![]() “I think I owe a lot of who I am today to the orphanage teaching me such serious lessons so early on.” “They live in poverty but it seems clear there’s always something they took away from the home.” Bobok, too, has taken something away from her time there. “But they work and love their children and are very respectable,” she said. Most of the children she meets are there because of neglect or economic scarcity, and often when they leave the orphanage, they are subject to the same cycles of poverty their parents were. I remember asking how the world could be so unfair just because someone was born in a different place.” Since that revelation, Bobok has returned to the orphanage annually, for anywhere from two to six weeks, getting to know the 30 or so 3- to 17-year-olds who live there. Probably my third day there I completely broke down. My entire worldview shifted in terms of how I’d seen my life and what was important to me. “I thought I was going to teach an English program for the kids,” she said, “but I realized on the first day that of all the things they needed in the world, fluency in English wasn’t one of them. It was when she spent 10 days working with her aunt in a foster-home “orphanage” in Galospetreu, Transylvania, a region of Romania with a Hungarian ethnic minority. “A big turning point in my life happened when I was 14,” she recalled. She found another sort of family on her visits, though. “I had great opportunities here but wish I could have gotten to know my cousins better,” she said. Though she and her parents and younger brother were active in the expat Hungarian community, they had no extended family nearby. The language we spoke, the foods we ate, the culture we grew up in, and also my family’s values were Hungarian.” “It was difficult in Hungary to express what it was like to live in America,” she said, “and difficult in America to explain that I’m not entirely American. Unlike many immigrants, while growing up Bobok returned to her native land every year. #ZDENEK BOBOK SOFTWARE#at age 2 when her parents - an internist and a mathematician and software engineer - emigrated in search of economic opportunity, eventually settling in a suburb of Schenectady, N.Y. Born near Budapest, Hungary, she moved to the U.S. Sara Bobok ’19 has always been of two worlds, at home in both and neither. #ZDENEK BOBOK SERIES#He died in Prague on 17 July 2011 following a long illness.This is one in a series of profiles showcasing some of Harvard’s stellar graduates. He continued to work and publish on Chalcidoidea after retirement. įollowing his retirement in 1989 and the Velvet Revolution Bouček returned to the Czech Republic buying a cottage near his birthplace of Hradec Králové. He was installed as an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society in 2004 and was awarded the International Society of Hymenopterists Distinguished Research Medal in 2005. Zdenek published over 150 papers and named over 1100 taxa of Hymenoptera including 47 families and 281 genera. This work was so big that it took one person over two months to compile the taxonomic revisions it contained into the Zoological Record. Among his publications was the 800+ page book "Australasian Chalcidoidea" published in 1988. His main subject of taxonomic research was the Chalcidoidea, especially of the families which included those species with larger body sizes Leucospidae, Chalcididae, Pteromalidae, Torymidae and Eulophidae. He took his family to the United Kingdom where he worked for a short time at the Hope Department at Oxford University before taking up a post at the Commonwealth Institute of Entomology which is located in the Natural History Museum, London where he worked until his retirement in 1989. In 1969 he was forced to flee Czechoslovakia as a result of the deterioration of the political situation following the Prague Spring and the subsequent Soviet invasion. from the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, his thesis being a "Revision of Chalcidoidea of Europe". His first works as an entomologist were published while he was at the Charles University in Prague and he later worked at an agricultural research centre before obtaining his Ph.D. He married Tatiana Rýdlová in 1949 and they had one daughter, Jitka. With Marcus Graham and Richard Askew, Bouček was one of the most important workers studying this large and diverse group in the second half of the Twentieth Century and these three laid the foundations of the modern systematics of the chalcid wasps.īouček was born in the Czech city of Hradec Králové on 8 January 1924, then part of Czechoslovakia. Zdeněk Bouček (8 January 1924 – 17 July 2011) was a Czech entomologist specialising in the Chalcidoidea superfamily of the Hymenoptera. ![]()
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