摘要：The anticipated letter announced its arrival with colourful geological postage stamps: botryoidal blue willemite (Zn 2 SiO 4 ) and a cluster of orange wulfenite crystals (PbMO 4 ) from Tsumeb, in northern Namibia; placer diamond mining at Oranjemund, mouth of the Orange River which divides Namibia in the south from South Africa (Fig. 1). I had moved to the University of Victoria from GSC six months earlier, and had responded to the NWT MDA-II (1992) call for projects with a proposal to map, with geochronologist Sam Bowring (MIT), the Archean basement rocks of south- ern Wopmay orogen and the adjacent Indin Lake greenstone belt of Slave craton. How different my future would have been had the proposal not been vetoed in Ottawa. My new academic freedom to work outside the country was now obligatory.
