NAARA-1

This is Naara-1 who was mentioned in the previous post. She is the President of GI here in Mongolia.   She and I opened up the office this AM.  Her oldest grandchild is 15 and she speaks good English and even better Russian (I am told this).  She told me that for an ambitious woman in her early days someone who wants to do well needed to be educated in Moscow as she was.  She like all others here are truly fighting for free speech and free press every day and I am sure that their compensation is insubstantial by our standards.  She tells me that she wishes she was a young girl again because their democracy only came about because the Soviets tore down that damn Berlin wall in 19989/90.  She seems to be making up for lost time however.  English was discouraged as a language but once the wall came down there was a rush to do all things democratic.  I had a political science professor at I.U. that taught a course in geopolitics, i.e., that your countries ability to defend itself against other countries and shape its own destiny is primarily dependent upon your world location.  The U.S. is lucky to be separated by large bodies of water but his country was Chzechlslovakia (spelling?).  I look at Mongolia which is sandwiched between Russia and China and see a country that wants to control its destiny independent of those two giants and I hope it works out for them.  This is an evolving matter.