Ron Hart and Sharon Semingson dated all through high school. Ron went to Oregon State University and majored in Anthropology. Ron and Sharon married in 1969 and both graduated from OSU in 1971. Ron received a full ride to Michigan State University to get his PhD in Anthropology. He received several prestigious grants to conduct his field work for his dissertation and he and Sharon and their daughter Jemila went to Yemen in 1974. Ron loved Yemen and the people and didn't just do field work, but started a soccer program in the village he worked in for the kids and was always friendly and meeting people and fluent in Arabic so he did well and Yemeni people loved him. Ron would travel back to the states with Jemila to do some library research while Sharon stayed in Yemen working on various agricultural related projects with Yemeni women. Than Ron would be back to Yemen to write his thesis and be offered consulting positions. It was a good life for us and also very adventuresome as we rode motorcycles all over the country and hiked to villages with Jemila carried on a donkey. Many people in the villages we visited had never seen foreigners before and especially people who spoke Arabic. Ron excelled in his field of Anthropology and we had dreams of traveling all over the world. In the end, even when Ron knew he was dying, various organizations were contacting him about consulting on projects and I heard him on the telephone saying how he would get better and could go to Sudan, for instance! Ron had that super optimism to the very end and is still very much missed. He died in 1980 when we were both 31 years old.