[Peter Finke]

Bill – I fully agree with your ideas.
Founding ALFA was a good decision and it will promote things, no question. But that will take time and it will be only one of more possible steps. You are fully right by mentioning others.
What you describe is more or less my program that I try to follow since 2005. There are more friends of this endangered genus on earth than we know, it’s only a matter of method how to find them. Today with the internet this must be much easier than in former times.
You are fully right in pointing out the role of our German association as a base, but that alone was not enough. It needed additional personal action (and that meant time and hard work) to collect addresses, and more addresses and more addresses. This is my business and that of some friends since 2005. If I should say what the most valuable result of the Paro-work since that time is: it’s the treasure of addresses. If someone wanted to cause a maximum damage to the Parophromenus-project he needed to steal or destroy our addresses.
Your idea to write to all the many associations and clubs is fully right. I have tried to to so in Germany, and was lucky that the German head organization of the aquarists gave support to that by opening its magazine. Unfortunately, the result was meagre up to now. But I have not done it as efficient as possible; one can do better. But I can’t, I need helpers.
And that is the problem on the American or even world-scale, too. We need helpers. I think this is the present situation: building up a group of helpers. You are one of these and Mark and some others. Now let us see what we can do precisely.
1. How should we proceed? In the world and in the U.S.?
2. What is the primary goal? What secondary, and so on?
3. How could we partition the task?
4. How could we find out the addresses of the most important associations that possibly could play a role in this?
5. In our steering groupwe have no position for a person who would work on that strategy. But we needed him (or her)! Not in the first line for Europe, but for America and for Asia!
6. Besides America the Asians are rather quiet (with the exception of Japan). We urgently needed more active correspondents in Malaysia and Indonesia.
Well, dear Bill, perhaps we should break the thing down to the nearest goal again: How to proceed for the U.S.?
More questions than answers. Perhaps you’ll have some answers?