CUBA - EARLY JOURNALS Sept 1993; June 1994; March 1999 Part 1

My first venture to Cuba took place in September of 1993, when I traveled to Havana and then on to the cities like Matanzas and Pinar del Río. The official invitation had come as a result of many trips to Washington, D.C., to meet with “Ambassador” Miguel Nunez. He really wasn’t an ambassador, because there is no formal relationship between Cuba and the USA. The US had imposed a very strict embargo around Cuba, and all my dealings with the Cubans had to be conducted at the Swiss embassy, located at 2630 16th Street, NW, in Washington, D.C. The Swiss had established a “Cuban Interests Section” and allowed Cuban officials to use a part of their gorgeous embassy to conduct business.

Miguel Nunez became a very good friend of mine, and at one point, I was even able to talk the State Department into allowing him to travel to Colorado and stay with Anna Marie and me at our home in Evergreen. I’ll never forget how captivated Miguel was with Colorado when I drove him to a spot near Evergreen to view a herd of live, roaming buffalo. He had always wanted to see a bison and had read of the wild adventures of Buffalo Bill whose gravesite overlooks the eastern plains of Colorado and the city of Denver from Lookout Mountain near our home.

My cordial relationship with the “Cuban Interests Section” at the Swiss Embassy in Washington DC had paid great dividends. I was eventually allowed permission to travel directly from Miami to Havana.

As you might imagine, there was no such thing as regularly scheduled flights from US to Cuba in the early 1990s. So, if you were intent on arriving in Cuba and didn’t want to swim the distance, the other option was to make arrangements with a risky and unreliable charter outfit using ad hoc pieces of international flying equipment and adventurous crews. The flights would always be packed full with the strangest looking sights imaginable. Most of the folks traveling would be immediate family members of Cuban residents. Each of those passengers would be restricted to one piece of luggage. But how do you take to Cuba all the things you want to take to Cuba in one small piece of luggage? You wear it!

The passengers would board wearing several suits of clothes or dresses in layers. They would show up with four or five hats stacked on their heads, one on top of the other. Every set of garments had at least a thousand pockets stuffed with every item conceivable.

The ticketing and boarding process was absolutely crazy. Hopeful passengers were instructed to arrive at least four or five hours before suggested departure time. We were required to sign numerous forms and agreements and eventually we would make our way to the line where “cash only” payment in US dollars would be rendered in exchange for a hand-written ticket and boarding pass.

The Embargo that had been imposed on Cuba by the United States was very restrictive and had mostly banned all commerce and economic transactions between the two countries. The issuing of Visas, for the most part, had been suspended. Mexico and Canada had continued relationships with Castro’s Cuba and international relationships still existed between those countries and Cuba.

I smile to myself when I recall my first flight from US to Cuba. When the plane dropped down low enough for the landing procedure, I could see the green countryside surrounding Havana. Everything was so grown over and run down! The runway landing lights were all wired on either side of the runway with extension cord wires running on top of the runway. When the planes came across the runway, they had to run right over the top of the heavy black extension cords. Cords exposed to the sun, rain, and plane wheels had to be a bad mode of operation. All along the runway to the terminal there were old US and Russian planes torn apart and inoperable. Somehow, I wasn’t really surprised when I spotted two air taxi planes that were old WWI surplus bi-planes.

My various trips to Havana had been very successful. Fortunate for me, I had always been able to find a way to get boxes of medical goods approved to take with me. Sometimes that necessitated working through a family named Issacs who lived in Canada and loved Project C.U.R.E. At any rate, the Good Lord had always made a way for me to take lots of medical supplies with me to distribute as gifts in places like the Calixto García hospital in downtown Havana.

The policy of Cuba was to retain all medical donations at the port of entry until the next day so they would have a chance to check for expiration dates and undesirable goods shipped in. The excuse they used was that since they were responsible for all illnesses of the people of Cuba, they would be responsible to treat any people who would get sick as a result of restricted drugs.

I had a feeling that the true motive was once they got their hands on the medical goods, they put them in their own warehouse, and then the government distributed them, rather than the donor having any knowledge of or connection with the recipient of the gift. That way, the recipient would think that the government was the entity responsible for the gift, thereby keeping the ill recipient looking to the all-giving government for answers. It was a means of control.

I protested and said that we had to have the goods returned to us, since they were designated gifts, and we were in Cuba to take pictures of the gifts as they were being donated to the Cuban recipients. They agreed that as soon as they checked the medical supplies they would, in this case, be turned back over to us the next day. Time would tell. But I had determined that if they “appropriated” the goods, then Project C.U.R.E. would not send more.

On those trips, I was introduced to many government officials and health-ministry leaders, and even the president of Cuba’s chamber of commerce, Carlos Martinez Salsamendi. You can only imagine the interesting clandestine talks I was able to have with them regarding their severe shortages of everything and the possibilities of eventually establishing a free-market system once again on their island nation.

On my trips I began realizing the true plight of Cuba’s health situation. They simply needed everything! But Project C.U.R.E. could never begin to supply that need by just bringing a few boxes of medical things along on the trips. We needed to be sending ocean-going cargo containers from our Project C.U.R.E. warehouses. But that would require shipping licenses. Those licenses were not available because of the strict Embargo on Cuba that had been imposed.

Some folks have referred to Project C.U.R.E. as a “miracle organization”. What I can attest to is that we have certainly been a part of a large number of “divinely appointed happenings”. Being able to acquire a valid shipping license so that we could ship medical goods directly into “Embargo Restricted Cuba” from USA certainly qualifies as such a divine happening!

The Project C.U.R.E.–Cuban relationship had matured to a point where I began petitioning the US Commerce Department and the State Department to grant me a license to export medical goods directly from the US to Cuba. As far as I know, I was the first, or one of the first, to ever receive such a license. That greatly impressed the Cubans. From that time on, Dr. Enrique Comendeiro Hernandez, the minister of health, began addressing all letters and fax messages to me as “the Distinguished Dr. Jackson.” I’ve enjoyed a fun and very special relationship with the Cubans.

I would like to share a copy or that unique license #D216884, validated March 1, 1995, with you here:

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RELATIONAL TRUST

In 2008, I had the unusual opportunity to participate in an international commission at the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre in Accra, Ghana. USNORTHCOM, NORAD, and Homeland Security had nominated me, and the US Department of Defense (DOD) had specially selected me for this unique privilege. The official invitation read, “Your selection is reflective of your dedication to global humanitarian programs and your specific expertise, as recognized by your peers internationally.”

I was to represent the United States, in conjunction with other international organizations, on a select, five-member international panel commissioned to meet for two weeks at the training center in Ghana. The purpose of the meeting was for the panel to begin establishing protocol and structures to assist world nations and African partners in achieving a more stable environment through security cooperation, information sharing, and information management.

Our venue at the center was set up with two moderators at the front, and the five panel members seated at individual desks forming a semicircle facing the moderators. At desks behind the panel members were about twenty advisors who served as subject-matter experts from around Africa and the world at large. Behind the advisors were many observers who had been invited to attend the meetings.

Over the next two weeks, our five-member panel was tasked with developing a comprehensive model that would encompass multiple stages of crisis—precrisis; event; crisis declaration; initial response; and immediate, mid-term, and long-term response. The seven forms of capital were to be addressed for each stage—human, social, natural, built, political, cultural, and financial—including their influences on the crisis situation.

Having worked with various groups before, I was fully expecting the normal process that takes place with every group as it comes together and works toward some kind of productivity:

• Groping—“Why are we here . . . really?”

• Griping—“Where’s my coffee? The computer on my desk isn’t working.”

• Grasping—“I’m beginning to understand the expectations . . . This is going to be good!”

• Grouping—“I’m sensing a melding, bonding, and solidifying among the group.”

• Group action—“This is what we’re going to do.”

But this situation took me a little by surprise. Before we had much of a chance to move forward and accomplish anything, we hit a road bump—trust.

It was established that the model we were to develop would place significant importance on information sharing (IS) and information management (IM) regarding cultural conflicts as well as pandemic disease outbreaks, epidemics, and health crises. An expectation was expressed that it was more important to share information than it was to protect it. That’s when the gloves came off. A number of the advisors, and even the observers, from the African nations weighed in on the discussion, citing example after example where they had been deprived of the power of information in the past. A few even harkened back to colonial history, where “the colonial institutions had no interest or desire in fostering trust among the native populations, and misinformation was a frequent weapon used to keep the population in check.”

Another huge problem regarding trust dealt with the issue of corruption in certain areas throughout Africa. The participants felt that high levels of corruption reduced the types and amounts of information that could be shared, and those conflicts often created crises themselves between the private and public sectors.

The moderators did a fine job recognizing and discussing the lack of trust and getting us back on track. But throughout the two weeks, this issue kept sneaking its way back into the panel’s discussions. In the months following the commission meetings, I mulled over the concept of trust. Allow me to share with you some of my musings on the subject . . .

Steven Covey said that “trust is the glue of life. It’s the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It’s the foundational principle that holds all relationships . . . together.” And even Abraham Lincoln said, “If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem.”

According to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, trust refers to “an assured reliance on the character, [integrity], ability, strength, or truth of someone or something.” It’s characterized by a confidence in the credence of a person or situation and an assurance that such confidence is well placed. There also seems to be an element of risk or vulnerability that goes with trusting, because the result is out of our control. Whenever we risk trusting, it’s possible we could be wrong. In a sense, we pay the highest tribute to a person when we trust him or her to do what is right. In fact, it may be an even higher compliment to be trusted than loved.

Trusting is difficult enough, but knowing whom to trust seems even harder. The sad thing is that trust takes years to build and seconds to shatter. Ernest Hemingway tried to keep it pretty simple by concluding, “The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”

I can’t imagine that love could even exist at all without the element of trust. I agree that we run the risk of being deceived if we trust too much. But I believe we’ll probably live in torment if we don’t trust enough.

Rick Warren, in his book The Purpose-Driven Life, holds out hope that a break in trust can be repaired: “Forgiveness must be immediate, whether or not a person asks for it. Trust must be rebuilt over time. Trust requires a track record.” 

It sounds to me like trusting in the restoration and healing of a broken trust would take another occurrence of trust itself! Maybe it just works that way.

The commission panel, advisors, and observers finished the assignment in Accra, Ghana, and the results were presented to the United Nations, the US Pentagon, the World Health Organization (WHO), and other involved groups. During those two weeks, I learned a lot about crisis management, possible pandemic outbreaks and epidemics, and global information management. But I also discovered a treasure trove of insights regarding trust.

Perhaps we should have just spent our time on the subject of trust management (TM)!

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POSTPONED DEBT

As a cultural economist, I’m very curious about the phenomenon of postponed debt that I observe as I travel around the world. Cultural economics tries to deal with both sides of one coin: How do people affect the economics of a culture? And how do the economics of a culture affect the people? The issue of postponed debt has everything to do with economics and everything to do with culture. And it also has everything to do with character!

In many of the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) where I travel, if more money is needed to meet economic demands and pay the country’s bills, a very simple method is used. The dictator simply prints more currency. That method has an immediate impact on the value of the existing currency. With the same amount of goods in the market but additional money in the system that was printed and spent, the prices for those remaining goods in the system go up. No one has to vote or agree for the prices to go up; they just do. For example, if there were ten cherry pies and ten dollars in the system, each cherry pie would cost one dollar. But if another ten dollars were to be created and injected into the system, you would have twenty dollars chasing the ten cherry pies, and you would end up paying two dollars to purchase your desired pie. The pie wasn’t really worth more, but the money was worth less.

In the United States, our method is a bit different. When Congress overspends, the US Treasury is overdrawn. The Treasury then creates and issues treasury bills (T-bills) and bonds and sells them at auction (IOUs) on the assumption that some individual, institution, or foreign entity would rather have an interest-paying bond than a cherry pie. For the government to pay off the T-bills and bonds, it’s necessary to raise taxes on US citizens, sell off national assets (e.g., oil reserves, coal reserves, harbor and port rights, national forests, military armaments, air space, etc.), or allow the Federal Open Market Committee of the Federal Reserve System to start calling in the IOUs and paying them off. What method would they use to pay off those T-bills and bonds? You guessed it . . . more newly created money!

A bond dealer would receive the T-bills or bonds and make the appropriate payment to the holder. The Federal Reserve Bank would receive the T-bill or bond and issue a check to the bond dealer, who, in turn, would deposit that check into his bank account. The check, when deposited, would be credited by the Federal Reserve Bank to that bank’s required fractional reserves, and that bank would then be entitled to make loans against that new reserve, or exchange it for cash. Why did the Federal Reserve Bank have the right to issue the check? Because it was backed up by the US Treasury IOU that it just purchased!

In essence, what happens in the transaction is that the federal debt, a liability, is transformed into an asset by the US Treasury signing a note, and the note becoming an asset of the Federal Reserve Bank. In other words, the government debt has been miraculously turned into spendable money. That is called monetizing the federal deficit. It gives the illusion and false assurance that the government has a never-ending source of money and store of wealth.

Those T-bills and bonds are issued with the express intention of postponing repayment. Some may be designed not to be paid back for up to thirty years. That postponed repayment defers the immediate impact on the monetary system. And when the debt instruments are paid back, they are nearly always paid back with money from more postponed debt generated by selling more T-bills and bonds. The ultimate effect, however, is exactly the same as if the government simply satisfied its debt with newly printed currency fresh from the presses rather than issuing T-bills and bonds.

The combination of postponed debt and subsequent inflation is the ultimate subtle taxation. No one escapes the effects of inflation. When inflation is employed to settle overspending, the government avoids being blamed for a congressionally approved increase in taxes while reaping the benefits of an indirect inflationary tax increase. Those decisions come from the people who affect the economics of our culture. The activity ends up being a form of the old Ponzi scheme, where, hopefully, the early investor is repaid by the investment of a later investor. But I’ve never heard of any country in history whose traditional economic system could tolerate monetizing trillions of dollars into its system. Historically, a more likely result would include bankruptcy and civil conflict.

So what’s the psychological problem with postponing debt? How do the economics of a culture affect the individual people?

William Shakespeare instructed, “Defer no time, delays have dangerous ends.” And I might add that postponement is perhaps the deadliest form of denial, because the longer we wait, the more the sharp edge of urgency wears off. Our minds actually start telling us that the responsibility to keep a promise isn’t that important anyway. Something that can be done at any time will probably be done at no time. Postponement and ignoring accountability can become cultural suicide on the installment plan. Many of the leaders of foreign countries I visit really believe that the loans the United States has made to them should now just be forgiven and forgotten. They figured that they would repay “someday,” and then they discovered that “someday” isn’t a day of the week.

I’m sensing that the people of our culture have carefully observed our government’s loose attitudes toward the integrity and accountability required for handling debt. The assumption seems to be that it makes no difference whether we purchase homes we can’t afford or lease cars that have a residual balance at the end of the contract. We simply accumulate more without worrying about the consequences. When one credit card is maxed out, just go and get two more. Stack up student loans, depending on political leaders to simply forgive the ballooned amounts before the next election. Make personal commitments and relational promises with no intention of keeping them. I think we have some serious problems resulting from a systematic breakdown of integrity and accountability.

Albert Einstein said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” And a culture can’t rationalize away what it has behaved itself into. “The heart has its reasons which reason does not know,” wrote Blaise Pascal. We can be assured that where there is an intellectual disconnect from personal integrity, reason, and intellect will try to synthesize a substitute connection to justify the current state of affairs.

I think that when it comes to integrity, in order to change the culture, there has to be a change of heart. The economic practices of a culture will definitely affect the people. And the morals and integrity of the people will ultimately affect the economics of a culture.

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WIND IN YOUR SAILS

Dr. Vike Thonghu and his wife, Puii, invited me to tour the market in Kohima, Nagaland, one day around lunchtime. I think if I could just stroll through the Kohima market at about noon each day of my life, I would be able to save lots of money otherwise spent for lunches. Puii reminded me that the people of Nagaland were historically regarded as great hunters. That fact was underscored immediately as I spotted a variety of monkeys offered there for butchering and cooking. Just a few yards away were squirrels hanging by their hind legs, and below them were ordinary small birds for the choosing.

On the market table to my left were deer quartered but with the hair and hides still on. Then I saw what I didn’t necessarily want to see: short-haired, tan dogs split open from their nostrils to their tails, cleaned and ready for sale. But the kiosk getting the most attention was where two older women were working on a very large black bear behind their sales table. They had just severed the massive forearm from the rest of the huge body and were kneeling on the ground skinning out the bear’s body with careful precision so as to perfectly preserve the hide, which would be sold separately.

Having spent a considerable amount of time in Asia, I realized what a prized possession the women had brought to market. Bear meat was valuable and, except for being a bit greasy, was similar to pork. But the value of the bear was really in the bones and organs, as well as the paws, claws, and skull. The Asians respect the medicinal value of spare bear parts, much as they desire the horns of the deer family.

Dr. Thongu and his dignified, gracious wife, Puii, had invited me to stay in their lovely home in Kohima while I was in Nagaland, one of the seven sister states of northeast India. Snuggled up against old Burma (present-day Myanmar) on the lower slopes of rugged, towering mountains, Nagaland, along with Mizoram and Manipur, is separated from the main body of India by Bangladesh to the west. Nagaland is a place of spectacular beauty and mystique.

At dinner the previous night, an intriguing discussion had precipitated the invitation to the market so that I could view the diversity of items offered there. The exotic dinner entrées had included pig and goat (I think) for meat dishes and lovely presentations of squash, rice, potatoes, and vegetables. But there was one side dish that in the ambiance of lantern light, I presumed was ivory-colored pasta mixed with young bamboo sprouts.

“Puii,” I inquired, “please tell me about this delicious pasta dish. I can’t seem to identify the unusual taste.”

Dr. Thongu answered, “You are here in Kohima at exactly the right time, Dr. Jackson. Only once a year do we have this opportunity, and it’s very expensive. We honor you as our guest, for this is the most desired dish of our culture. This is black wasp larva in varying stages of development.”

With a closer look, I could see that indeed the whole bowl was full of nice, big, plump worms nesting in the tender bamboo sprouts.

For the remainder of that memorable evening, I could hear this admonition ringing in my ears: “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

I wasn’t the only person around that table who was exploring, dreaming, and discovering. I found the doctor and his wife to be two of the most dedicated and creative people I had ever met. Mother Teresa was thought to have said, “If you can’t do great things, do small things with great love. If you can’t do them with great love do them with little love. If you can’t do them with little love, do them anyway.”

Dr. Vike Thongu and Puii were doing great things . . . with great love!

Dr. Thongu’s hospital was located on a steep, narrow street in the heart of the busy city of Kohima. Painted across the front of the building were the following signs: CT Scan Service, Ultrasound Machine Diagnosis, Pharmacy, and Endoscope Surgery. Puii and Dr. Thongu were running the most technologically advanced hospital in the whole northeast section of India. Their story of insight, discipline, hard work, and entrepreneurial risk taking was unparalleled. Dr. Thongu was a gifted surgeon who performed every kind of surgery imaginable, from orthopedics to skin grafting to delicate brain surgery.

The couple had begun with only a dream and a small clinic and pharmacy. They set aside 10 percent of all their pharmaceutical products for charity and performed at least 10 percent of all medical procedures free of charge for those who couldn’t pay. They also saved another 10 percent and purchased a piece of property so they could build a forty-bed hospital that would operate on a cash basis. Their discipline and hard work paid off handsomely.

They knew that if they could offer technologically advanced medical services, they could capture the medical market. They wouldn’t even take needed medicine for their own children out of the pharmacy unless they paid full price. They had no money to buy beds or other furniture for the hospital, so they constructed their own beds and sewed their own mattresses and sheets. When the hospital opened, they needed divider partitions between the beds, so Puii took the drapes out of their own house and sewed them into usable panels.

Soon they outgrew their hospital, and with discipline and the money they had saved, they were able to purchase the adjacent property to build another forty-bed facility. To help pay for the new facility, they began to rent out rooms in their own house.

As an economist and businessman, I was in awe of the entrepreneurial example of this wonderfully dedicated Christian couple. Their eyes sparkled as they unfolded the story to me. They embodied the kind of people that iconic Apple commercial in the 1990s was talking about: “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

Dr. Thongu and Puii had never acquired MBA degrees from Harvard or Yale, but they were outperforming classic business planners by leaps and bounds and making sure all the time that their charity work was never cut short. They told me that Project C.U.R.E. was the first organization from the outside to ever come and help them. I left with unbounded admiration and respect for the two of them. Their hard work, discipline, frugality, and absolute confidence and obedience certainly must make God smile everyday!

So “throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

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SERBIA and YUGOSLAVIA July 16-24, 2000 (Part 8) A Crazy Lady and a Hurting World

(Note to the Reader: This is the last Journal segment of the July, 2000, trip to Serbia. I must tell you how very proud I am of the staff and volunteers of Project C.U.R.E. For the last nineteen years we have not forgotten or neglected the wonderful people of the old Yugoslavia. Once we go into a country and establish a relationship, we do not just send an initial ocean-going shipping container to that country and then abandon them. To date, we have donated millions of dollars worth of medical goods. In just the past few weeks Project C.U.R.E. has continued to ship the most needed medical supplies into the country through our friends, HRH, the Crown Prince and Princes of Serbia. I am so grateful for this organization called Project C.U.R.E.)
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Belgrade, Serbia: July 22-24, 2000: Jim Peters intends to fully utilize my time in Belgrade. We even scheduled another three hospitals for Needs Assessment Studies. Our first appointment today was at 9:00 a.m. at the children’s disability hospital, out away from the city center.

The hospital sits directly adjacent to the Yugoslavian military barracks. NATO had targeted the military facility, but during the bombing, the rockets and bombs splashed over onto the hospital complex, totally destroying several of the main buildings and severely damaging the rest of the medical complex. The collateral damage included not only the buildings but also many of the disabled children and hospital staff members, who were killed in the air strikes. It really is a profound tragedy.

As we drove up to the facility, the hospital director and one of his aides met us. The director is an older gentleman and was very cordial and appreciative that we came to see his hospital. He immediately furnished us with videotapes of the destruction and carnage from the bombing and the steps toward reconstruction that the hospital is taking. He said that when he asked why the hospital was a military target, NATO authorities told him that it was foolish for them to build their hospital so close to the military project. “But,” he protested, “the children’s disability hospital has been here since 1861.”

As we approached an administration building that has been almost completely renovated with funds from the government of Denmark, we met a middle-aged, bleach-blonde woman who was involved in fund-raising for the hospital reconstruction. She is either a lawyer or an economist, but she isn’t a medical doctor. She kind of took over the meeting and led us into the conference room of the rebuilt administration offices.

Once we were seated, the blonde bombshell turned into a human buzz saw. Her eyes were wild, her questions were erratic, and her mouth was going eighty miles an hour, even though I couldn’t understand a word she was saying. Jim attempted to get a word in edgewise, but it was like trying to thread the needle on a sewing machine that was running at top speed. The very fact that Jim tried to say something only made her actions more intense. Alexander tried to jump into the conversation as well, but his efforts met with the same response.

When the woman left the room briefly to pick up some solicitation brochures from a desk, Jim had just a minute to explain what was taking place. The woman was incoherently anti-American. How could the Americans destroy a country, bomb and burn a city, and demolish a civilian hospital, killing innocent children? Who gave them the right to enter a sovereign country and start killing and destroying property without even declaring war on the country? And how dare an American actually come to her country under the pretense of wanting to help? She was very, very angry—dangerously so!

When I heard what was going on, I told Jim and Alexander that we weren’t there to sell anything, and I advised leaving quickly and quietly. The woman was out of control.

The intensity only increased when the woman reentered the conference room and shoved some brochures across the table at Alexander and me. At that point Jim tried once more to explain why we were there. But the woman’s jabbering only got faster and louder. I could see Jim’s neck turning red, and the color working its way up into his face. He was getting angry.

At that point Alexander stood up and pushed back his chair. I put my things back into my attaché case, stood, and reached across the table to retrieve the Project C.U.R.E. business card I had given to the woman earlier. I walked to the conference-room door, opened it, and walked out into the hallway. The hospital director was sitting there in shock. He had looked forward to our visit and had prepared a list of needs for us, including a new X-ray machine and medical supplies.

I reached the outside door of the building but discovered that the woman had locked it. She had to get on her mobile phone to call someone close by to unlock it from the outside. In those minutes, her anger was so intense that I believe she would have shot us if she’d had access to a gun.

The week had already been emotionally taxing for me from viewing all the destruction and loss of life. But the episode with the anti-American woman left me exhausted and solemn. She had a right to be angry, and our presence in Belgrade had become the flash point for her anger. On our way out of the building, we talked with the doctor as we walked. I tried to assure him that we held nothing against him because of the unpleasant meeting. It was my advice that we let things cool off for a bit. Then, in the future, Jim can work with him on his specific requests for help.

The whole incident was a wake-up call and a reality check for me. The Yugoslavians we met had overwhelmingly accepted and appreciated us. They were fascinated with my presence in Belgrade but were warm and responsive. However, I was reminded that you don’t dare get complacent or sloppy in security measures. I’m in a life-threatening position every time I enter a hostile environment like Iraq, Pakistan, northern India, Rwanda, North Korea, or Cuba. In reality, there’s a lot of global anti-American sentiment. No longer are we the “darlings” of the world, and our elitist and arrogant national policies in recent years have turned many people around the world against us.

Our next appointment was across town at the university hospital for cardiovascular diseases. We had another set of excellent meetings with Dr. Miodrag Grujic, the director, and Dr. Vladan Vukcevic, the deputy director. I was very impressed with their medical procedures. In many ways they are very advanced, and the doctors are very well educated and respected around the world for their work. But under the current conditions in the country and the economic situation, they really have nothing enabling them to practice medicine up to their potential.

At 2:00 p.m., Jim and I were scheduled to perform our final hospital assessment in Yugoslavia. Already my mind was jumping ahead to how nice it will be to get home to the Colorado mountains, where I can walk along my peaceful creek, feel the cool breeze coming off the glaciers of Mount Evans, and listen to the birds singing and the pesky squirrels chattering.

The last hospital was another obstetrics, gynecological, and maternity hospital located right downtown in a large converted office complex instead of the central medical complex we visited earlier. As Jim and I walked to our appointment from the Moskva hotel, Jim reminisced a bit and pointed out the building directly across the street from the hospital, telling us that when he was a teenager, the building had been the girls’ high school. He had attended high school dances there, and he described how the teenage boys of the 1930s and early 1940s pursued the young Serbian chicks of that era.

The hospital was much larger than it appeared from the street. It accommodates nearly four hundred beds and delivers twenty-five or more babies per day. Our host doctor explained that the number of births in Yugoslavia has decreased by half from ten years ago. I asked if that was due to increased demands for abortion, but the doctor, Nikola Antic, said that abortions have also dropped in number. The decline seems to be caused by a decision not to have children and bring them into a world of such uncertainty and chaos. Young couples are having a tough enough time taking care of themselves and don’t want to accept the responsibility of rearing children. I encountered the same attitude in many of the old Soviet republics.

In my opinion, Communism over the past eighty years has successfully discredited the value of the family unit and the importance of the individual. The government has permitted no positive influence from the church regarding sanctity of the family or the special love and nurturing of children. At its roots, Communism doesn’t promote love, social nurturing, or altruism, even though it is marketed that way. It is rather a very sinister, selfish, and elitist philosophy. Now, those countries that adopted and adhered to the greedy philosophy are paying a high price economically, socially, and morally.

Like the other hospitals we visited, the maternity hospital of Belgrade exists in faded glory. In the past, health-care funding came from the redistribution of wealth in a socialist system. But the well eventually ran dry.

The hospital lacks spare parts for their broken equipment, and every department suffers from the lack of the most commonly used medical supplies. No longer can the Communist dictators offer free health care to meet the needs of the populace. Yugoslavia is financially broke, and in my opinion, they aren’t even close to arriving at any economic, social, or moral solutions for the country’s problems. The next eighteen months will really be difficult for the people of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

I returned to my room at the Moskva hotel to sign the books I brought to give as gifts. I want to give the big prize, Atlas of Human Anatomy by Dr. Frank Netter, to my new friend Dr. Mihajlo Kobac, the health minister who nearly cried when he heard what God did to change my life. Jim’s words were still ringing in my ears following our unusual meeting with the health minister: “Did you hear what Dr. Kobac said to you just before we all got up to leave? He said, ‘God bless you, my friend.’ That’s amazing. He was raised as an atheist and a Communist, and I doubt the word God has ever crossed his lips.” I wrote a note of friendship and thanks in the front of the book. I won’t be able to present the gift to him in person but will have Jim deliver it to his office next week. I want the health minister to know how much I appreciate our new friendship.

I also toted along with me two lovely picture books of Colorado. I signed one with a note of thanks to Dr. Cedo Kutlesic, the head of the medical complex in Nis. Our driver will make the four-hour trip to Nis next week and give the book to Dr. Kutlesic on my behalf. The other book of Colorado I’ll personally present to Olga and Alexander Cvetanovic, Jim’s relatives, who had been so kind to host our visit. The last book I brought with me is an abbreviated version of Dr. Netter’s work on human anatomy, focusing on the thorax. I want it to be given to Dr. Vesna Bosnjak Petrovic, the head of the Belgrade hospital specializing in pulmonary disabilities. She has been doing an outstanding job at her hospital.

At 7:00 p.m., Jim and I had dinner with a young lady who was born in Belgrade. Four years ago she was a writer for an opposition newspaper in Belgrade. Just before the NATO bombing began, she left Yugoslavia on a journalism scholarship and traveled to Denver, Colorado, where she worked as an intern at the Rocky Mountain News under the direction of some fine editors and journalists. My friend Ann Imse, who wrote a wonderful story about Project C.U.R.E. and published it in the Rocky Mountain News, told me about Ana Davico and asked that I contact her while in Belgrade.

Over dinner with Jim and me, Ana summed up the overall feelings of most of the common people of Serbia. Ana quit her job with the opposition newspaper upon her return to Belgrade and is working as a translator for English-, German-, or Russian-speaking people traveling in Yugoslavia.

“I couldn’t take the hopeless pressure any longer,” she told us. “I went into survival mode, trying to take on odd jobs to support myself and my young son. I came back to witness the destruction of my city and my country and realized there was no way to rid the country of Slobodan Milošević. The actions of NATO and America gave Milošević complete control over the Yugoslavian people rather than helping to eliminate him.

“Our economy is in a shambles, with over 60 percent unemployment, and those employed make only about fifty US dollars per month. I could handle the opposition no longer. I had to concentrate on just surviving from one minute to the next. It’s that serious here in Serbia, and I’m convinced it will only get worse in the months to come. We thought we could depend the US and NATO for help, but instead, they bombed and killed us and left us with no hope and no one to turn to. History has been cruel to the Balkans.”

Sunday, July 23

This morning I checked out of the old Moskva hotel. Olga and Alexander Cvetanovic and their teenage son arrived in a car to pick up Jim and me. On our way to the Belgrade airport, they drove us to the top of a large mountain overlooking the city. It was lushly forested with spruce, pine, and cedar trees. It has been the hiking and camping destination for the families and youth of Belgrade for hundreds of years. Jim and his friends had trekked to camp fifty years ago, as did Olga and Alexander when they were kids.

At the top of the mountain, a beautiful marble monument had been erected to the unknown soldier of World War I, in which so many Yugoslavs lost their lives. The surrounding grounds were kept beautifully. It’s a place of sacred honor, and I was privileged to be there as Olga, Alexander, and Jim related stories to me of so many individual family members who were killed in wars in the Balkans. They really opened up their hearts to me as they described the wartime tragedies that had plagued their families.

The huge television and communications tower that was built on the top of the mountain had been blown up by NATO and US smart bombs. It lay in a heap of rubble not far from the war memorial. The bombs and missiles had exploded with surgical accuracy. The tower was completely destroyed, but the buildings just a few feet away were unscathed. Our means of destruction has really become high tech.

I was headed home but Jim Peters would stay a few more days with his family. At the airport I checked through customs and passport control with no problems. Again, all the airport personnel looked at me with “What in the world are you, an American, doing in a place like this?” glances.

I took a Lufthansa flight from Belgrade to Munich, Germany, where I spent the night at the Mövenpick Hotel.

Monday, July 24

Today was the last leg of my Serbian trip. I boarded United flight 963 for the eight-and-a-half-hour flight from Munich to Washington, D.C. There I endured a little layover before winging my way back to Denver International Airport, where my lovely Anna Marie was waiting for me at 7:30 p.m. God answered my prayer for wisdom and acceptance on this trip—wisdom to say the right thing to the right people just at the right time, and acceptance from the hurting people of Yugoslavia.

Once again, I’m safe at home!

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SERBIA-YUGOSLAVIA, July 16-24, 2000 (Part 7) The Interview

Belgrade, Serbia: Friday, July 21,2000: The more I was driven around the city of Belgrade, the more destruction I saw. Many of the buildings were totally gutted from the inside. The United States had used smart bombs launched from 15,000 feet above and guided to penetrate into the building before it exploded with its incendiary payload. The outside of the structure might have looked relatively normal except for the roof being gone, but the inside would be a charred, totally gutted building. I was told that night after night the city of Belgrade was ablaze. Olga said she could stand and watch the incoming rockets fly across the city seeking their targets and entering into the buildings.

The great fear for Olga, as well as other civilians, was that they never knew which rocket had been programmed to hit the building in which they were standing. “Our defense weapons would be fired but would arc across the sky and fall back into the city without reaching a third of the way to the height where the U.S. bombers were flying. It was like the U.S. was playing a game with our city, using it to experiment with their new super-high technique war weapons knowing that we were absolutely helpless to defend our citizens or our city.”

Belgrade city was the capital of the Republic of Serbia, as well as the capital of the entire Federation of Yugoslavia. That sounded a little complicated, and it was. Serbia was a big republic and was much, much larger than the only other republic left in the Federation of Yugoslavia, which was Montenegro. Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia Herzegovina and Kosovo also had been much smaller republics in the Federation of Yugoslavia. But they had all been declared independent, leaving only Serbia and Montenegro still within the Federation of Yugoslavia.

We had previously visited the Minister of Health of the entire Federation of Yugoslavia. But Serbia also had its own Ministry of Health to represent itself as an individual republic. Therefore, when news got out that Project C.U.R.E. was in the city and had met with the Yugoslav Ministry of Health, and when the newspaper article appeared about Project C.U.R.E. working with the Red Cross, the Health Ministry of Serbia also requested to meet with us. We certainly agreed to the meeting. It appeared that the Yugoslav Federal Ministry would be in charge of the international part of getting medical donations into Yugoslavia and the Serbian Health Ministry would oversee the distribution within Serbia. There did not appear to be any conflict in the system but we certainly wanted to meet all the parties to guarantee there would not ever be any confusion or misunderstanding. Thursday, the Serbian Health Ministry contacted Slavka Dreskovic-Jovanavic at the Serbian Unity Congress and said the Minister of Health was out of the city but would request we meet with Dr. Persia Simonovic, the Deputy Minister.

Friday, at 3:00 we met with the Serbian Health Ministry. It was an absolute miracle the way we had been able to meet with all the important officials who had the power to either make our shipping into Yugoslavia a success or a failure. It had been accomplished in such a short period of time and the acceptance of Project C.U.R.E. had been almost overwhelming.

I had only one more business meeting scheduled for Friday. The woman reporter representing the official government newspaper had requested an interview with me through Slavka at the Serbian Unity Congress. It had been set up that I would meet with her at 5:00 p.m.

I had not wanted any publicity while in Yugoslavia. I had just wanted to slip in and slip out of the country quietly. But that hadn’t happened. I knew I was really walking a fine line. The Serbian Unity Congress was an opposition organization to the Milosevic regime. They were not our official hosts but had made a lot of the appointments for us. On the other hand, I had already spent considerable time with cabinet members and representatives of the government. I knew I was tiptoeing through a virtual political minefield and knew the dangers involved in giving an interview for the government newspapers. My only diplomatic hope was to emphasize the position of Project C.U.R.E. as being a humanitarian organization of political neutrality which served many people, many organizations and many governments in 85 different countries around the world. Our specialty was medical help and not politics. Staying focused in the interview on helping people through love and concern and not getting pulled away by any of the reporter’s political questions would be mandatory and perhaps necessary for my life and safety. One slip could be critical.

The people who would have been reading the newspaper would have been people whose city had been bombed and burned by the Americans and they perhaps would have themselves suffered injuries and perhaps experienced death of some of their loved ones. I realized it was very risky for me to even be there, but I was bothered most by having a newspaper article announce to a large segment of the city that an American was even there in their city during those days. Before the interview I prayed God would direct the reporter to ask questions which I could handle with definitive answers of neutrality. If possible, I would like her to even forget to ask the hard questions of politics, bombings and killings.

The reporter had been intrigued with my meeting with the head of the Red Cross. After some easy questions about Project C.U.R.E.’s inception and founding and about its work around the world, she asked why, as an American, I would put myself in harms way to travel to Belgrade, personally. When she lobbed that one to me I knew I could burn up the rest of the day with the answer. The rest of the 40 minutes interview I took to explain why I was the happiest man in the world getting to do what I do. I told stories of Haiti, Africa and Iraq and what God had done in my life to change me from a life of success to a life of significance.

The tape in the reporter’s recorder was about used up when I finished. In the last few minutes she turned to Jim Peters and asked him a few questions about his humanitarian desires for being back in Belgrade. I thanked God on the way out of the office for the way the interview had gone and the fact that however the article might come out I would be safely on my way home before it came out in print!

Olga and Alexander were at the Moskva Hotel when we returned. They wanted us to go to dinner with them at the home of some of their dear friends, Professor Brana Popovic and his wife Olja. Sunday, the doctor and his wife would be leaving Belgrade for Toronto, Ontario, Canada where the professor would be undergoing some radical cancer surgery. They were wonderful and warm people who are highly educated and had a daughter who lived in Boulder, Colorado where she was a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Colorado. The senior professor Popovic was Serbian and had just been dismissed from his University position after many, many years, because of his opposition views against Slobodan Milosevic.

We ate outside in a lovely garden. During the dinner, Alexander and Jim Peters related to the Popovics the incredible and highly unusual meeting we had earlier with the Yugoslav Minister of Health and how he was so moved that he nearly cried. “The story of what God did in your life has not been heard by our friends Brana and Olja Popovic, or by Olga. Please start at the very beginning and tell the entire story. We have never heard anything like it.” I agreed to tell the whole story again.

Dr. Brana Popovic commented at the end, “Thank you for sharing such a strong story with us. I don’t think I have heard such a story before. We are nearly consumed by the thoughts of politics and the need for change and we are terribly frustrated. But you, I believe, have found the answer. We must begin doing what we can to help others instead of being concentrated on political problems in either the Clinton Administration or the Milosevic government. We can do that. That is really the answer for our whole country.”

Next Week: A Crazy Lady and a Hurting World

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SERBIA July 16-24, 2000 (Part 6) Sharing Hope with the Minister of Health

Belgrade, Serbia: Friday, July 21, 2000: I watched as the conversation between Jim and the health minister quickened. I almost jumped in, but then I thought, I don’t have anything to sell here. The two people talking have more to lose than I do, and I’m not expected to regulate this meeting. I’ll respond at an appropriate time. So, I just sat back and relaxed.

Eventually I was asked a direct question about inventory and procedure. At that time I started from the top and thanked the health minister for giving Jim and me his time and honoring us with the meeting. I assured him that we had only traveled to Yugoslavia to assist if possible. I then said that perhaps they won’t need anything we have, but we’re here to explore the possibilities and get acquainted.

The health minister then began to relax a little. I continued by complimenting him on what I had observed in the hospitals we had assessed. “Yugoslavia has a good health-care system and doctors and nurses who are very qualified and very dedicated.”

I gave him some specific examples and then went on. “I believe that Yugoslavia in the past has been a model for other Eastern European countries. But right now, and for an unknown time in the future, there is difficulty, and there will be opportunities for friends to help. Eventually Yugoslavia will once again be a leader. There is a certain spirit of optimism and courage that is very observable in the country, and that spirit will take Yugoslavia successfully through the difficult times.”

By that time, everyone around the table was smiling, and their heads were moving up and down, including the health minister’s. He then told me that he is really in trouble on medications. There simply is no money to buy medicine, especially heart medications and medications for diabetes. He asked if I had any suggestions, and I told him that Project C.U.R.E. ships out very few pharmaceuticals because of the expiration-dating procedures for the drugs and because of the inconsistent policies of the recipient countries. I went on to explain how and why the pharmaceutical companies date their products the way they do. I also told him that I had suggested to North Korea that they test for themselves the drugs that are close to the expiration date. If they test good, they can use them. If they don’t test to their satisfaction, they can opt not to use them.

The health minister leaned back and smiled. He realized I was there only to help him. I assured him that Project C.U.R.E. will never violate any of their policies or requests. As we talked and everyone around the table got friendlier, I felt strongly that I should share with the health minister why I was really there and what God had done to change my life. When I asked him if he had time for me to tell him a story, he said, “Yes, of course.”

I started out telling him about trading rabbits as a boy and deciding I would be a millionaire before I was twenty-five. Then I said that by age thirty, I was way past my goal, but nobody had told me that just because you have the ability to accumulate wealth, it doesn’t necessarily make you happy. And I wasn’t a happy man. I told him that Anna Marie and I decided to give away all our accumulated wealth and start over again, and I told God that if he would get me off the hamster wheel, out of the cage, and just make me a simple man again, I would never use my ability to accumulate wealth for myself. I would just help other people.

“That’s why I’m here today, Dr. Kobac. I don’t take any money for what I do. It’s a gift to God and to other people. I just want to help the people of Yugoslavia while they’re having a difficult time.”

I went into more detail than this, but when I finished, the health minister was fighting back tears as he said, “You have told me the most important story. What you have said is the only hope for the world. I have been very discouraged and bitter over what has happened, but now that you have told me this powerful story, I have hope.”

Our meeting was supposed to last for only thirty minutes but went on for an hour and a half. I apologized for taking so much of the health minister’s valuable time, but he replied, “No, no! You have come here with the most important thing possible. Do not apologize.”

Everyone was only whispering when we all filed out of the health minister’s office. Project C.U.R.E. confronted Slobodan Milošević’s closest friends and cabinet members with God’s love today, and that love was incredibly effective!

At this point, Jim and I were late for our next appointment at the Belgrade Institute of Psychiatry, so we hurried across town and into Dr. Sanda Raskovicivic’s office. The director is in charge of a 750-bed mental hospital, one hundred day patients who are limited to staying only one month, and 250,000 outpatients a year. She is in desperate need of IV solution, poles, and starting kits; needles and syringes; an EEG machine and an EKG machine; and lots of medications.

As we walked from her main hospital building to an annex, I commented on how nice her building looked, and that it appeared to have a fresh coat of paint. “It is new paint; it’s some new building, too,” she said. Then Dr. Sanda pointed to a large building about fifty yards away. “That’s Belgrade’s main police station. It was repeatedly bombed, and some of the bombs missed and hit my hospital. I was sitting in a room, and suddenly the ceiling came falling in around me, and all the windows fell out. I thought it was the aftershock of an earthquake somewhere. I didn’t know we had been bombed. I’m a woman doctor. What would I know about bombs and war?”

Dr. Sanda told me that she quickly figured out that she was in real bad trouble. The roof was gone, the doors and windows were gone, there was a lot of damage to the building, and there were fires everywhere. “I went down to my patients and told them to stay calm. ‘I need your help. Everyone needs your help. I am going to untie you from your beds, but you must not try to run away. You must stay calm and help me get everyone through this.’ That’s what I told them.”

She went on with her story, telling me that all the patients stayed calm, and some even went to other parts of the building to help other patients. “While there was chaos, terror, and lunacy outside the institution, there was absolute calm and perfect control inside the mental hospital.”

Next Week: The Interview

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SERBIA, July 16-26, 2000 (Part 5) Total Acceptance in Nis

Kragujevak and Nis, Serbia: July 20 - 21, 2000: Another half hour down the road, we came to the town of Kragujevac. The pediatric hospital there serves a population of about 180,000 people. Dr. Jasmina Knezevic, the hospital director, is a sharp young lady who really takes pride in what she does. She is a pediatric cardiologist, and her husband is also a doctor in Kragujevac. Together they cut quite a wide swath medically in central Serbia.

Dr. Jasmina is desperate for basic supplies for her hospital and is trying to do the best she can with broken lab equipment and antique medical machines. She fixed little truffles and tarts for us, with black tea. The tea was a nice change from the Yugoslavian coffee served in most places, which I’m convinced is made from floodwater mud.

After tea, Jim and I had to hurry on to the city of Nis. The city was once the inland capital of Yugoslavia and today serves a population of about two million. It was about another two-hour drive to Nis from Kragujevac, and it was getting dark by the time we arrived in Nis and checked into the Ambassador hotel on the city square. Jim, the driver, and I wandered around the city until we found a good place to eat dinner.

Thursday, July 20

Jim Peters and I ate breakfast at our hotel this morning and then decided to walk to the Nis Clinical Center. Yugoslavia followed the old Soviet model of together-but-separate hospitals.” There was a separate hospital for each specialty, but they were all clustered together in relatively close proximity. It really wasn’t an efficient method, but it became tradition throughout Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The Nis Clinical Center was set up according to that model.

We located the administrative offices for the complex. Snezana Milošević, the deputy director and head of nursing, had been expecting us. We were then ushered into Dr. Cedo Kutlesic’s spacious office, where Tanja Milošević, the chief business administrator for the hospital complex, and Snezana were invited to meet with us. Dr. Kutlesic is a physically large Serbian with a rather gruff demeanor. He is a very focused individual and serves as the vice dean as well as the general manager for the medical campus.

The Nis hospital is a fifteen-hundred-bed institution with twenty-seven hundred employees, six hundred doctors, and eighteen operating theaters. In addition to taking care of the local population, the hospital now tries to care for several hundred thousand refugees who streamed into central Yugoslavia from the war zones. I could see immediately that if there is a place in Serbia that needs our help, Nis is that place.

We met with hospital administrators for more than an hour before we took a photo tour of the hospital. By that time, Dr. Kutlesic had really warmed up. I told him I really admire what he is doing as a doctor in Serbia and what he is accomplishing as an administrator during such difficult times. He walked over to his glass-secured bookcase and took out a boxed collection of two beautiful volumes on ancient Orthodox monasteries. He opened the first volume and signed it: “To Dr. James Jackson, my big friend from America. Dr. Cedo Kutlesic.”

The doctor stood up, walked over to me, and kissed me three times on alternating cheeks as only family members do in Serbia. The mouths of the two ladies meeting with us dropped open. They work every day with the big, burly doctor, and I doubt they had seen him that open and emotional before. Snezana and Tanja then escorted us around the hospital to finish our needs assessment. All of us became good friends in a short time. Jim and I came to Nis to deliver love and hope, but we received far more love and acceptance than we could ever have dreamed of.

Our next appointment was set for 11:30 a.m. at a psychiatric hospital in the small nearby town of Toponica. But the people at Nis didn’t want us to leave. Our compromise was to quickly perform our needs assessment in Toponica and then return to Nis and have a late lunch with them.

On our way out of the hospital, I saw a woman in a wheelchair struggling to enter an elevator. Both of her legs were missing at the thigh. Snezana helped her onto the elevator. I smiled at her as Snezana told me that the lady was a nurse at the hospital. When the NATO bombs hit the hospital, she watched as her legs were blown off her body. Fortunately she knew what to do to save herself from bleeding to death. Now she is back working at the hospital again and is having a real tough time.

The psychiatric hospital at Toponica was a bit of a misfit for Project C.U.R.E. The hospital director didn’t even want to talk about his medical needs and didn’t want us to tour the facilities—not even the medical clinic. He just kept asking us for money so he could remodel his old building, which was erected in the late 1800s. It really wasn’t too difficult to cut short our evaluation at the Toponica psychiatric hospital.

Back at Nis, Jim and I joined Dr. Kutlesic and his staff for a lovely lunch at an “American” outdoor restaurant. There’s no doubt about it: My obedience and willingness to go to war-torn Yugoslavia has been richly rewarded, and the timing of the visit has been absolutely providential. God, again, has been way out ahead of us in the planning.

It was a long, difficult, four-hour drive back to Belgrade. Jim and I found ourselves eating dinner in Belgrade at about 10:30 p.m.

Friday, July 21

This morning, Alexander Cvetanovic, Jim Peters, and I met early for breakfast. The day was heavily scheduled. Our first assignment was a needs assessment at the Belgrade maternity hospital, where Dr. Slavka Durutovic-Gligorovic is the director. She had been instrumental in helping us get our visas to enter Yugoslavia. She is a great manager and medical doctor. Her maternity hospital sparkled with cleanliness, and her staff was very positive and had things well under control. I took some photos that I really hope will come out good. I think it will be a pleasure to work with the hospital in the future.

Jim and I had promised as a stipulation for receiving our visas that we would meet with the foreign-affairs ministry and the health ministry while we were in Belgrade. We had already met with the foreign-affairs people, but the minister of health was making it difficult to schedule a meeting.

At our lunch in Nis, we had mentioned our problem to Dr. Kutlesic. He simply got on the phone with the minister of health and said, “You really need to meet this guy.”

That was all it took. We were scheduled for a 10:30 a.m. meeting today at the minister of health’s office. Additionally the newspaper article in the official newspaper just came out in Belgrade telling about the American humanitarian organization that had arrived to offer assistance. The health minister’s curiosity had been piqued.

The newspaper announcement came out of our meeting with the Red Cross. A reporter for the official newspaper had been there, and it had taken her no time at all to get the news into print. I’m quickly losing the position I had hoped for of just quietly slipping into Belgrade and quietly leaving without any high-profile exposure. I’m fearful that the publicity will just alert any genuine and aggressive American haters to the fact that there is an American in town.

Dr. Mihajlo Kobac, the health minister for the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, is a real medical doctor instead of just a government figurehead. He allowed thirty minutes for our meeting and also invited to the meeting Dr. Vera Ilankovic, the deputy federal minister, and Dr. Ljiljana Stojanovic, the first counselor to the federal minister and two other ministry officials.

The minister of health was very cool and defensive and almost cynical about an American being in Belgrade to see him. It was the Americans who had caused their problems. Had I come to gloat over their misery?

Jim started out by introducing me to the health minister in the Serbian language. He had sat in on about ten official meetings by that time and pretty well knew the Project C.U.R.E. story. Usually that kind of situation drives me nuts, because without them taking time to translate both sides of the conversation, I never know what they’re saying. But all translators will slip into that temptation at some point, because they know the answers to the questions asked and go ahead and give the answer rather than interpreting the question for me, letting me answer, and then saying essentially the same thing the translator would have said to begin with. Translators, I believe, actually think they’re doing me a favor and saving precious time by going ahead and carrying on the conversation without my help. The only problem is that I don’t have any idea where the conversation has gone or is going. Even though the situation is quite understandable, in strategic meetings it’s very dangerous because a translator never really knows how I would have answered the question. He only presumes.

Next Week: Sharing Hope with the Minister of Health

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SERBIA, July 16-24, 2000 (Part 4) Yugoslav Red Cross Will Help Us

Belgrade and Nis Serbia: Tues. July 18, 2000: It was hot in the hotel last night, but I was exhausted and slept well. At breakfast this morning, Slavka Draskovic informed Jim Peters that a bright young girl who was preparing to go to medical school had been one of the victims killed in the recent bombing raids. Family and friends had raised money for a scholarship to help her pay for her education. During the middle of the day, she was crossing a bridge near her town, and the US–NATO plane zeroed in on the bridge and blew it into the water. The girl was killed in the explosion. Most of the US planes flew from ships anchored in the Adriatic Sea, but some B-52 bombers flew nonstop from America to deliver their payloads.

Alexander Cvetanovic accompanied us to our first hospital assessment. Dr. Vesna Bosnjak Petrovic and her assistant, Dr. Dragan Mandovic, run the Institute for Pulmonary Disabilities. More than 50 percent of all Yugoslavians are serious smokers. Incidents of throat cancer, and lung cancer in particular, are rising rapidly in the country. Another 10 percent of all the patients at the hospital have tuberculosis. Dr. Petrovic is a very busy lady. More than seventy institutions are under her jurisdiction throughout Serbia and Montenegro. She literally begged me for asthma medications, inhalers, and oxygen concentrators.

At 2:30 p.m., we were scheduled to visit Yugoslavia’s largest surgical hospital. It was at one time the leading abdominal surgery center in Europe. But now they have no surgical supplies and can’t get spare parts to repair their surgical equipment because of the NATO-imposed trade sanctions. Dr. Miroslav Milicevic, the director of the hospital, was trained in the United States and still lectures all over the world. He was torn with emotion as he showed us around the hospital, because he is watching his hospital deteriorate into a third-rate institution.

At 5:00 p.m., Jim and I walked to the offices of the humanitarian organization of the Serbian Orthodox Church. I was hoping they could help us get our donated supplies safely into Serbia and delivered to the correct hospitals. We met with Dragan M. Makojevic, the director. He was pretty puffed up with organizational importance and assured us that without him, it would be really difficult to accomplish our goals. His plan was for us to send the medical goods to him, and then he would determine which institutions were worthy of receiving them. I tried to be kind as I let him know that we had traveled a great distance to perform needs assessments on the various hospitals and clinics, and we would insist that the goods go to the places we designated. Mr. Makojevic said he couldn’t guarantee that would happen, so I told him that we probably wouldn’t be able to work with his organization even though there would be some mutual advantages for us to do so.

Olga and Alexander Cvetanovic picked up Jim and me at the Moskva hotel at 7:00 p.m. They drove us by more of the destroyed bomb sites around the city, including the now-famous Chinese embassy near the Hyatt hotel. The US planes had targeted the embassy three times and demolished it by sending smart bombs inside to gut it and still leave the structure standing. Supposedly, the United States hit the Chinese embassy by mistake, and when it nearly threw the bilateral trade agreements off course between China and the US, the Clinton administration offered apologies to the Chinese and paid reparations. The Chinese diplomats were still inside the embassy when the explosions occurred, and they were killed. The consensus was that the Chinese had set up electronic devices on the premises capable not only of monitoring the bombs and missiles but also of altering their guidance systems.

At Olga and Alexander’s home, we enjoyed tea and then went to a lovely restaurant on the Danube River for dinner.

Wednesday, July 19

Following breakfast today, Jim Peters and I walked to the offices of the Yugoslavian Red Cross. There we met up with Slavka Draskovic, who had arranged for our meeting. I was hoping that if I couldn’t work with the Serbian Orthodox Church, I could perhaps work with the Red Cross to get our loads into Serbia safely and efficiently deliver the medical goods to the individual hospitals. I don’t want to work directly with the Milošević government. Many places Project C.U.R.E. goes, I try to work with the government to guarantee the success of our shipping. But even though I agreed to meet with the minister of foreign affairs and the minister of health as a stipulation for getting a visa to enter Yugoslavia, I don’t have any desire to work directly with declared war criminals. All I really want to do is deliver some desperately needed medical goods to the hurting people of Yugoslavia. Perhaps the solution will be found in working with the Red Cross in Belgrade.

I was as pleased with my meeting with Dr. Rade Dubajic, secretary general of the Yugoslavian Red Cross, as I was exasperated last night during the meeting with Dragan Makojevic of the Serbian Orthodox Church. Dr. Dubajic is a real gentleman and took a liking to Project C.U.R.E. right away. He was very complimentary of our approach of personally traveling to Belgrade to do the Needs Assessment Studies and setting up meetings with the key players in Serbia.

“That sends the message that you are willing to humbly come in and work with the locals and learn the system and situation rather than just come in on an inflated, do-gooder ego trip,” Dr. Dubajic stated.

Dr. Dubajic offered to work with us and even let us store our medical supplies and equipment in his warehouse, if necessary. He also offered to make his trucks available to Project C.U.R.E. at no cost to deliver the medical goods to the hospitals. He gave us his guarantee that our goods will go exactly where we direct them, and he will ensure complete accountability by providing a distribution record for the goods. He also had Dr. Dragisic and Andrea, the medical coordinator, sit in on our meeting and instructed them to work with Project C.U.R.E. to get all the proper paperwork through to customs and the shipping forwarders.

“Dr. Jackson,” Dr. Dubajic concluded, “I’m really glad you are here. Yugoslavia is in a bad way right now and will continue to be in the near future. We need all the help we can get, and you can count on us for helping Project C.U.R.E. in any way we can.”

To me this was a miracle and another affirmation that I’m on the right track.

We left the meeting and went right down the hall into Dr. Dragisic’s office, where we started working on all the procedures and logistics.

Afterward Jim Peters and I walked back to the hotel and met the driver we had hired to take us to Cuetojevac village, the town of Kragujevac, and then on to the city of Nis (pronounced “Nish”). There was no time for lunch today, but before we left town, we had one more very important stop to make. We drove to the main government offices for the minister of foreign affairs, where we met with Ambassador Slobodan Morchkovic.

The ambassador was far more relaxed and friendly than I had assumed he would be. There’s simply no way to second-guess how a government official will greet you when you’re an American, and the Americans have just blown your ancient city apart and killed your neighbors. Slavka Draskovic was right. Almost everyone I met was surprised or fascinated by my presence in Belgrade. They all had assumed I would hate them and not come to visit, or that I would decide it was just too dangerous for me to be there.

Our meeting with the ambassador went extremely well. We talked about Project C.U.R.E. and our work, and he gave me a copy of the written policies and procedures to follow for shipping in the medical donations. He said he would cooperate fully with us and the Red Cross and assured me that the goods will go where we direct based on our needs assessments. He was in no way “offish” toward me, even though we talked briefly about the bombings throughout the country. He wanted me to know that the door to his office will be open to Project C.U.R.E. in the future.

By 2:15 p.m., Jim and I were on our way out of Belgrade, heading south toward Nis. An hour and a half later, we pulled off the main road onto a side road that led to the farming village of Cuetojevac. The small rural clinic is run by a young, single doctor named Branko Gajic. The clinic receives no government help but does receive some support from a foundation.

Right next to the spotless little clinic was an old, ornate Serbian Orthodox church. The Communists had closed up the church and shot the priests years ago, but in the past few years, the government had granted permission for the quaint edifice to reopen for worship. We were invited to enter the sanctuary, and the bearded priest in his flowing, black robes showed us around.

The priest has taken his mission quite seriously. He opened a Bible school to train the children on the weekends and organized adult Bible studies in the evenings during the week. The villagers who had been forbidden to pursue anything religious during the Communist days are now very eager to learn. Before we left the village, the mayor came to greet us, and the people at the clinic insisted we sit down and have a cheese sandwich and a piece of melon with them before we continued our journey.

Next Week: Total Acceptance in Nis

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Serbia July 16-24, 2000 Part 3 Confusion and Chaos in Belgrade

Belgrade, Serbia: July 16 -17, 2000: Anna Marie has cried only twice when she dropped me off at the airport terminal in Denver. Once was when I went to Baghdad, Iraq, and the other time was today, when she dropped me off on Sunday for the trip to Belgrade.

“When I see you walk through those airport doors, I never know if I’ll ever see you again,” she said. Then she apologized for crying.

I cannot tell you how much the two of us depend upon the travel promises in Psalm 91. At the airport is where the rubber really meets the road. There are no outside pressures making me do what I do with Project C.U.R.E. It truly is a love gift to God. And Anna Marie and I are both totally a part of that gift.

As soon as I determined that I should go to Belgrade, I began reading everything I could get my hands on about the history of the Balkans and how the most recent unrest started. I read newspapers, books, news magazines, and briefing papers. I even asked Jim Peters and the US State Department to give me materials and had Anna Marie glean information from the Internet. I took a lot of the documents with me on the plane for continued reading.

United Airlines flight 296 departed Denver at 10:00 a.m. and flew to Dulles Airport in Washington D.C. After a couple hours’ layover, Jim Peters and I were to have boarded United flight 962 to Munich, Germany. However, the plane scheduled to make the Munich flight was hit by lightning on the incoming flight, so we were delayed an additional four hours while the electrical maintenance people and engineers thoroughly checked out the equipment. I was worried about making the connection to Belgrade in Munich. If Jim and I missed our connection, there were no alternative flights to Yugoslavia.

During and after the US and NATO bombing of Belgrade, all air traffic was halted into Yugoslavia. The flights just resumed, and there are still very few flights scheduled. In fact, when Jim and I were first making our travel plans, we had to consider flying into Budapest, Hungary, and taking a bus from Budapest to Belgrade.

The woman at the United flight desk figured it out for me and said that if our plane could take off by 9:00 p.m., we could still just make the Lufthansa connection in Munich to Belgrade. At 9:15 we were given clearance to depart and left Washington. I knew then that Jim and I would have to run through the terminal in Munich if we were to catch the flight to Belgrade.

Somehow we made the connection, and our luggage was even properly transferred. We arrived in Belgrade around two o’clock in the afternoon, and to my surprise, I wasn’t hassled at passport control or customs for being an American. Olga and Alexander Cvetanovic met us at the airport. Olga is the daughter of one of Jim’s deceased brothers. She has a PhD and a very responsible job. Alexander is an engineer and has designed projects and airports not only throughout Europe but all over the world. He is also head of the engineering department at the university in Belgrade.

I wasn’t prepared for the amount of damage I saw in Belgrade, which was inflicted during the recent bombardment of the downtown area. Their largest and most prominent government buildings were bombed either from the outside in or from the inside out by US smart bombs. At one downtown intersection, all of the large buildings on all four corners had been totally destroyed with precision so as not to impact surrounding buildings.                                             

I began to see that the US and NATO bombing game wasn’t just about destroying billions of dollars’ worth of factories, police stations, army barracks, and infrastructures; it was also about psychologically scaring the pants off the Serbs with the surgical precision of high-tech weapons. All of the sorties were flown no lower than fifteen thousand feet with pinpoint accuracy. Conventional defense systems like antiaircraft guns can’t reach anything above about five thousand feet. The US and NATO were playing serious cat-and-mouse games with the Serbs, and the message was, “Either sign the peace accords, or we’ll shoot the pillow out from under your head in your own bed from an elevation so high, you won’t even know we were there.”

As we crossed the Sava River where it flows into the Danube River, I could see the ruins of lots of bridges that had been blown into the water. The debris was still blocking ships from using the river ports. That sent an unmistakable message to the neighboring countries of Romania and Austria, who are now economically disadvantaged because they’re unable to use the river for shipping. Olga told me that seventy bridges were targeted and destroyed throughout Serbia.                                            

Jim and I checked into the old Moskva hotel, which dates back to the old days of Russian influence and is located right in the heart of historic downtown Belgrade. Over the past two weeks, Belgrade experienced a heat wave, with temperatures setting records of well over one hundred degrees. The weather people are calling for much cooler temperatures during our stay, and when I realized that the old hotel isn’t air-conditioned, I too began calling for cooler temperatures.

As I opened my hotel window, I could hear the chants and loud voices of political protestors just a few blocks away. They were calling for the ouster of President Milošević. I decided that’s one area of the city I won’t visit. Common sense and experience have taught me to stay far away from antigovernment protests or any gatherings that could become unruly. I’m in potentially dangerous surroundings.

Slavka Draskovic, the director of the Serbian Unity Congress, joined Jim, Olga, Alexander, and me for dinner at the hotel. She had helped Jim set up all of our appointments at the hospitals, clinics, and organizations we’ll be visiting during our stay. I asked Slavka about the demonstrations I had heard from my window, and she told me that the Serbian Unity Congress stands in opposition to Milošević’s government, and months ago, members of the congress joined thousands of protestors who were calling for Milošević’s resignation. But now, most people have completely lost heart and hope for any change, and only about fifty to one hundred gather in the square to protest. She said they had all hoped that America and the NATO countries would help them in their opposition, but the Clinton administration only sent bombs and sanctions, which has made all of their lives more miserable, killed a lot of their loved ones, and reduced their incomes to less than fifty dollars per month but left Milošević and his people wealthier and more powerful.

At dinner the three of us went over next week’s schedule of appointments. We’ll be traveling outside Belgrade, as well as performing needs assessments at the major health institutions in the city. It looks like a tough week ahead. As Slavka was leaving, I asked her what kind of reaction I can expect as an American from the people we’ll meet.

“There is no hiding the fact that the people here really hate Clinton and Albright. Clinton has deceived us, and Mrs. Albright used to live right here in this city when her father was the Czechoslovakian ambassador to Belgrade. She knows us and grew up with us, and she is the one who negotiated for bombing us. Most of the common people here are just terribly confused. It doesn’t seem like Washington knows what it’s doing with their foreign policy. Now it will be harder for other countries to ever trust the American government. The common people we meet will be terribly surprised you’re here. You are the first to try to bring help to us. They will appreciate you and like you for that.”

I’ve fallen in love with the old European cities. At night people still put on clean clothes and go to the downtown centers to walk, visit, and stop at the sidewalk cafés to have coffee and maybe some ice cream. They really carry out that tradition in Belgrade. Jim Peters, who is seventy-six years old, wanted to show me some of the history of Belgrade, so before we retired for the night, we spent almost an hour walking. He showed me where his boyhood friends used to live and where he used to work, and the office buildings where his prominent family members used to run their businesses.

When we got to one intersection, Jim stopped and pointed out the old bank building where his father was once an influential officer. Just across the street, he pointed out where he spent his last night in Belgrade in 1944. The Gestapo had already surrounded his house and was going to put Jim and his brother in prison or in front of the firing squad. For every German soldier who was killed, the Gestapo would kill a hundred civilians in retaliation. Jim told me that the Yugoslavians had ambushed and killed seven German soldiers. The next day the Germans rounded up seven hundred civilians, men, women, school children and shot them.

Jim asked a school girlfriend, who was also in the resistance movement, to hide him and his brother at her house overnight. They then slipped out of the house, jumped fences, and ran into the nearby forested hills to escape. After his escape in 1944, Jim wasn’t able to return to Belgrade until just ten years ago.

Next Week: Yugoslav Red Cross Will Help Us

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