Sometimes I wonder how in the world I could have lived what I have lived and done what I have done, thriving in a man’s world, when I came into it as the girl child of World War II refugees who had little before that war and lost everything by the time the war was over.  We moved from a mining town in Belgium to a factory town in New Jersey, but, somehow I made it to the women’s Ivy League, Mount Holyoke, one of the Seven Sisters, by the time I was seventeen and a dozen years later to the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.  Even more incredible I was greeting ambassadors when I was twenty one and, as a United Nations consultant, sitting and discussing with a president when I was just over forty.  More than that I did it ,as Frank Sinatra sang,  ‘My Way’, jogging in cities in Europe, Africa and Asia in the seventies when ‘normal’ people would come out to stare at a woman doing that, smoking big cigars which unexpectedly opened doors to incredible conversations, and doing all in a small five foot three, one hundred ten pound frame.  My life has been so full that people keep telling me to write an autobiography but what use is that when separate parts of that life have given rise to books (Before they Cut the Ivy, Mangoes and Blood, Choices), as I have always lived many lives – my life and the lives of the people I’ve known in a golden journey.  For so much, dear reader, is based on people, on you, on those around you, on those far from you and on those who came before you, and a great part of the riches of the mind and spirit that you can achieve is based on how you deal with the challenges you face.