Listeners have written to us describing events they have seen or consider to be amongst the most important in the last hundred years. Amongst others, we have memories of the disaster at the Union Carbide Plant at Bhopal in 1984, Winston Churchill's death, the Ethiopian famine of the mid-eighties and the Lithuanian 'Singing Revolution' of 1990. We also have an account about the death of Yitzhak Rabin. We also hear a firsthand account of the eruption of the volcano Mount Vesuvius. And violence in South Africa.

Maria Shattock remembers the Revolution in Portugal in 1974.

"On 5 April 1974 when I was 17 years old I witnessed the bloodless revolution in my country, Portugal. Having been brought up in a fascist regime I had no idea about real democracy and my education was indoctrination as much as anything.

Early on 5 April I woke up to the radio playing a very famous Portuguese folk song 'Grandola Vila Morena' and other traditional music. In between citizens were told to stay at home. More news came throughout the day as soon as the Armed Forces took over the Presidential Palace, Radio and TV stations and eventually Parliament. The only opposition came from secret police 'PIDE' who put up a fight. Otherwise there was no blood shed. As a gesture of gratitude we gave soldiers on the streets carnations which they put into their gun barrels. I managed to go to school a few days later but there were so many barricades and bag searches it took ages to get there. As there were no buses I had to share a taxi with some friends.

On my way I passed a major barracks, the Palace of Justice and various government buildings all occupied by the military. I was not scared, however, and to this day I am amazed that our revolution could have happenned so quickly and peacefully. Things did get worse, however, and the following February major changes took place in the provisional government whose communist tendencies were worrying many of us.

Today my beloved Portugal is a stable democracy and I will always be grateful to the brave Army Captains who ended the fascist regime which had kept so many so poor and ignorant for so long. After all Salazar's motto was 'Keep the people fed and ignorant. This is no longer the case, thanks to the Revolution of 25 April".

Cyrus Kadivar kept a diary throughout the years 1977-1979. He lived in Iran and remembers the day The Shah and Empress Farah left Iran for good. He also heard Khomeini predicting the birth of an Islamic government. Here are some excerpts from his diary.

Wednesday, August 30, 1978. Shiraz, Iran.

In the Persian press there are articles calling for the return of Khomeini, a very influential religious man who was exiled to Iraq fifteen years ago for opposing the Shah. Many people (excluding me) like my friend Karim's chauffer believe he is the "Hidden Imam" and that if he orders a "Holy Crusade" against the government the whole nation would break apart and Islamic rule would be the sole form of government...

Saturday, September 2, 1978. Shiraz, Iran.

Dad told us at noon that yesterday in Shiraz, 50,000 people demonstrated peacefully against the government. Among the crowd were many priests and women clad in chadors. Mom told me that on the same day when she went to the city with Darius to see our dentist Dr. J., a small child ran up to her and cried: "You are English? I will kill you!" Tonight Dad was taken ill with a terrible stomach pain so bad that he rolled on the floor to calm it down.

Thursday, October 26, 1978. Shiraz, Iran.

Today is the 4th of Aban, the Shah's birthday. He is 59 years old. At 1:15pm Dad informed me that somebody had written anti-Shah slogans on our white walls. I ran outside and saw that it was written in black paint. Translated from Farsi it read: "DEATH TO THE SHAH! TRAITOR AND MURDERER OF THOUSANDS OF MUSLIMS!" I was very shocked and upset. I told Ali Mohammad [our driver] who was busy cleaning it to rub the word "Shah" first. Poor King! He must have had a lonely birthday. This evening we went to the E's for dinner. Dad and I talked politics again with Mr. E. He said that today school kids had brought down the King's picture and stamped on it. "The whole country and the entire world is against him," Dad said shaking his head as we listened to the BBC. Dad still hopes that nothing happens to to him [the Shah] so that Iran does not become a Communist state. This danger is not appreciated...The BBC reported that the Jahrom [near Shiraz] police chief was shot dead and the Martial Law Commander seriously wounded by a sniper, believed to be a soldier, as they returned from ceremonies in the town to celebrate the King's birthday...

Revolution (1979)

Monday, January 1, 1979. Shiraz, Iran.

Petrol shortages is causing hardships for everyone. In Shiraz there are continous queues of taxis guarded by Chieftain tanks and soldiers armed with machine-guns. Ali Mohammad complained that he had spent nine hours waiting for fuel. He said the soldiers were rude to the people and kept "pushing them around". Every wall in the city is now covered in pro-government and pro-Khomeini revolutionary slogans.

Wednesday, January 3, 1979. Shiraz, Iran.

Dr. Shapour Bakhtiar has received approval by Parliament. There is talk, probably true this time, that the Shah may leave the country in order to get some rest. A British royal visit to Iran by Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip has been cancelled. The Shah and Empress Farah have said that "in the present circumstances" they would be "unable to entertain the Queen as they would have wished to in Iran." When we heard this on the BBC we felt happy. We don't need the British in Iran after what their radio has done to our country.

Saturday, January 6, 1979. Shiraz, Iran.

Khomeini has said that obedience to the new administration is tantamount to "obedience to Satan"...Once again I had to explain to my classmates the reasons why I am loyal to the King. The kids at school are just replicas of their foolish parents. Some desire an Islamic republic. Some say that if the King goes "all will be fixed." Others want to see a democracy like those found in Europe or America. So much stupidity and irrationality among the people! It is hard to believe it. After school I went to Mr. Khan for my [Maths] lessons. When I got home Mom told me that the Shah had given a speech at two o'clock and that Dad had become upset when the King had said that he would be leaving the country for some rest and that a Regency Council would take care of Iran during his [temporary] absence. This evening I became very emotional when I thought about how our people moved with the wind and deserted the King when he most needed our support. I could not stop my tears which rolled down my cheek. I love Iran and have believed in the Shah as the symbol of its unity. I am certain he was betrayed by everyone...

Thursday, January 11, 1979. Shiraz, Iran.

This morning I went to the British Council to take my Physics 'O-Level' exams. On the way I noticed that the soldiers had disappeared and the streets were full of rough-looking youngsters...I was struck again by the people on the streets. They looked like they were from out of town. Most of them were reading newspapers and leaflets...This afternoon we heard that the Shah's statues at the Felekeh Eram and the Felekeh Setaad [near the Shiraz Army H.Q] had been pulled down by a mob... I must say that martial law in Shiraz was lifted on Monday...

Tuesday, January 16, 1979. Shiraz, Iran.

The Royal Couple left Iran at 1:10pm. I heard their short interview on the radio in the midst of jet engine noises. I later heard from several guests invited by Dad this evening that the Shah and the Shahbanou had broken down in tears as they bade farewell to their sad entourage. This event has touched me deeply. I am angry at this nation of ours for letting down the Shah, a man who did everything to see his country progress into a strong and proud country...Khomeini has predicted that the birth of an Islamic government in Iran is imminent...

Thursday, February 1, 1979. Shiraz, Iran.

This morning at 9:39am the Ayatollah stepped down from a white Jumbo jet to a tumultuous welcome by a very large crowd...When I saw all those people I realised that all was lost and that it was the end of any hope for the Shah's return.

Peter Sunderland now living in Hong Kong sent us his memory of when he was working in Iran throughout the political upheavels in 1978/1979.

"In 1978 I was working in Iran, as our company's Project Manager on a road construction project in Baluchistan, connecting the Iranian road system across 300km of desert to the Pakistan border. There were troubles in Teheran, with crowds in the streets demonstrating against the Shah, and the airport was closed during December.

There were some 50 British staff with families living on our camp near Zahedan, the provincial capital of Baluchistan, and those of us with children at boarding school back in England had arranged for them to fly out and join us for Christmas. As Teheran airport was closed it was arranged that they flew out into Pakistan, changing at Karachi and joining the flight from Karachi into Zahedan. this went smoothly and we all enjoyed a traditional Christmas, with a carol service, drinks outside my house, and a communal dinner in the Club House.

The political situation in Iran was worsening, though there were few signs of this at the time in Baluchistan. Nevertheless we had an emergency plan should the troubles worsen to the extent that theyt would affect us. The key to our survival, we thought, was the supply of diesel fuel, both to continue our road building activities and to provide the necessary electrcity for survival, including obtaining water from our own wells. Our storage allowed us to maintain supplies for two weeks working at full production, or for six months in a non production ,survival mode. As long as these stocks could be replenished we could continue there working to complete our contract.

Two days after Christmas diesel supplies stopped arriving. I immediately arranged for all work to be halted and for our emergency plan to be put into operation. We employed at that time some 2,000 workers and staff, the majority local Baluchi, but also several hundred Pakistanis as well as over a hundred Europeans, together with wifes and children. To go into survival mode it was necessary to reduce the numbers to around 200, and, as a priority, to get the women and children out of Iran.

Although there was a road into Pakistan it required a journey of some 24 hours, over very rough roads by local bus, to reach Quetta, the nearest airport. However, by arrangement with the local staff of PIA it was arranged that a plane would come into Zahedan on 6th January to evacuate all those who wanted to leave, from our company, from the Pakistani community in Zahedan, and any others who were unable to leave otherwise.

I decided that whilst all our staff and workers would stay to effect a close down all the children should go on the plane, as well as those wives who would not be prepared to, at a later date, walk across the border and take the long bus journey into Pakistan. This was all arranged and those who were going packed up and prepared to leave. Although UK was enjoying their Christmas leave I was able to advise these plans back to Head Ofice in Bath, where they did not find favour. I was instructed, over a very bad telephone line, that all the wives were to leave by the plane, leaving their husbands behind.

My director, who gave me this instruction, later advised me of his trepidation in doing this as he knew his wife would have refused such an order. I thus had to start with my wife, who, as long as our children went back, had determined to stay if I was staying as we had our UK house rented out. many were in similar circumstances. I was very pleased to have the support of my w! ! ife in agreeing to leave, and it was this that enabled us to persuade all the other wives to leave. At three days notice there was a lot of packing up to do but all got away safely on the plane.

We men buckled down to our business of surviving and only later heard of the troubles awaiting our wives and families. After being herded around Pakistan, in hotels and airports, being referred to as the British refugees, they eventually arrived back to Britain's "winter of discontent", power shortages, cold weather, and having to be put up by relatives until their own homes could be vacated by tenants. They were also told not to speak to the press lest it should compromise our situation back in Iran.

We men stayed there for a further six months, whilst the Shah left and the Iatollah arrived, until things stabilised enough for us to resume work. During this period we took leave every couple of months, via the long road through Pakistan, and achieved our aim of reducing the numbers to 200 but maintaing a state of readiness. Excitements during this period included a visit by a TV team from Thames Television, and frequent contacts with Afghan fighters visiting their cousins in Baluchistan.

The saga ended in 1981 when we finally closed down all operations and departed into Pakistan, leaving all the construction plant, and 200km of completed road, 100km of which had been paid for by our Iranian Client".

Rosaline Bleasdale from the UK sent us her memory of the day in her childhood when she saw Mahatma Gandhi.

"A story is told in my family, about an event of which I had only the vaguest of memories for a long time. It relates to a time when I lived, as a little girl, with my family in a small R.A.F. station situated at the edge of the Sind desert. It was in the years immediately before the Second World War in what was then India, before Partition.

The R.A.F.station was called Drigh Road and the nearest big town was Karachi. I am told that now Drigh Road airfield has been swallowed up the expansion of Karachi's sprawling conurbation, and it has been converted into Karachi International Airport.

To go to Karachi, then, was a treat, incorporating a trip to the bazaar, and a ride on a train. The family story tells of how, on one of these visits, I had seen a very small, very thin, bespectacled old man, in a white dhoti, walking along the railway station platform.

Somehow my attention had been captured, and I turned to my father to enquire,"Who is that funny little man, Daddy?"

My father had replied,"That is Mohandas K. Gandhi, the Mahatma, the Great Soul." His words have stayed with me.

My father was the Garrison Engineer at Drigh Road, and he ran the powerhouse there. He had learned respect for Gandhi from the indigenous workers at the powerhouse, and this had inspired him to make a small brass cast of the seated figure of Ghandi.

This figurine was given a place of honour in every one of a long list of homes we subsequently lived in, each time my father was posted. Thus, 'Gandhi' became an integral part of my childhood and growing up, wherever we went. Indeed that figurine has been preserved in my family until this day.

But my own memories of that occasion, when I had seen Gandhi in the flesh, had faded with the passing of time.

One day, in late middle age, I was seated in eager anticipation in front of my television, awaiting the next episode of the BBC's production of the'Jewell in the Crown', that most evocative of sagas of life in India at about the time of my childhood. Watching it brought back, with sharp pangs of pleasure, many of the sights, sounds and smells of that most precious time of my life.

As the episode started I was suddenly transported onto the platform of an Indian mainline railway station, dark with wooden trellises, but bright, through the arches and the skylights, where the fierce sun strove to infiltrate. There was a steaming monster of a train standing at the platform. There were the high, metallic sounds of drum and tambour being beaten, with the long-remembered rhythms, which had permeated my childhood.

And a memory flashed before my mind's eye, superimposed onto the television screen with startling clarity. Along the platform came a gaggle of revellers, at the centre of which was the little man in the white dhoti.

I could see him clearly now. He was quiet and serious in demeanour, but not at odds with the rejoicing around him. He was part of it, but his centre of gravity was within himself. I have seen that look of patience, suffering and reconciliation since, once or twice, on the faces of the dying.

But these are the thoughts of an adult looking in on a memory of distant childhood. I cannot now tell whether I have conflated a real memory with what I have since been told, and with what was recreated in that BBC production.

All I do know is that I remember 'India' faithfully, with my heart, and that I really did see The Great Soul, on a railway platform in Karachi one day in the early thirties when I was a little girl. Roz Bleasdale".

Bryan Harris remembers the day in 1952 when the State of Emergency was declared in Kenya.

I was a fourteen year old English schoolboy living in Nairobi when the State of Emergency was declared in Kenya on 20th October 1952 by the then Governor Sir Evelyn Baring. This day marked the beginning of a campaign to counteract the Mau Mau movement using emergency powers such as detention without trial and the imposition of the death penalty for a large range of offences including ‘subversive activities’. These days the Mau Mau is referred to as the struggle for freedom in Kenya but then it was branded by the British colonial authorities as a terrorist revolt.

I have a very clear recollection of the day the Emergency was declared because my father came to my school at 3 o’clock in the afternoon and whisked me out of the classroom following a hushed conversation with the teacher. This was an unprecedented occurrence so I knew that something pretty momentous must be afoot.

Even when I first heard the phrase ‘State of Emergency’ I had no real idea what it represented but what rapidly became apparent was that the European settler community had been driven into a state of near panic believing that life as it had been known was coming to a precipitous and blood thirsty end because of an uprising by the Kikuyu people motivated by alleged grievances over land tenure. This was entirely news to me but I am sure that I was not alone in my ignorance. My parents and their friends never spoke of the trouble that we were told later had been brewing among the African people for a generation. Indeed subsequent accounts of the Mau Mau uprising traced the roots of the problem to alleged injustices arising from the squatter system in the so-called ‘White Highlands’ by which indigenous - mainly Kikuyu families- were permitted to live on white owned farms in exchange for their labour. We learned subsequently that Jomo Kenyatta and his fellow members of the Kenya African Union had been campaigning for land rights for Africans since the end of the Second World War and possibly even before that.

The declaration of a State of Emergency gave the Colonial authorities sweeping powers which they rapidly put to use. These included the arrest and detention of Jomo Kenyatta and a group of his closest followers who were accused of managing a proscribed organisation (the Mau Mau) and put to trial in a remote area of northern Kenya. Even though the prosecution evidence was seen to be highly flawed, the inevitable guilty verdicts were duly handed down and with them sentences of seven years hard labour. By then, thousands of Kikuyus and members of related tribes had been rounded up and detained in military sweeps carried out by British troops who had been sent to the colony in large numbers. Once out of school, my father took me and my mother to a Nairobi hotel where he thought we would be safe.

Neither he or my mother would tell me when we would be returning to our home about five miles from the centre of the city. I think this was the first time that I had ever stayed in a luxury hotel and I soon made friends with many of the other European children who had been similarly evacuated with their mothers while their fathers reported to local police stations as volunteers. Suddenly everyone seemed to possess a gun. My father had an automatic pistol and even my mother who I am certain would never have fired a shot in anger and would have wildly missed the target if she had, was given a silver Beretta which fitted neatly into her handbag. Evidently there was a crisis of epic proportions among the Europeans but the African waiters were as cheerful and friendly as ever, which even then I thought must be somewhat odd if it was their intention to have us thrown out of the country.

The panic lasted for only a few days and I then found myself back at school and living at home once more. However, things did not get back completely to normal for some time. For one thing, my father insisted that we had to finish our evening meal before darkness fell so that the doors could be locked and the servants returned to their quarters. My father would then go out on occasional patrol with one or more of our neighbours but would invariably do no more than to collect somebody’s unfortunate cook or gardener who had failed to get home before the curfew.

The Emergency lasted for many years even though matters were brought pretty much under control within 18 months but at a massive cost in terms of lives lost among the African population. Unlike other rebellions in the British Empire, the suppression of the Mau Mau did not immediately lead to independence which took until 1963. In retrospect, the uprising probably delayed the granting of independence to Kenya several years after it was granted to neighbouring Uganda and Tanganyika even though they were less advanced countries in many respects.

When independence did finally come it was under Jomo Kenyatta’s leadership as the first Prime Minister (later President) of Kenya. Friendly relations with Britain were quickly restored partially because one of Kenyatta’s first acts on being released from detention had been to urge the Europeans and other ethnic minorities to stay on to build the country together in the spirit of the Swahili word 'Harambee' which translated means ‘Let’s all pull together’".

Peter Crowe has send us these memories of Vanuatu in the South Pacific:

Father Lini asked me for two dollars, I did not know what for, although he was helping us record the thunderous slit-drums for pig killing ceremonies. "There you are," he said,"you are now a member of the New Hebrides National Party, and this is a copy of number 2 of New Hebrides Viewpoints." It was 1971, the print run of the magazine was 25 copies. A decade later Father Lini became the first prime minister of newly independent Vanuatu, a micro-state of 83 Pacific Islands. New Hebrides was supposed to be under a double yoke of colonialism, the Franco-Britannic condominium established at the turn of the century. In fact, the Melanesians could easily play off one side against the other, and quietly went their own way, while the Napoleonic wars were carried on in Port-Vila, the capital. Things gradually hotted up, with visits to the United Nations commission on decolonisation. The so-called authorities had to do something, like hold elections. I was roped-in to register voters in the bush of Santo, the biggest island, not fully explored, rumous of cannibalism there. Our team had to cross the River Jordan, full of sharks at the mouth, so we waded across upstream. In 1606 the Spanish expedition of Queiros and Torres had established the short-lived "New Jerusalem' here, but the Melanesians had been on the territory for 4000 years. At the first settlement we were told that a priest had threatened the bushmen that if they didn't vote his way then iron dogs stamped "made in America'' would rip through their gardens, that bulldozers would descend and wreck their houses. Therefore nobody wanted a voter's card. Why, Jimmy Stevens, later the leader of the "coconut rebellion" had pulled everyone to his station, failed to feed the people, and several died of hunger. No thanks for those cards. It was an interesting walk into the mountains, the women with bones through the nasal septum, clay pipes in their armbands. There were Christian Brothers with us, who specialised at being derisive of signs of custom, such as garden statues. One could see l9th-century manners of evangelism at work, and it disgusted me.

I proffered things like mirrors and pieces of cloth. "Why don' t you bring something useful, like bottles of kerosene and bags of-rice?" My bush knife was coveted. Well, no local store up there. Back in the capital there were demonstrations and tear-gas. The French didn't want the domino effect to touch New Caledonia, the British were keen to leave. It was all rather untidy. When the French left they failed to shred their notorious monthly reports which found their way into the Cultural Centre, for whom I was working. Someone stole those documents later on, but not before they had been read. It was a forerunner of the 1985 Greenpeace affair in New Zealand. Meanwhile, the Cultural Centre established an oral tradition programme, at my behest, to revalorise "custom". It was not evident at the time, but this became a powerful political tool - for identity. Father Walter Lini himself killed sacrificial pigs. The New Zealand Governor-General did so to howls in the press from animal-rights people and missionaries against "custom".

 

Stacy Richardson was 10 years old when John F. Kennedy was shot in November 1963, he remembers hearing the news.

"I had more interest than the average 10-year-old in the events current to that day, and so I kept track of the forthcoming visit to Dallas of John F. Kennedy, the President of the United States. It was with some trepidation that I awaited his visit, for even I knew that Dallas was politically inhospitable to those perceived as "liberal". I heard the story of the abuse suffered by former Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson in his visit to "Big DI', not too many months earlier. Still, I was reassured that nothing untoward would happen, for rain was expected, and the president would be riding with a plexiglass bubble atop his Lincoln convertible.

But when Friday morning dawned crisp and sunny, I learned that the bubbletop might not be used, and as my mom drove me to school, I was full of foreboding. And I put my fears out of mind as I plowed through my morning classes. Then at lunchtime: rumors. Something had gone wrong with the President's motorcade. Had someone shot at the President? A classmate, bringing forth the first fruit of the denial which we all would shortly experience, said, "Yes, someone in the crowd shot Kennedy with a rubber band."

But then the news came: the President had been shot. Then: the President was dead. Now: a Texan, Lyndon Johnson, is the President of the United States. Numbness settled over me, not only because the president had been assassinated, but because it had happened *here*, less than 30 miles from my home. Doubly benumbed, I settled in front of the television set to see the weekend's horror beget more horror.

Dimly I remember the reaction around the world: a broadcast from Britain of "That Was The Week That Was"; responses from world leaders, many of those leaders grief-stricken; the "man on the street" in the interviews inarticulate, trying to find a way to express feelings which were inexpressible.

So: I was not alone. Everyone else was finding this as unbelievable as I did. But after that Friday, the assassination was no longer spoken about among my friends and classmates; a blanket of shock (and, again, denial) settled over us, and many of us began to re-emerge only when the Beatles arrived in America, early in the following year"

Dr A H Chapman was a third year medical student in the USA in 1945 - he remembers when penicillin was first introduced at the hospital where he worked.

In December 1945 I was a third year medical student on the general medical service of the New Haven Hospital. the teaching hospital of the Yale University School of Medicine, in New Haven, Connectiout, in the United States. One of the patients whom I was accompanying was a large, muscular man who had severe lobar pneumonia. There was no effective treatment for this illness at that time. The patient lay gasping for breath in an oxygen tent. He was delirious; he thought that at any moment armed men would enter the ward, come to his bed and kill him.

Suddenly he ripped the oxygen tent aside, rushed to the win- dow and, quickly opening it, climbed onto the slanting slate roof of the hospital, which was in many places covered with a thin sheet of ice and snow. Despite the constant risk of slipping from the roof and falling to his death on the ground four flights below, he made his way to the high peaked roof of the hospital and straddled the ridge there. He continually shouted, in hoarse, croaking gasps, that help should be sent to protect him from the assailants whom he said would soonbe ascending the roof to kill him.

The intern and I craned out the window to watch him in his perilous position. "Chapman," said the intern,, "this patient is assigned to you. It is your responsibility as the medicab student on the case to crawl up there and rescue the patient." I replied that I wished to continue to be a medical student and felt it was unlikely that I should do so if I undertook this task. I think my reply was, more or less, "I'm no damn fool. Why don't you try to get him down? You're the intern on the case-" We continued to twist our heads out the window and to try to donvince the patient to come down and re-enter the ward. The intern, who had many other patients to care for, soon desisted.

I decided to enter into the patient's delusions. I assured him that the police had arrived and had taken his would be assasins off to jail. After about ten minutes of such mendacious- pseudopsychiatric talk, the patient came down and began to climb back through the window. At that point several male aids, summoned from other wards as well as our own, seized him, dragged him back to his bed and firmly tied his wrists and ankles to the four corners of the iron bedstead. We then tried, without success, to get him to accept his oxygen tent again. The in-tern and the resident physician,, who had by this time arrived, decided that it was the lesser evil to let him exhaust himself by constant thrashing and struggling, as opposed to sedating him. His already limited breathing capacity would be dangerously compromised by sedative medications. Against all expectations he recovered he remembered nothing of the several day period during which he was delirious.

When, about six months later, the first penicillin arrived in the hospital, such cases became rare. We were astonished and delighted at the results of this truly miraculous drug. It cured many kinds of infectious diseases for which we had hereto- fore had only treatments of doubtful value. When we first began to employ penicillin we gave it once every two hours in intra- muscular injections of 20,000 units, or 240,000 units in each twenty-four hours Todays a typical tablet of penicillin, taken for a badly sore throat or a gravely infected wound has a little more than twice that amount. After that, many other antibiotics were developed, until we now have a panoply of effective agents for many kinds of infections.

I have witnessed this change, as well as many other medical developments, in a cen- tury which has seen more medical progress than in all preceding therapeutic history. And I have been privileged to experience these things as a doctor.

A couple of years later I heard Sir Howard Florey, during a visit to America, tell of the first use of penicillin, initially disecovered by Sir Alexander Fleming in a contaminated bacterial culture in 1928. he described his employment of penicillin in treating battle wounds during the Second World War. He had convinced the doctors in a military hospital to discontinue continual washing of wounds with an oxydating agent, and was dusting penicillin powder into a severely infected wound. One of the doctors in the group which was watching him said, quite audibly, "It's,murder, just plain murder." Sir Howard took a deep breaths went on sprinkling his penicillin powder, and made medical history"

 

Lawrence Watt from New Zealand remembers the sharemarket crash of 1987.

" I was a business reporter, on the morning (our time) of the 1987 sharemarket crash. We went mad calling up key people, seeing how they were affected by the crash. One of my tasks was to call one of New Zealand's wealthiest men, who had lost millions upon millions in share value. He said he didn't care and had spent the morning playing tennis. It made the front page. The rival paper followed up the next day, pretending they had broken the story. His company later went bust. I had shares a few shares in it - now worthless. I was later told by a source that he hated losing at tennis - and used to play all sorts of sneaky tricks, like trying to distract people when they were serving"

Michael Luick-Thrams was born on a farm in Iowa/USA and now lives in Berlin/Germany. He has witnessed two major historical phenomena of the late twentieth century: the destruction of the American family farm and the rebirth of post-Wall Eastern Europe.

"The former reflects an ongoing industrialization and capitalization of the world economy which has marked the twentieth century; the latter is a reverberation of a failed massive social experiment: the building of Soviet-style communism. Both have been exceptionally disruptive to the lives of those affected; both have entailed much suffering as well as opportunity; the lingering effects of both will be with us for generations.
...................Iowa
My family had farmed the North American soil since 1630. During the last years of my youth, however, US economic and political policies meant the death of a 355-year-long family tradition. Crisis brewed in the 1960s and '70s when the US government encouraged farmers to "plow from ditch to ditch", to remove fences and unused buildings - in short, to boost production to the limit. This gospel of "feed the world" was proclaimed from on high: my parents once attended a banquet at the Clear Lake (Iowa) Surf Ballroom [where Buddy Holly performed before his plane crashed in a nearby cornfield after his last concert] to hear Secretary of Agriculture Earl Buzz extoll local farmers to "produce, produce, produce!". That same official mantra, however, collided with State Department and White House policies after the soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and shot down a Korean commercial flight. The ensuing boycott of the Soviet-sponsored Olympics was startling enough; the grain embargo, however, went beyond diplomatic tit-for-tat and resulted in the collapse of US commodities prices.

When farmers such as my parents spent--for example--$2.50 to produce a bushel of corn ("maize" in British English) but could sell the harvest for a mere $1 or $1.25 a bushel, they ran into real trouble. The first year the bank extended them credit with which to plant another crop; the same eager terms were extended the second and a third year. After a certain point, though, when a "dangerous" level of debt had been reached, the banks called in their loans and via juridical channels demanded repayment. Their customers had no choice but repay. The problem was, farm capital is not fluid, but invested: to raise the demanded sums, farmers had to liquidate their operations - their machinery, their livestock, the land...even their very homes.

In the case of my parents, my father already had taken a night-shift job at a local meat-packing plant to try to make ends meet. On a night in December 1985--at a quarter to midnight, to be exact - the Cerro Gordo County sheriff came knocking at our ancestral home and served foreclosure papers issued by the bank. Like one might have expected in Soviet Russia or Apartheid South Africa, my mother was roughly roused from sleep and brought to her feet. Unable to find her glasses and wearing only a modest nightrobe, she made her way to the door, dazed and alarmed. The shock of it all ate at her for months; when my father returned the next morning and heard the news, the world he had known since birth evaporated: he has not been the same since.

Relatively seen, my parents were lucky. Having had a modest operation of only a quarter square mile of land, their debt load was small enough to be negotiated: they had to sell the land which my great-grandparents had bought in the last century, as well as the cattle, the hogs, Dad's prized horses and the machinery, tools, etc., but were allowed to remain in the house which Ma's father and his father had built in 1925. In the same house where my mother was born, her grandparents died, I grew up... a world revolved... around seasons and ceremonies, holidays, news of war and peace, of birth and death, of food and fighting, faith and love.

Admittedly a simple, self-contained world, it was nonetheless a world which had existed at Ashlawn Farm. Since its demise, though, we have all lost part of our shared agrarian roots and have become poorer for it.

..........Eastern Europe

Given my family's disillusionment with the American status quo during the cruel 1980s, in my mind one of the best things that George Bush ever did was to send me to Czechoslovakia on the Fourth of July, 1991. Under the auspices of the United States Peace Corps, I taught American history, pedagogy and English for two years in Ostrava, the future Czech Republic's third largest city, which huddles against the Polish and Slovak borders.

When I arrived in Prague in July 1991, I encountered a gray, dreary city which hardly resembles the colorful, buzzing tourist mecca of today. At that time the restitution laws had not yet been settled, so there was not a private shop to be seen in the whole city. When I left two years later --as was the case in Ostrava, too - there was not a state-owned shop left.

This somewhat superficial example speaks of deeper, less tangible changes afoot in the country during my stint there as a teacher. Deeper hints of radical shifts of values and attitudes, however, could be seen everywhere. We foreign lecturers at Ostravska Univerzita, for example, lived not in the smoke-soaked industrial plain of Ostrava proper, but in the rambling villa of a former communist big-wig perched in Hostalkovice, a village on a hilltop some twenty minutes outside the city by bus.

We watched with interest as one villager after another tried her or his hand in opening a private business - a pastry shop, a cafe, a tour-bus line shuttling gawking Czechs to exotic destinations like Paris or London, a beauty parlor, etc. The local "potraviny" (grocery store) became a combustible source of friction, as one former local powerbroker after another vied to scoop up the sleeping gold mine during the feverish privatization which swept across the land once the national government had settled property issues. Even the frugal "commoners" of Hostalkovice kept up a dizzying pace of "modernizatcie"--throwing out communist-era furniture, stripping the walls of "Eastern" wallpaper, buying marvelous gadgets for the kitchen produced by unpronounceable Western firms, knocking out walls and building onto their humble cottages a garage...

This massive consume rush knew no boundaries nor sense. Scores of brands of yogurt or juice or other locally produced goods disappeared from the shelves as yogurt from Stuttgart, juice from Italy and other imported "stables" flooded the shops. It was as if the country was reliving four decades of "missed" development--economic as well as social: the consume craze smacked of the benighted '50s, the novice-led dabbling with metaphysics and "self- actualizacie" of the '60s or '70s, the unfettered capitalism of the 1980s.

If also confusing and frustrating, it was an intoxicatingly eventful time to live amongst the ruins of the collapsed Soviet empire. Change was not on everyone's tongue; it was in their eyes and under their feet and in their hands... Above all, Czechs the age of my students at the university were old enough to appreciate the implications of such a revolution, yet young enough to reap the benefits of it. They spoke among themselves and in class of the new world which was arising daily in their midst. Certainly, some complained. Some suffered nostalgia for the security of the drab statist world on which they had been weaned as babes. Most agreed, though: virtually anything was possible now--and they loved it!

I have returned to Ostrava a handful of times since moving to Berlin in July 1993. Each time, I have been amazed by the changes, by the transformation of the gritty, colorless pit I had first seen there in summer 1991. Now a bustling, incomparably cleaner place, Ostrava symbolizes the larger experience endlessly replicated across post-Soviet Eastern Europe. The luckiest of its inhabitants have ventured into a new world; with all its insecurities and oddities, most agree that it is better then the one which it is still replacing".

Susan Gainoutdinov from the USA remembers the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

"I have so many memories of this century that will stay with me forever, but the most vivid is the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The news reached us in the changing room of the high school gymnasium. No one believed it at first, thinking someone was making a very poor joke. But as we left the school that day and saw the faces of pedestrians and motorists, and heard the radio broadcasts on transistor radios, we knew the truth. The following days were spent in front of the television, watching the unfolding events of the funeral, the murder of the assassin, and the coming together of the world in shared grief. Whenever I think of this event today, the most indelible memory is that of the muffled drums of the funeral procession. I don't think another event of the century united so many people from so many cultures as did this tragedy".

Mr T.H Bowmer recounts a violent incident he witnessed at the college where he lectured in South Africa.