Class Notes

December 2002

by Tony Lee

The September Mini-Reunion in Santa Fe was a tremendous success. Read Tyler Smith's summary.

Thanks Tyler. I hope all classmates will seriously consider attending the next Mini in London from June 11 through 15, 2003. Plan to arrive early and stay late, and combine our class outing with a wonderful vacation in the UK.

Chris Getman and his reunion committee will be meeting in New Haven on February 8, 2003 at 11 am to plan for our 40th in 2004. This is the most important planning session for our reunion, and everyone is invited to participate. Following the planning meeting we'll hear from our summer fellow, Abhi Sud, followed by cocktails, dinner and the Yale-Clarkson hockey game. Our next class golf outing will be on Friday, May 9, 2003.

Russell Sunshine reports from Sri Lanka: "I'm working in Colombo as UNDP's Special Advisor to the Sri Lankan Govt's peace-building process. As you may have been reading in the media, after 20 years of devastating internal conflict, February's ceasefire is holding and the peace talks in Thailand are off to a highly encouraging start.

"UNDP's chief contribution to this momentum is called the Invest-in-Peace Initiative. We're helping to mobilize private-sector resources ― domestic, diaspora, and foreign ― to secure the peace and to finance post-conflict reconstruction. We just facilitated the Prime Minister's trip to NYC that put him in touch with key international players. Now the hard work begins.

"The Afghanistan recovery is discouragingly slow, in large measure, I believe, because the US Gov't cynically declines to let an international security force extend the central government's sphere of control outside Kabul, in large measure in order to protect Al Qaeda-chasing warlords from accountability to that same central government. It was especially grim to hear on CNN last night that Afghanistan's opium production has jumped 10-fold in the past year. So much for crop substitution!"

Russell also expressed great concern over an American preemptive strike and predicted it would destabilize the already precarious Middle East and Central Asian regions for 20 terrible years.

I received a sad note from Samuel Albom's sister notifying me that he had died on June 29, 2002. No other details were provided. Lowell Lee Stokes died in Louisville, KY on September 5, 2002. His obituary is on our class web site. Our condolences to both families.