WHO WE ARE

ALL SOULS IN THE WIDER WORLD —by Marietta Moskin

When we sit in church on a Sunday morning, we often don't know the people sitting in the pews around us. We know many of the members of the congregation who are very active in church activities and outreach programs, but even though faces sometimes become familiar, we don't necessarily know anything about those other people although many of our members do important work beyond our church doors.

Leah Hanlon at the Internet Project of Kosovo overlooking the former Secret Police building in Prisvtina—December, 1999

Leah Hanlon, who has been a member of All Souls since 1994, has quietly pursued her own personal outreach efforts that take her about twice a year far from her job as an attorney working for AT&T across the Atlantic Ocean to the troubled countries of the Balkans. Using her vacations, Leah volunteers her time as an election supervisor and observer in places like Bosnia, Kosovo and even Serbia itself. So far, she has made seven election trips to the region, sometimes doing hands-on supervision at polling stations, sometimes just acting as an observer to make sure that no irregularities occur. She has worked in five elections in Bosnia (including 1998, when she supervised Bosnian Serb refugees voting in a polling station in Novi Sad, Serbia, which was destroyed by nato bombs a few months later), one in Croatia and one in Kosovo.

Since democratic elections are fairly new experiences for these poll workers and voters, who once simply showed up to vote for Tito, a fair amount of "coaching" is often needed. Inexperienced workers might be tempted to just dump out ballots in a heap on a table and start counting instead of first sealing the ballot box while verifying the numbers of ballots issued and the signatures on the voter register, so they can be compared with the number of ballots found in the box. Leah estimates that she's seen a problem rate of up to 15% in some of the elections she has supervised. One big problem is the dropping of names from voter lists. Another is the sometimes-haphazard assignment of voters to voting places. Confusion over extensions of voting hours sometimes also created chaos, especially in the early Bosnian elections, since some of the voting took place in refugee camps, and refugees often had to be bused from one place to another. At times, Leah has had to use her best judgement in interpreting unclear rules to allow as many of the eager voters as possible to fairly cast their ballots.

"Last October in Kosovo," Leah says, "We had the usual percentage of problems, and one young Albanian man who found he couldn't vote after standing in line for six hours, chewed me out in absolutely flawless English. He said, 'I can't hate you, because you're an American, but I can't understand how you, as an American, would permit yourself to be affiliated with this travesty!' I can only imagine what the fellow thought after our Florida fiasco just a couple of weeks later!"

Training for this complicated endeavor was minimal in the early elections, although now there is brief but intense training for supervisors and poll-workers before each election.

Leah began her Balkan adventure in 1996 when she read about the need for election observers in the New York Law Journal. She volunteered, was interviewed and accepted on the basis of her résumé and her work experience. Her educational background also helped. She has a BA from the University of Virginia, with a double major in Foreign Affairs and Economics, and combined MBA and JD degrees from Harvard. While she does not speak any of the Balkan languages, her language skills include German, spoken by many in the Balkans, and Spanish. She has also studied some Russian, and so can often decipher key words and phrases in Bosnian Serbo-Croatian when there is no interpreter at hand, even the variant written in the Cyrillic alphabet.

International administration and observation of elections in the Balkans, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union is handled by the OSCE—the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which has its roots in the Helsinki Accords of the 1970s. Leah has also done non-election work in the Balkans through the International Rescue Committee. Her legal work for that organization included a project in Pris^vtina, Kosovo, to enable the establishment of an Internet backbone making communications between Kosovo and the rest of the world possible.

Leah stressed that her work is not dangerous although she admitted that at times, she has faced tricky moments. Russians, Germans and Americans are variously trusted or despised. At times the State Department insists that American supervisors be stationed in places under control of the American army. "Although some Balkan ethnic groups harbor some hostility towards Americans, most individuals are very interested in the United States and are especially fascinated that I live in a 31st floor apartment in Manhattan," Leah reports.

There is a big difference between international supervisors and observers. A supervisor is actually an election worker and has the power to close a polling station when serious irregularities or security problems threaten the integrity of the process. By contrast, observers are not allowed to handle ballots and may only ask questions. Leah has observed only once, in Croatia. In most elections, Leah has been as much a teacher as strictly a supervisor. In all elections, however, when she sees these eager voters standing in line for hours in order to vote and overcoming fears and obstacles to get to the voting stations, she is frustrated about our lackadaisical American voters who don't understand how lucky we are.

Over a period of almost three years, entirely on her own, Leah assisted one of her former Bosnian interpreters, who had managed to teach himself excellent English. She helped him obtain a student visa to study at the New England Culinary Institute and become an intern at a Ritz Carlton hotel in Florida. She had hoped her protégé would get a four-year degree, allowing him to obtain an H1-B visa. Unfortunately, attracted by the offer of a short-term work visa from the hotel, he decided to discontinue his studies, and the hotel declined to provide the necessary support for an eventual successful visa application. Rather than remain here as an illegal immigrant, the young man decided to return to Bosnia and an uncertain future.

At All Souls, Leah has kept a low profile although she has participated for many years in the Monday Night Hospitality program as a team captain. She lives in the neighborhood but reverse-commutes to her job in New Jersey. Her unusual outside volunteer activity reminded me again that our small UU denomination has from its historical inception, touched the rest of the world through its members. Some, like Leah Hanlon, connect our own congregation to places far away.