Europe in 1990 to document the need for textbooks. During the Christmas break Mr. Toyn, Brad Wilson, his KWCR successor, and Dr. Marie Kotter, WSU Vice President for Student Sevices, paid a visit to VMU, from which Mr. Toyn produced a video documentary about the university and nation. This led to “Project Lithuania,” a student drive to collect donated books, computers, teaching materials, and mundane supplies unavailable in Lithuania. In May, my wife, Adele, and I traveled to Kaunas, Lithuania with Mr. Toyn; Shane Stewart, ASWSU president; Jill Fifield, KWCR public relations manager and past ASWSU vice president; and Necia Palmer, former Signpost editor-in-chief. In addition to delivering nearly a half-ton of supplies and equipment, we presented workshops and advised VMU students and administrators on development of student government, a newspaper, and a radio station, as well as on curriculum, accreditation and academic organization. The final draft of a formal agreement of cooperation between WSU and VMU also was worked out. On the surface Lithuania may seem an improbable subject of Weber State involvement. But the eight of us who have visited there in recent months find this small Baltic nation compelling indeed. For reasons of influence, timing, scale, expertise, even ancestry, we think a collaboration between WSU and VMU makes sense. First, as the Lithuanians assertively seek to disentangle themselves from Moscow, they see the United States as a symbol of democracy and freedom — a symbol so powerful that we need do little more than be there and breathe to have a positive effect. It’s a rare experience in today’s world for a typically noisy, irreverent, funny, creative bunch of Americans to feel admired for those characteristics. Despite such admiration, however, Baltic peoples have learned not to count on the United States government. What little help Lithuanians get comes typically from emigrant families in America whose parents successfully preserved the language and culture after escaping the wars, murders, and deportations of the Stalinist era. I was interviewed for an Estonian TV documentary on VMU, simply because the presence in Kaunas of a group lacking direct family ties to Lithuania was too implausible to ignore. A second reason for attending to Lithuania has to do with timing. Emerging from a half-century of Soviet domination,’ the country now is like a blank slate. Whoever arrives first on the scene will exert a disproportionate influence on Lithuania’s future. In that light it was unsettling to learn, for example, that pornography merchants are already there. The generation raised under Communist control has quickly grasped this very tangible byproduct of Western freedom, but cannot yet comprehend the more abstract idea of balancing freedom with responsibility. A third attraction of Lithuania is its small size — three million people in an area equal to that portion of Utah north of Provo and Vernal. This makes its problems, regardless of their intensity, more manageable psychologically than those of its larger neighbors. Similarly, VMU, with 600 students, can operate on a human scale. At the same time, Lithuania’s small size puts it in a weak position to fend for itself in the shadow of Russia. A latent Baltic Rim family of nations may be coalescing around the region’s economic and environmental problems. Affluent Scandinavians find themselves downstream from a string of impoverished polluters. Utahns with strong Scandinavian roots have reason to support this development. PROFESSOR EXCHANGE Two University professors, a staff member and six students are in Lithuania this fall as part of a faculty exchange program with Vytautas Magnus University. Geography professor Deon C. Greer and sociology professor Daniel T. Gallego will remain as visiting professors in Kaunas, Lithuania through December. Their assignments mark the first faculty exchanges between the two universities under a cooperative agreement aimed at promoting mutual cultural awareness. Dr. Greer has an extensive background of overseas research. His experience includes two study visits to the Soviet Union for research in Moscow and Baku from 1977 to 1978 and participation in a SovietMongolian geographical experiment in the Soviet republic of Tuva in southern Siberia during 1989. Dr. Gallego has achieved international recognition for his studies of aging, particularly its effects on minority populations in America. He has served on the National Council on Aging and as a member of a 1981 White House conference on aging. Julie Rich, lab technician in the University’s geography department, and six students also are in Lithuania as part of the exchange program. Earlier this summer Loreta Juodiene, 32, head of English languages instruction in the foreign language department of Vytautas Magnus University, visited Weber State’s campus. PRAYERFUL PEOPLE - Even though Lithuania was the last Baltic Republic to adopt Catholicism, its citizens are devoutly religious. While in Lithuania, our Weber State delegation quickly developed a profound admiration for the Lithuanian people. They seem optimistic, proud and animated, despite the obstacles they face as the Eastern European economy disintegrates. Consider some of those obstacles. The local currency (Russian rubles) is virtually worthless in the outside world. I was surprised, on arrival in Kaunas, when our hosts gave us 50 rubles apiece for incidental expenses, but I was even more surprised that it lasted for nearly a week. At the going exchange rate of about 30 rubles to the dollar, eight people could buy a morethan-ample lunch for less than 80 cents. This makes the typical VMU professor’s salary of 300 rubles ($10) a month seem more adequate — provided he or she doesn’t venture outside the USSR. Inflation, artificially suppressed in the past but now becoming part of daily life, would be a truly frightening prospect if only goods were more widely available. (The quality of products we saw in stores would make Deseret Industries merchandise look irresistible.) One VMU administrator hires a woman solely to stand in market lines for food. Regardless of what the menus say, restaurants seemed to have only one or two entrees available on any given day. More frightening is the total unavailability of medical supplies and drugs; as a result, the consequences of common illnesses can be devastating. During Stalin’s time, the male population was depleted by systematic murder, deportation to Siberia and guerrilla warfare. In economic terms, this has raised the scarcity value of men, making them relatively immune to criticism — “precious pets,” as one woman put it. Women’s issues prominent elsewhere in the world — self-esteem, wife battering, development of cottage industries, pornography, family planning —lie hidden beneath the surface of Lithuanian society, awaiting public acknowledgement. In the absence of reliable birth control technology, a woman may undergo a dozen abortions during her childbearing years. Visiting the most progressive school in Kaunas and talking with parents gave us a glimpse of how the polite decorum we saw in school children masks a low self-image inculcated by their brutalizing educational system. *Photo courtesy of National Geographic. For boys, what the schools leave undone, conscription in the Russian army finishes. Parents fear losing their sons to military service, and draft evasion is on the rise. For the survivors of this training who still seek personal autonomy, there is always further harassment by the KGB. For example, the home of the VMU vice president was broken into and vandalized shortly before our visit. While we were there the Supreme Soviet telegraphed an eviction notice to VMU, which happens to occupy a former Communist Party training facility. Mail headed beyond Lithuanian borders must pass through Moscow, where much of it is randomly burned. When Lithuania’s newly elected, non-Communist parliament declared restoration of independence — not secession — in March of 1990, Russian harassment, blockade, and violence escalated. The bloody climax, hardly noticed by Americans preoccupied with the approaching Persian Gulf war, occurred on the night of Jan. 13, 1991. After two days of confrontation, special Russian “black berets” and tanks overran a crowd of unarmed citizens to seize the country’s main TV transmitter in the capital city, Vilnius, killing 14 and injuring hundreds. Perhaps fearful of adverse publicity, the Russians surprisingly did not make their expected move on the Parliament building, which was surrounded by a human sea of nearly 100,000 passive resisters. I found it impossible to keep an emotional distance from the defenders as I sat through hours of unedited, unnarrated videotape documenting the January clash. The tapes reminded me of our own Civil Rights movement and the antiwar demonstrations of the 1960s. It was heartwarming to watch a freezing crowd around the Press Center face the guns by singing Lithuanian folk songs to befuddled Russian soldiers. I empathized with Russian travelers expressing outrage at being stranded by their own government’s military shutdown of the railroads. The futility of relying on arms to achieve political ends was evident in hospital interviews with indomitable wounded and dying victims of the Russian attack.