Dear readers,

We are well into 1989 and you are only receiving your last issue of Women in Action of 1988 now. We have at least half a dozen good excuses for why it is so late! We appeal to your patience and understanding and hope that the contents of this issue are worth the wait.

Now for the excuses! First, our publications coordinator Niala Maharaj left us at the end of October for Hong Kong. We wish her all the best at the Asia Monitor Resource Centre! It's taken us a bit of time to reorganize the work here in Rome on the publications. Second, after ejq)experimenting with desktop publishing for the first three issues of 1988, we thought it was time to get really serious about it. We have bought our own new computer and taken a short course in it. All this, has also taken up time. The result is what you see before your eyes. Bear in mind, please, that this has been produced with only IS hours of training. Not bad for neophytes, eh? We hope to get better with practice.

For those of you contemplating going into desktop publishing, it's an example of v/hat can be done by inexperienced people with a minimum of training. We want to share our experience with other groups and organizations. Let us know if you are interested and maybe we can get a training workshop together.

Lots of other things have been happening around here too. Our resource center in Santiago has moved to a new, more spacious quarters and now occupies a rambling old house with plenty of room for visitors. So if you are ever in Santiago, drop by at Ricardo Lyon 1735. The postal address and telephone remain the same.

We also have some very exciting future plans! We are planning to open a new Isis International Resource Center in Asia in 1990. When we opened our office in Santiago in 1984, we saw it was as the beginning of a process of decentralization and more direct involvement of many women and groups in our work and networking. The Santiago office has proven to be a great success in this respect and now we would like to embark on the same road in Asia. We envision transferring the publication of Women in Action and the Isis International Book Series in English to our office in Asia. We would produce the Women's Health Journal in English there too and, of course, there would be a resource center, training courses and more!

At this stage, we are exploring places to open the office. It needs to be a place where we can operate fairly easily in terms of producing publications in English and mailing them out to other countries around the world, where we can obtain the necessary legal permits for an international organization and visas for an international staff. Some places that have been suggested so far are the Philippines, India and Thailand. Any other suggestions? We appeal to you to send us your reactions, ideas, suggestions and offers of help!

Inside the pages of this issue, we have tried to give more space to the voices of our sisters in rural areas in different parts of the world. We also have success stories from women in Sri Lanka, Chile and Malaysia, a report about the Isis International training course for women's documentation and resource centers that we gave in our Santiago office, and news about conferences and resource materials available.

Please note our Cover Contest on the next page. We hope to be overwhelmed by responses from all of you! Even if you cannot design a cover for us, we would like to hear from you anyway. Let us know how you are what you are doing, what you like (and dislike) about Women in Action, your ideas and suggestions for future issues.