The Foreign Service Journal, April 2021

54 APRIL 2021 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL would be dedicated to encouraging young Bulgarians to return from work or study in the United States or Western Europe and to pursue their careers domestically. This seemed like a perfect match for our outreach efforts, given that it could touch on several key themes: engaging youth, offering career training, sharing American ideas and boosting the domestic economy of a NATO ally. But there would be more. I soon learned that the new NGO, Tuk-Tam, had been trying to organize networking and job train- ing seminars, but their applications to the Bulgarian government for funding had been turned down. I imagined that this was due to their youth, inexperience and the absence of a record of responsible grants management. At that time, I had started working with the Bulgarian branch of Junior Achievement, a job skills and entrepreneurship NGO that was organizing a two-day seminar for high school pupils called Smart Start. I noticed that, despite a Roma minority of more than 10 percent in Bulgaria, not one Roma had signed up for the seminar. Working through a local colleague in the embassy, I quickly got two Roma girls registered, but later learned that they felt uncomfortable at the seminar and did not return the second day. This is where Tuk-Tam came in. For the next two annual iterations of Smart Start, I wrote a grant for the new NGO to find the Bulgarian high schools with the largest percentage of Roma pupils, to visit the schools with Junior Achievement representa- tives and to introduce the seminar and encourage the pupils to apply to it. With the Tuk-Tammembers’ remarkably savvy skills and hard work, we met our target of 10 percent participation by Roma pupils for the next two years. At about the same time, the office of youth programs in State’s Bureau of Public Affairs and Public Diplomacy was urging all PAOs to create “youth councils” composed of youth leaders of their choosing to coordinate and advise on youth-oriented pro- grams. I struggled to explain to Washington that such a Bulgar- ian youth council would be vacuous, given the existence already of the homegrown and very promising Tuk-Tam organization. A Deeper Understanding: The Brain Drain I worked intensively with Tuk-Tam throughout my three-year assignment. In fact, given the maturity and smarts of its lead- ers, they became my advisers and confidants not only on youth issues, but on many of the problems plaguing the country. Thinking strategically, I asked myself what role a public affairs section with a modest program budget could play to address Bulgaria’s biggest problems. We certainly didn’t have the resources to stop the environmental despoliation, energize a limp economy, correct the rampant government corruption or introduce genuine rule of law in the country. But what did seem a very important and worthwhile goal of our youth programming was to slow the brain drain from Bul- garia, the exodus of the best and brightest young people to better job opportunities overseas, which depletes a country’s intellec- tual capacity and entrepreneurial work force. This was exactly the problem that Tuk-Tam was attacking in its own way. The extent of the damage from brain drain in Bulgaria and the region is alarming, indeed. In a recent article for the Financial Times , Ivan Krastev called depopulation Eastern Europe’s biggest problem. He cites Andrej Plenkovic, the prime minister of Croa- tia, who called depopulation Europe’s “existential problem,” and a United Nations estimate that, since the 1990s, Eastern Europe has lost about 6 percent of its population. This problem is greatly compounded by the departure of those with the most education and best job skills. As the poorest member of the European Union, Bulgaria has had the world’s fastest population decline by some measures. Tuk-Tam’s U.S. Alumni Club meets at the U.S. ambassador’s residence in Sofia in June 2019. TUK-TAM