Who are we and what do we do: HQ staff happy to work with the 'broad and diverse ICM family':; Bernadette Davis, Jessica Gonzalez and Maria Laza explain the work that goes on at ICM head office in The Hague.

The ICM administrative staff consists of three part time employees with diverse professional and ethnic backgrounds. Aruba-born US/Dutch citizen Bernadette Davis brings a broad professional background as a personal assistant to the office, with a variety of skills in public relations and office management. Bernadette is the longest-standing administrative employee and has been with ICM since its move to the Netherlands in 2000. Maria Laza from Hungary has a professional background in PR, marketing and economics and a superior knowledge of databases. She enriches the office with her knowledge of Hungarian and Russian. Finally, Mexican-Canadian Jessica Gonzalez has an academic background in political science, literature and languages, speaking all three of the ICM's official languages (as well as Dutch). Jessica happily incorporates her language and writing skills in communicating with the broad and diverse ICM family throughout the world.

Together, this administrative team runs the dynamic ICM office and handles a wide variety of administrative and professional tasks. The administrative staff works closely with the rest of the ICM team to make sure that the job gets done; this involves first and foremost working with our dedicated Secretary General, Kathy Herschderfer, our energetic Programme Manager, Nester Moyo, London based journal editor Elizabeth Duff, and also with faithful ICM volunteer Margo Bubbert, and temporary researcher Hanneke Kateman. Needless to say, with all these active people around, the ICM office is a busy place with a tremendous output!

To give you some idea of our daily administrative duties we have compiled a brief statistical summary of the main office work handled on a yearly basis. As just part of the daily running of the office the ICM administrative staff-collectively:

* responds to over 2400 e-mail inquiries

* registers and distributes over 3000 incoming mail items

* puts out over 6500 mail items (including huge bulk mail-outs for the journal, association correspondence, press releases etc. and don't forget all the manual work that goes into the addressing, stuffing, sealing and stamping of all those envelopes!)

* sends out over 700 personal correspondence letters

* answers over 1450 calls

* makes over 75,000 photocopies

* sends out over 130 faxes

* books around 70 teleconferences

* and makes over 150 scans.

Travel, meetings and papers Besides handling these daily tasks, each team member has her own area of...