Smith Club of San Francisco
and Marin
Alumnae Profiles
Frederica Muhlenberg Bunge '48
Spring 2005
Profile By Sarah Cross Mills '66
"Faraway places
With
strange soundin' names
Faraway over the sea
Those faraway places
With strange soundin' names
Are callin', callin' to me
Goin' to China
Or maybe Siam
I want to see for myself
Those faraway places
I've been readin' about
In a book that I took from a shelf."
As a child, Freddie Bunge absorbed these lyrics her mother sang while playing the piano. She realized how prophetic they were decades later when she traveled to China and Thailand (once known as Siam) and many other faraway places. As the daughter of a PA Congressman, Freddie attended high school in Washington, DC, where her curiosity about different cultures grew. She really wanted to study cultural anthropology, but it wasn't offered at Smith, so she majored in Sociology and tried to satisfy her hunger for learning more about the world's peoples by reading periodicals in the library.
Answering the call of distant lands first took form as a desire to marry a foreign service officer and live abroad, so she returned to Washington with hopes of fulfilling her dream. She learned that social scientists from various universities were working on a series of handbooks on foreign countries for the U.S. Army. Each subject country was chosen because the military considered it an area where problems loomed on the horizon, and they wanted their officers to have in-depth knowledge of the political, economic, social and cultural affairs where they would be stationed. With Army funding, the project was lodged at American University which hired Freddie for one of its teams. Hard work and strict deadlines didn't diminish her wonder at being paid to do research, write and travel with stimulating colleagues. With her focus on family life, social values, health and education in Asian countries, she found herself in Malaysia, Burma, Indonesia and, yes, in China and "Siam". During 28 years with the team, Freddie co-authored more than twenty books in what became known as the Foreign Area Studies Country Survey Series. While Assistant Director of the Foreign Area Studies Department, she was responsible both to the Army and the U.S. Department of State for quality control of the books, which were ultimately also published as bound volumes for more general audiences.
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Marrying a foreign service officer was abandoned as part of the dream when she found a partner who was a psychoanalyst - and a breeder of purebred beef cattle. Freddie and her husband divided their time between Washington, with its urbane lifestyle, and Maryland farm country until her husband, a decade older than she, died after only eleven years of marriage.
Freddie stayed another eight years at American University, and at age 58, she moved to Berkeley, in large part because of its proximity to Asia, now calling with familiar, not "strange soundin' names". Having been the eyes looking in to many countries, she wanted to work more directly to improve the lives of women and children. Her first step was to enroll at U.C. School of Public Health, where she received her M.A. in 1984. Encounters with ageism, shocking to anyone who knows Freddie even today, blocked her efforts to work with Unicef. Then a challenging opportunity arose, which brought together her expertise in China, her writing and editing talents, and her public health interests. Dr. C.C. Chen, an M.D. known worldwide as the originator of the concept of "barefoot doctor", was at the School of Public Health in Berkeley. He had produced a manuscript recounting his life and dedication to bringing medical services to vast rural areas of China, but it needed much work before it could be published. Freddie spent two years off and on under a Rockefeller Foundation grant, in Berkeley and twice in Chengdu, listening to Dr. Chen's stories and shepherding the resulting memoir through publication by the U.C. Press. Medicine in Rural China: A Personal Account was later translated into Chinese.
In the early 90's, horrific events halfway around the globe captivated Freddie's concerns. Seeing TV images of war in Bosnia and our government not responding to the carnage, she had to act. She gathered a list of Muslim and other groups in Croatia and sent faxes expressing her interest in helping wherever she could. Invited to Zagreb by a Catholic foundation for child war victims, she visited refugee camps and established a liaison between the foundation and a Berkeley-based aid group. The next year, because of her Bosnian contacts, she was asked to join a film crew from the relief organization World Vision which wanted to interview women who had been raped during the war. Entering the country under siege with a British UNPROFOR battalion, avoiding regular roads closed because of landmines, they witnessed terror, death and destruction in a small town 40 kilometers from embattled Sarajevo.
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Since then, Freddie has traveled to the Balkans annually. She was a counselor three summers for refugee girls at an island camp in the Adriatic run by the Global Children's Organization. Here she met another northern Californian, Stella Ruiz, who shared her concerns about these children's future. Out of this conversation grew Balkans YouthLink (BYL), an organization Stella says Freddie has poured her heart and soul into. BYL first sent two trauma recovery teams to Kosovo immediately after the war. Freddie believed that future activities should be determined by Balkan youths themselves, honoring their desires for peace and stability. Since 2000, summer YouthLink Leadership Institutes, under the direction of Erion Veliaj, a charismatic young Albanian whom Freddie first met in Kosovo, have drawn 60 ethnically diverse Balkan teens and young adults (and Stella Ruiz's three teenagers). BYL's success in supporting youth-led social change initiatives in Eastern Europe largely reflects Eri's commitment and leadership; in 2003 he founded a BYL offshoot, MJAFT!, to which the UN awarded its '04 prize for the best citizen campaign movement in the world. Freddie and her board serve as mentors and provide some financial support, but Eri and his peers now raise their own funds. In Freddie's own words, "In the Balkans region where extremists of all views are eager to gain a foothold, the need for such efforts (to advance ideals of democracy, individual rights, and religious and national tolerance) has never been more acute. Democracy, freedom, and respect for human rights are powerful antidotes to terrorism."
Also in 2000, BYL sponsored a choral group representing the three major nationalities in Bosnia as they performed Balkan music concerts in the New York City area. Their final concert was at the sixth annual State of the World Forum, the first five of which were held in San Francisco with hundreds of innovative leaders from many nations. Their talents were recognized when Nelson Mandela invited them to sing in South Africa.
While BYL's mission may be complete by the end of this year, the Institutes will undoubtedly continue. What Freddie initiated with BYL has helped young people create the civic participation necessary for building a future after an armed conflict that cost the lives of over 200,000 people, mostly civilians, and left millions homeless. For Freddie, her own youthful energy seems only to increase. She'd like to still work with young people, probably in Eastern Europe, and do more writing. Peace-building begins with knowledge and respect for differences, and for Freddie, this has been a lifelong focus, starting with that childhood longing for faraway places.
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