[Music]
Hello and welcome to InWisconcent.
I'm Patty Low.
Each week we bring you stories about the
people and issues in our state.
This week travel to Iraq with an Eau Claire
civilian who risks his life to help rebuild that
war-torn country.
Metacroation immigrant who works
through a physical challenge to keep an old world
tradition alive and discover how our lives are forever
intertwined with some of the most majestic trees in
our state.
We'll have all that plus a trip to
Whitefish Dunes home to some of the most beautiful and
wind-swept shores in Wisconsin.
Major funding for InWisconcent is provided by the people
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Comprehensive has designated by the National Cancer
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Wisconsin's technical colleges providing local education
for the crucial occupations essential to our communities.
Wisconsin's technical colleges.
Communities first.
Iraq is quickly approaching the October 15th National
vote on its constitution.
Since the United States invaded nearly
three years ago, thousands of Wisconsin soldiers
have traveled to Iraq nearly 50 have died.
But soldiers aren't the only people from our
state who serve in Iraq.
There are private contractors like the man in our
first report.
Wallace Rogers of O'Claire is a
consultant who's made three trips to Iraq during
the past two years.
Reporter Art Hackett says Rogers' story is one of trying
to establish stability under extremely volatile conditions.
Local government is Wallace Rogers' business.
Counsel President Rogers.
He's an eight-year veteran
on the O'Claire City Council, who's the former planner for
O'Claire County.
Okay, the first discussion item is presentation
of proposal to hire a consultant to conduct a health insurance
study. Rogers is now a consultant to local
governments himself.
The career has taken him all
around the world.
South Africa, all through the former Soviet
Union, Guyana and South America, not the real garden spots
of the world, but places that are going from a
more centralized kind of government to a decentralized
system. This is a souvenir of his most
recent assignment, Iraq.
This is Saddam's parade grounds in that area.
That's an impact.
That's in Baghdad in the green zone, yeah.
Huge. Rogers went to Iraq in the summer
of 2003.
This was just a couple of months after
the war ended.
And for somebody in my business, this is sort
of like the Super Bowl, I guess, because there's so much
attention. There are so many resources that were
to be allocated to this effort.
You wanted to be there?
Yes. Yeah, I wanted to see firsthand what it was like.
This is how a U.S.
government website portrayed the
project with which Rogers worked.
His job was to help build local governments
in a country where everything had been run out of Baghdad.
At the local level, the Iraqi people with U.S.
AID training and support are learning to make
decisions directly affecting their lives.
Rogers worked for the Research Triangle Institute.
RTI, a think tank based in North Carolina, is under
contract to the agency for international development.
We had an office in the city of Decree, and this
was our gate here.
This is a Bradley fighting thing.
Rogers first posting was in Saddam Hussein's hometown
of Decree.
All this stuff was built in the 90s
during the kind of joke about this oil for food.
Yeah, this is for palace.
Rogers realized how difficult his job was going
to be as he spent more and more time in Iraq.
We set up these city councils and these provincial
councils. There were no elections for these things,
no local elections.
So we tried to give these people
a simple instruction in Robert's Rules of Order,
or you could go more into budget issues, but the
problem was, is we never allocated money directly
to the local governments to be able to direct where
they wanted to.
So the local governments were
really and still are debating societies.
Who were these people?
They were either tribal leaders,
shakes, or people suggested by tribal leaders.
Did they have business experience or a management
experience? Yeah, some of them did.
Another large group that really got
involved in not so much at the local government level,
but at the provincial and national government level,
were a whole wave of Iraqi exiles who came into the
country. They knew how things operated.
So the tendency was to move those
people into leadership positions, but the problem
there was that they didn't have a political
following when we ran up closer to an election.
Rogers soon got a promotion and was put in charge of working
with local governments in the Kurdish region in northern
Iraq. And the longer I was there, the more problematic.
He came to move around.
It was a little more dangerous.
When I got to Iraq in October 2003, it was a
the security situation was not what it is right
now. It progressively got worse.
The longer I wasn't I wasn't Iraq.
We had to evacuate the team out
of Mosul and things got really tough in Mosul.
So we moved them up the road here to to hook and
ran our Mosul program with our local staff
from this office into hook.
So we first had an office in a hotel.
We'd have a cocktail hour at 5 30
every day.
We were up there and that was on the
hotel roof.
Rogers has he tried to use the daily
cocktail hour to give his staff some semblance
of normalcy.
Things were not normal.
Something as simple as a visit to a mayor
required a convoy of armored vehicles.
By the time I left, we were spending about
40 cents of every dollar we had on security and
it was really eating into our programming.
We were having to cut back our programming
even to the point of laying off our expat specialists.
Do you feel like in the time you were there that
you did actually manage to accomplish something as far as
getting local government going?
There's so much of traditional centralized government, not
decentralized government.
I'm inclined to think it'll take a long time, at
least in generation, for any place in the region
whether it be Jordan or Iraq or to really establish
a viable local government.
Something like what we can relate to here.
Rogers made two more trips to Iraq.
One was in December of 2004 to help Iraq
ies include principles of federalism into their new
constitution. The other was in May of 2005 to work
with the Iraqi agency which controls the country's
oil reserves.
In August, delegates hammered out a
proposed constitution for the new Iraq.
It will be up for ratification in October 15th.
In the meantime, bombings have taken the lives of
numerous Iraqi police and US and Iraqi soldiers.
Earlier this week, Rogers told us the place lurches closer
to civil war by the week.
Rogers says the United States brought the reconstruction
of Iraq to where it is today, but the US can do little
to direct its future.
I think most people who have followed the Iraq
situation realize now that what happens to Iraq depends on the
Iraqis. The irony is that it always depends on the
Iraqis. We couldn't impose something on people.
It's a lesson that we have to
learn and relearn throughout history.
Wallace Rogers tells us that given the current state of
affairs in Iraq, it's unlikely he'll be able to
return in the near future.
Instead, Rogers next tour of duty will be a
three-week trip to Jordan to work with emerging
local governments in that country.
He's also considering a longer term
posting in Macedonia.
The woman in our next story comes from another frequently
war-torn part of the world.
Stephanie Lemke-Vuljianek grew up in a Croatian
mountain village and emigrated to the United States
in the 1970s.
While she left her homeland behind, she holds on
to her heritage and traditions, traditions that live on
through her hands.
Producer Liz Kurner has her story.
For Stephanie Lemke-Vuljianek, creating embroidered eggs is
more than artistic expression.
It helps her feel connected to family in Croatia and to
happy memories from childhood.
It's also a way to cope with some of the difficulties
that have come her way.
I think it is just something so simple that means so much.
The style of decorating eggs is unique to the
area where Stephanie grew up, south of Zagreb
in Croatia.
It's called Pisanica.
Pisanica is a Slavic word for writing.
So it would be like Pisanica,
Pisanica, you know, like writing with a thread.
For hundreds of years, children were given these
beautiful eggs at Easter.
Stephanie learned how to create this art form from her mother.
On a visit to the old country, Stephanie discovered that this
art form has almost died out.
The thread you would grab when you come from the site.
She's keeping traditional live here by teaching others,
including her granddaughters, Madeline and Lauren.
I give them plastic needles
and I put the thread on and they are doing it and
they are so excited about grammar sakes, you
know. You are making one for me or you darling.
I'm gonna pass the tradition on because I think that
we need to look back and where we are from, you know.
Stephanie grew up in a mountain village in Croatia,
an area where faith and art go hand in hand.
The traditional pattern embroidered on the eggs
is called the God's Eye.
We would call it Boji or Korv, it's just God's Eye.
In Stephanie's family, the God's Eye pattern
was not simply a decoration.
She still remembers what it meant to her mother.
She would use like the egg and she would point the
God's Eye in front of us and she would say now
focus on the center of that egg and then she would
move the egg from side to side and she says see now
the eye, you can still see the eye and that's how it
is with God.
God can see you no matter what you
are doing so God is always watching over you.
That was enough to scare us for good.
The beauty of Stephanie's intricate creations is
even more remarkable for the effort it requires
from hands crippled by rheumatoid arthritis.
I have severe rheumatoid
arthritis for about 30 years now and I have
plastic knuckles and I have plastic elbows and
metal knees and spinal fusion so I'm like the
biannic woman.
My hands have little nodules which
are normal for people with arthritis but not in not so
many. It doesn't bother me you know except sometimes people
look at them and they are afraid of them or
something or like my little granddaughter says to me.
One time she came to me and she hugs me and she
kisses my hand and she says oh Baka I love you hands
but you know sometimes when I look at them I feel like running
they look like monster's hands.
A sense of humor and a passion to create often carry her
through difficult times.
While healing from elbow surgery Stephanie couldn't
manage the two-handed art of egg decorating.
Instead she took up a paintbrush.
Inspiration again came from her childhood.
My first painting is the painting of my mother
in my house making the eggs.
She is sitting there by the table and we are
sitting around waiting for the eggs to be done.
We were very poor and so to have an egg for one person
was like a special gift.
We were a big family and a close family.
My great grandmother, my grandma,
my mom dad and my dad's father, my grandfather
lived together and then five children.
All in one room house with the dirt
floor. Another early painting depicts a favorite
Easter memory.
In that painting you see Vuzmanka which is the
Easter fire that is burned at 4 o'clock in the morning and
all the children and all the people in the town wake up and
are united in this particular moment in prayer and hopes
for better future.
It was such a magical moment
you know that it stayed with me for up to today
you know and I will carry it until I die because
it was just so beautiful.
But these beautiful memories are
also colored with sadness.
Stephanie grew up in a region of Croatia ravaged
by war.
A lot of men lost their life in a war there.
Therefore the region was the poorest region and most
households were headed by women.
It was poverty that forced Stephanie to leave her
homeland. She found a job in Germany then moved
to America in the early 1970s.
She's traveled far from her childhood home
and faced a great deal of physical hardship along the
way. But through it all crafting her eggs has been a constant,
a way to keep going through good times and bad.
This is what I think it's
important to find in life just something to do for
the times when you don't feel like doing anything
you know.
Don't give it you just go on you know.
Stephanie Lemke, Voleonix, Croatian eggs are in both
the Smithsonian Museum and the White House egg
collection. But perhaps the most interesting
place to find her work is in the time capsule in front
of the Mezzo-Maini Museum.
It's scheduled to be opened in 2049.
While some hold on to history and tradition
through art others turn to the living world around us.
Madison Arborist and author Bruce Allison celebrates a link
between some of our state's trees and Wisconsin
history. Producer Joanne Garrett found Allison
also has a deep curiosity about the ways in which
trees in our lives intersect.
Trees root us.
They give us a sense of place.
They give us a sense of our moment in time.
People and trees co-evolve.
Trees are equally as complex as mammals.
They have the same nucleic acids that form the
basis of our genetic code.
They also have cells that got cell walls mitochondria.
They have a skin that holds all the organs together on
the outside.
That's the bark.
The molecule at the center of hemoglobin is the same as
the molecule of chlorophyll except that chlorophyll
has magnesium as an element in the center and the
hemoglobin has iron in the center.
Otherwise that molecule is the same.
We're made of the same stuff.
We are connected in many physical ways and
I think that probably explains why we seem to be
connected in emotional ways.
We're connected and those connections are
explored through portraits of trees in every root and
anchor, a book by Madison author Bruce Allison.
Allison is an arborist.
He knows the science and tending
of trees.
But Allison's book is about history.
The history of Wisconsin's famous and historic
trees and the ways in which stories of people
and trees have intertwined.
We're right by the president's oak.
It's a beautiful burrow oak over
250 years old.
A burrow oak on the campus of the University
of Wisconsin in Madison.
It's been rooted and reaching upward since well before
Wisconsin became a state.
And this tree actually predates the university
during the Civil War period, the camp randall soldiers would
supposedly according to legend use it for gunnery practice.
And that explains why we have large holes in
the crown of that tree.
There is another kind of tree on the Madison campus
that has been just as much a part of people's
memories. These graceful elms formed a cool shady canopy
over the famed Baskham Hill.
These are two magnificent elms that were part of the original
planting here, which is now over 150 years ago.
Many of those people that have graduated
from the university, this is probably that one
visual image that they carry with them of those large trees
that had crowns that were pusing one against the
other. Elms were a dominant tree.
In fact, in the book we call it remember the
elms because the connection is very, very strong.
Elms were often planted as memorial trees, using a
tree as a way to remember a loved one.
At weddings it would be very common
for people to take two elms samplings, plant them side
by side, and then twist the trunks together so that
over time they would grow together and ultimately
fuse so that when eyes and arborists, perhaps
you know 100 years later, come to take that tree down
if it died.
I would find in the center as we cut
through a cross section of the truck double hearts
and they would literally be rotating as they went higher up.
We loved our elms and we all suffered a loss when Dutch
Elm disease ravaged the state.
This is a photo of the last Elm on State Street, Madison, 1974.
Those few that remain on the Madison campus
are lovingly tended, inoculated, protected.
Out of the hundreds on the whole campus, only 17
survived. Trees like us are terribly mortal.
And so many of the stories in
the book are about trees that are no longer there.
The Fort Howard Elm for example, which was at Fort Howard
which has now become Green Bay.
It was there at the time of the Pontiac conspiracy so it was
there for the Native Americans time.
It was there for the French time.
It was there for the British time.
And then finally there for the American time.
It's the combat Dutch Elm disease but not
until it had 200 years to watch the people in our state.
They stood watch.
They often served a purpose.
This was a signal tree, a trail marker tree in
the Horacan Marsh.
This is the Indian halfway
tree, paced off by Native American runners.
It's the halfway point
between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River.
This is the Civil War signup tree, where volunteers
mustered up before they left for training camps
and onto that terrible war.
The tree still survives in Deleven.
A sycamore in Grand County holds a
single sad story of a father in the Civil War.
He received a letter saying, "Your son has been
very terribly wounded.
He's in a hospital in Ohio."
The father made that very arduous trip all the way
to Ohio and was with his son at the moment that the son expired,
he literally died in his arms.
As he brought his son's coffin back to the
homestead in Wisconsin, the father found a local tree
sampling, picked that up and brought it with him to
commemorate that moment of saying goodbye to his son.
The father planted that tree.
It was a sycamore tree, very common in Ohio,
not quite as common here, and that sycamore is now
one of the oldest and largest in the state.
It grows on the site near the
burial of the son and on the original homestead.
We all have that special tree that represents
our family in some way.
For the book, Allison shows a silver
maple on the Jones Deary farm, where generations of Joneses,
including Francis High Street, Milo Jones, and Adele Graves,
have gathered.
This was the tree that was planted in 1876 by
grandfather several times back.
Generations. It's a beautiful tree and it was
fun for one of my cousins weddings when they put
the swing in the tree.
Now that my kids enjoy coming here and spending
a lot of time swinging in the swing on the trees.
Oh, we had wonderful summers
here. I swam a lot.
I think the grown-up swam,
but they also sat in the shade more than we did.
We have this tie to trees, and that tie is explored
in portraits of trees past and present in every root
and anchor.
Allison's book on Wisconsin's famous
and historic trees.
That's our program for this
week. Join us next time when we'll have all new
reports, including one from the 2005 World Dairy Expo.
The Expo takes place through this weekend
in Madison.
More than 65,000 people are expected to
attend the 39th annual event, and it wouldn't be the
dairy Expo without the stars of the show, the cows.
Thousands of dairy cattle are on-site competing for honors
in seven breed shows.
Among all of those very special cattle,
there's one that stands out in particular.
Next week, we'll introduce you
to the cow of the dairy Expo.
In the meantime, we leave you with a trip to Whitefish
Dunes, found in Door County.
For in Wisconsin, I'm Patty Low.
See you next time.