From: Margaret Rose Beernink-Badger

My Dear Friends!

I wish you all a grand time together and hope dearly that I will receive some news in return of this grand

 I married Dale Beernink in 1965, a phenomenal young doctor and musician and we had a daughter Hanna in 1967. Dale died in 1969 at 31 of leukemia and I raised our daughter alone. I did not remarry until 1997! My career was primarily teaching high school English and History. I left teaching in 1988 and resumed the study of Russian to see if I could start a new career in that area. I did so briefly as you will read below. I enjoy good health, the love of three families and 6 grandchildren (my husband Tony's and mine). I feel very fortunate although the going has not always been easy.

 After Tri-Partite, I continued my study of Russian in one way or another until about 1971 when I realized that I would never be able to support myself and my daughter teaching it. The schools in California dropped Russian from the curriculum not long after first introducing it! It was not until my daughter was 18 and off to college that I began to re-engage my foreign wanderlust: I learned of a teacher exchange program in the USSR run by the American Field Service and began brushing up my Russian. After a summer at the Norwich Summer Language School in 4th year Russian (Solzhenitsin's son was there too), I felt that maybe I could take on some time abroad again. On very short notice in the fall of 1986, I went to Irkutsk, Siberia to teach teachers of English at a Foreign Language Institute for three months. After a week of orientation in Moscow, I took the Trans Siberian RR to Irkutsk. During that week in Moscow, I was able to contact Sasha Chicherov and his wife Regina. He remembered instantly who I was and that friendship flourished ..through my last Russian sojourn, which ended in 1991.

How to summarize Irkutsk? They all thought I was a spy, but tried to be nice to me at the same time. I made some good friends whose lives have intertwined with mine many times ever since. I still help support the daughter of a friend from there who died of a brain tumor.  In subsequent years,  I worked for the Citizen Exchange Council in New York leading groups of high school students to Russia and the Baltics. Great fun and very exhausting.  I organized a tour of Art and Architecture for adults, also

 In 1989, after a year of language work at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California, I accepted a job as Resident Director for the American Collegiate Consortium for a period of one year. ACC had a program for college students from the USSR and the USA to spend one full year in the host country's universities. It was run out of Middlebury College with funding from USIA. I lived in Moscow from August 1989 to June 1990, departing just before Gorbachev went down. New Year's Eve 1990, Sasha Chicherov and I did the town (Regina was away) visiting an amazing assortment of Party honchos each of whom in his own way made me very nervous.

 It was an extremely challenging year. I had 72 students I was responsible for in 8 different cities. I traveled to all of them, some several times from my base apartment in Moscow. It took me 3 months to just GET the apartment which had been promised on arrival. That was the year of the Gulf War, which put particular stresses on American students living in dorms with Arab students. By April, I began to believe we would all survive and started to enjoy myself especially by going to the ballet with my Soviet friends and cruising on the Volga for several days (about $1.00 a day Soviet style). I would describe the year as great and terrible at the same time. Certainly, it was not a protected experience like TriPartite was. It was endless head-ons with Soviet ways and means. I'd have to say that year took the romance out the love affair I had had with Russia for so many years.

Somewhat regretfully, I have not yet returned to see non-Soviet Russia. It was time to redirect my life to California and my future here. Going back and forth, it was hard to be fully in either place. Now 11 years have passed, I have remarried, moved and started a new life. I have all but forgotten my Russian again, but I know it is hidden there somewhere in my head when I next need or want it! An impressive number of my Russian acquaintances have left Russia and now live in Australia, Israel or the USA and remain part of my life through correspondence.

Off the top of my head, I would like briefly to try to respond to Hal's request for favorite memories of TriPartite:

•  First, there were the Caucasus Mountains, those glacial blue rivers and high mountain meadows we walked in near the ski lifts on Mt. Elbrus.
•  Next, I remember our isolation within the Kabardian/Balkarian language minority so that if we did speak a few words of Russian we were sure not to be able to use it outside our carefully chosen companions at the camp!
• Unquestionably, the most vivid memory is the dinner we had at the collective farm, Verkhnaya Balkariya. This was one of the many times Roger led the way with his excellent Russian, but this time he had to pay his dues for being the "leader" by swallowing the eye of a lamb, whole, followed by a vodka chaser!
• At the construction site, I remember our brick throwing lines and certain other efficiency improvements that the Americans promoted.
• At the discussions, I recall how seriously I. took all the debates and how I found them interesting. The quality and the diversity of background among the Soviet representatives was impressive.
• I particularly remember a conversation I had with Sasha out on the grass after a "formal" meeting. He said "if the North in the Civil War had practiced selective assassination of Southern leaders, the whole war could have been avoided." I had never heard anything tike that in my American History classes at Vassar! I was shocked. It led to a discussion of non-violence, which later influenced my decision, in 1964, to join the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Mississippi to register blacks to vote. I remember saying to myself "If I argued that hard with Sasha about the importance of non-violence, I better put it into practice." My work in Mississippi for civil rights was another memorable chapter in my life and has always been linked in my mind to the "values" and "action" discussions we had at Tri-Partite.
• Let's not forget the visit to the winery outside of Tblisi! Although it did not reach the level of drunkenness I had experienced in Samarkand on a collective farm in 1961, it came close. That Georgian wine was good!