who took everything except his cycle and the clothes he was wearing. We visited Gori on our way to a three-day adventure into the southern mountains. Given the geography and economy of Georgia, whoever controls the central city of Gori (20 miles from South Ossetia) sits astride the Republic’s river, only railroad and highway, and the Caspian Sea-Black Sea oil pipeline, adjacent to the newer Caspian Sea-Mediterranean Sea oil pipeline. Gori’s current fame is derived from it being Stalin’s birthplace and its grandiose Stalin Museum. The museum preserves the two-room house of his childhood and his personal World War II railway carriage. The only other visitors that day were a uniformed Russian officer and his family and our American family that included a veteran who had worked for a Cold War spy agency. In Stalin’s recreated office, one of the matronly museum personnel deposited the grandchildren into his chair—I couldn’t help but muse about two nice Jewish boys sitting in Stalin’s chair. Politically, in 2003, Georgia was in a great struggle with the post-Soviet breakup as it sought its own identity, global role, and sustainable economic and political institutions (aided by western NGOs). Internally, non-Georgian ethnic groups—Ossetians, Abkhazians—sought recognition. Georgia sought to throw off two centuries of Russian domination, both Czarist and communist; her elections were monitored and challenged. But in November 2003, the “Rose Revolution”—a public outpouring of street support for democracy—brought a change of president when Eduard Shevardnadze, Georgian president from 1995 to 2003 (and USSR minister of foreign affairs, under Mikhail Gorbachev, from 1985 to 1990) stepped aside. Shevardnadze later blamed NGOs, and specifically NDI, for his downfall.
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