Strong Macedonian Women

The young, under 30, women here in Macedonia are so very impressive. The professional women I have met are very well educated, fluent in a number of languages and determined to make something positive happen in their country. They are, to an individual, very worried about bringing up children in a very polluted country, but question their ability to change the course of events in a country where even the best educated throw trash into the river. They take full advantage of opportunities to travel and learn, and each one I have met has attended university courses in the US, Germany, Asia, France, England or Canada.

Attached is a picture of me with two energetic young women who are helping to develop a HR training consortium here in Macedonia. I am in the middle with Afrodita Kermicieva Panovska on the left, who runs the largest independent training company in Macedonia, called CS Global and, on the right, Zaklina Gestakovska, who is staffing the consortium, which is known as HRDF - the Human Resource Development Fund. She is the former training manager here in Macedonia for the US Peace Corps. I have been working with them to help the consortium get off the ground and giving them tools, copies of forms and advice on what works and what doesn't for basic management training. A number of companies, such as Microsoft, Hannaford Bros. Co., Wright Express and LL Bean, gave me copies of their performance tools to share with Macedonians doing exactly this kind of work. It has been such fun to get to know them! One of the women I met yesterday is off next fall to either Syracuse University of Georgia Tech on a Fulbright fellowship to study information security. She handles all of IT training development for the consortium mentioned above.

Take a look a the consortium website:http://www.hrdf.org.mk/