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Spotlights Alice Hengesbach Grabowski '96 University of Dayton Quarterly, Spring 2006 The woman was ill. So were all the others in her family — if they were not already dead. Their land and their water were killing them. Unknowingly, they swam and bathed and washed their clothes in deadly water. Deadly, too, was the land upon which they pastured their cattle and grew their food. In the late 1950s a nuclear explosion had contaminated the woman’s western Siberian village. Not until the 1990s did her government even acknowledge the event. In the summer of 2000, the woman was telling her story to a group monitoring nuclear power and weapons plants. Serving as an interpreter was Alice Hengesbach Grabowski. That the woman had been so affected by events of which he had no knowledge, Grabowski says, “opened my eyes to the importance of having information. Knowledge is power. People make mistakes. Things aren’t perfect. But it’s important to have the opportunity to do something about it.” Grabowski works to give people that opportunity. The international studies grad spent her junior year in Russia and served there in the Peace Corps for two years. Building on that experience, she joined the Initiative for Social Action and Renewal in Eurasia, becoming ISAR’s executive director in 2004. ISAR builds connections between grassroots American environmentalists and those in the former Soviet Union, a task that is becoming more difficult. Funding has waned and paid staff are becoming volunteer as public interest has moved to other crises. Even the Peace Corps is no longer in Russia. Nevertheless, Grabowski, who recently married and moved from Washington, D.C., to Miami, says she realizes “I was the beneficiary of working where there was a lot of interest and funders.” The scaling back now of small organizations like ISAR, she says, “is unfortunate. The big organizations are very important, but we also need involvement on the local level. Everybody needs to be part of decision making. “Some of that will be lost.” —Thomas M. Columbus

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