[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 71 (Thursday, June 9, 1994)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: June 9, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                         THE ROAD LESS TRAVELED

                                 ______


                          HON. BILL RICHARDSON

                             of new mexico

                    in the house of representatives

                        Wednesday, June 8, 1994

  Mr. RICHARDSON. Mr. Speaker, I want to call to the attention of my 
colleagues, the story of two of my constituents, Nancy Reynolds and 
Kate Radakovich, both of Santa Fe, as detailed in the accompanying 
article from the New Mexican, the local newspaper in Santa Fe. Ms. 
Reynolds and Miriam Radakovich, Kate's daughter, have been selected as 
participants in the Congo expedition, a 1-year, 6,066-mile trek across 
the African Congo retracing the steps of Henry Morton Stanley's 1874 
expedition.
  Ms. Reynolds will be a team captain of the secondary team which will 
supervise the trek's circumnavigation of Lake Tanganyika, a hike of 
several weeks which begins in mid-October. Miriam Radakovich will be a 
participant in the entire expedition. Kate Radakovich was so inspired 
by her daughter's involvement in this remarkable transcontinental 
expedition that she has begun the process of application for admittance 
to the Peace Corps.
  The attached article, written by Candelora Versace, provides an 
eloquent explanation of this wonderful adventure and I commend it to my 
colleagues.

                  [From the New Mexican, May 1, 1994]

                         The Road Less Traveled

                         (By Candelora Versace)

       Africa: dangerously exotic, deeply mysterious, darkly 
     primal. To some of us, the qualities of this most 
     misunderstood continent elicit feelings of fear and 
     avoidance. But to the incurable romantic, the incessant 
     wanderer, the one who knows that to fly one must first leap, 
     Africa holds perhaps the last promise on the planet for true 
     adventure and discovery.
       To the 16 people who were chosen from 1,700 applicants to 
     comprise The Congo Expedition, that promise came true April 
     22. After several years of planning and an agonizing delay of 
     a full year, The Congo Expedition departed Washington, D.C. 
     amid great fanfare to begin the first leg of a year-long 
     adventure--the adventure of a lifetime.
       Retracing the steps of Henry Morton Stanley's 1874 Anglo-
     American Expedition to verify the source of the Nile River, 
     the trekkers--American and African--will then follow the 
     Congo (Zaire) River from its source in eastern Zaire to the 
     Atlantic Ocean.
       The entire expedition will be on foot, with the team 
     expected to cover approximately 30 miles a day, each member 
     laden with a 40-pound pack. Resupply teams will periodically 
     rendezvous with the trekkers, bringing food, news, mail and 
     film. They will depart with journals, samples, specimens and 
     rolls and rolls of exposed film.
       Ted Turner will be producing a major video documentary 
     about the expedition. Twenty-seven thousand school districts 
     throughout the United States will be following the expedition 
     through live and interactive satellite broadcasts.
       And two Santa Fe women will spend the next year following 
     the progress of the trek with perhaps greater concentration 
     than anyone.
       Kate Radakovich, a nurse working in Dr. Leah Morton's 
     office, is already planning her letter-writing campaign to 
     her daughter Miriam, 36, of Columbus, Ohio, who is serving as 
     a water safety specialist on the trek. Radakovich, who is 60-
     plus, got so caught in the excitement that she recently 
     decided to apply to the Peace Corps for her own adventure.
       Nancy Reynolds, 66, a retired Washington lobbyist and 
     consultant with several extended visits to Africa already 
     under her belt, will spend the next six months in an 
     intensive physical training program. She is getting prepared 
     for her role as Team Captain of a secondary team supervising 
     the trek's circumnavigation of Lake Tanganyika, a hike of 
     several weeks that begins in mid-October.
       ``We'll be following Stanley's diaries to the letter,'' 
     Reynolds said, noting that Stanley's book, Through the Dark 
     Continent, Vol. 2, has served as the primary guide for the 
     expedition. Reynolds, along with the entire expedition team, 
     has been studying both contemporary and historical maps to 
     determine the names of villages Stanley visited on his 
     legendary adventure that may still be there.
       Reynolds said she will arrive in Tanzania and meet the team 
     in Uvinza, then walk to Ujiji, the site of that famous 
     meeting: ``Dr. Livingstone, I presume?''. The trekkers 
     will rest in Kigoma, and then begin circumnavigation of 
     the lake.
       ``When we come around the lake and the team then goes off 
     through Zaire to walk across to the Atlantic Ocean, to a spot 
     called Banana Point, I'll go to visit friends in Zanzibar and 
     Kenya,'' she said.
       Reynolds has already begun a vigorous exercise program with 
     daily aerobics and weight training with trainer Cindy Romero. 
     In the past few weeks, she has added daily hikes in Tesuque 
     and behind the Santa Fe Spa with Romero, loading her pack to 
     20 pounds to start.
       ``I'm trying right now to work up to 10 miles,'' she said. 
     ``In October, when I go, I'll have a 40-pound pack and we'll 
     be going probably 20 miles a day.''
       With more energy than a teen-ager and enough enthusiasm to 
     fill a stadium, Reynolds has become one of the expedition's 
     biggest cheerleaders. She has stacks of maps, books and 
     clippings detailing Stanley's first journey, the development 
     of the current trek and information about Africa.
       ``Africa is my passion,'' she said, although for her it is 
     a relatively recent discovery. In the 1980s, she was 
     appointed by U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Jeanne 
     Kirkpatrick to the post of United Nations Representative for 
     the Status of Women, which involved an immediate three-week 
     tour through Africa.
       ``I was thoroughly hooked,'' Reynolds said. 
     ``Paleoanthropology has always been a secret passion for me. 
     I put together the Decade For Women conference in Nairobi, 
     Kenya in the mid-'80s, and I had an opportunity to meet the 
     Leakey family, who kept inviting me to come back on fossil 
     hunts.''
       Reynolds also has been president of Rhino Rescue U.S.A., a 
     nonprofit animal rights organization, and said she has taken 
     every chance she's had to return to Africa.
       ``It got so my family had to remind me where my home really 
     was,'' she said with a laugh. ``I gave up vacations to 
     anywhere else just to go to Africa.''
       Reynolds said she is not anticipating any danger to the 
     team throughout the trek, despite the unrest that continues 
     throughout the region.
       ``I would be most uneasy about Zaire, which is in chaos and 
     turmoil, but the Zaire government has assured Jim Owens (the 
     expedition leader) that there will be no problem for them and 
     I'm sure it's true. That will be the toughest part of the 
     journey for them,'' she said.
       Radakovich said her daughter's interest in the expedition 
     began with an article about it that she spotted in the 
     Washington Post a few years ago.
       ``She was growing disenchanted with her job in D.C., which 
     involved a lot of computer work for various agencies and 
     organizations. She saw the article requesting volunteers and 
     thought it would be an opportunity for a big life change,'' 
     Radakovich explained.
       ``The expedition was originally scheduled to depart in May 
     of 1993, but was postponed because the organization still 
     needed to raise money. She was all ready to go, her stuff was 
     in storage, she had given up her apartment, and the let-down 
     was so great that she just decided to go ahead and go to 
     Africa on her own,'' she said.
       ``So she traveled around through the region for three 
     months on her own and had a wonderful time, but she said she 
     also realized just how difficult the year-long trek was going 
     to be, and she wasn't sure if she wanted to be part of it.''
       Eventually, the spirit of the expedition got to Miriam, and 
     she spent her last hour in the D.C. airport with her sister 
     Janet, going over stacks of paperwork. Janet, who also lives 
     in Columbus and whose roommate Mary Maloney is serving as the 
     expedition's horticulturist, has taken on the formidable task 
     of handling her sister's mail and belongings for the next 
     year.
       Radakovich, who has been in Santa Fe seven years, said her 
     own excitement about the trip is as strong as if she herself 
     were going.
       ``I told my daughter I shared her identical feelings. It's 
     been a rollercoaster of exhilaration and anxiety. I have an 
     intense pride that she had been chosen to participate in this 
     great effort, but there certainly are worries for me.
       ``The trip was originally scheduled to be ten months, and 
     then they extended it to a year, and that just seems awfully 
     long, but I have a firm trust that things will work out,'' 
     she said.
       The family has long had a spirit of reaching out, she said. 
     Daughter Janet was a foreign exchange student in Venezuela 
     and the family once hosted a Japanese student.
       Radakovich missed the farewell party in D.C. for the 
     expedition to start an adventure of her own; she traveled 
     instead to Dallas for the first of a series of intensive 
     interviews to join the Peace Corps. Her pride in her 
     daughter's position in the historic tour began to effect her 
     own life, she said.
       ``It has been a long time since I felt a sense of pride 
     about being a nurse,'' she said, adding that a visit to the 
     Vietnam Women's Memorial ceremony last fall touched off a 
     desire to use her training and be of service in a more 
     significant way.
       ``It's my greatest hope to get an assignment, although I 
     know the Peace Corps is now highly competitive. But wouldn't 
     it be wonderful if I could somehow rendezvous with them in 
     Africa?''

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