The U.S. Department of State each year tortures its brains and budget in dubious attempts to improve our relations with foreign countries. For the past 26 years The Experiment in International Living has annually demonstrated the theory that the best way to understand foreign peoples is to go and live with them.

This past summer, 800 young Americans traveled with Experimental groups to live in homes in 18 different countries in Europe, Asia, and the Americas.

Some of these Americans lived on farms in northern Denmark; others stayed in mountain villages in Austria. But there were some common features. Each Experimenter spent a month's "homestay" living as a member of a foreign family, and a second month of group travel in his Experiment country.

The Harvard Experimenters Club, a group of active alumni of the organization estimates that there are about 80 Harvard and Radcliffe undergraduates who have gone on the Experiment. The club holds weekly dinner meetings to compare experiences and discuss various phases of the Experiment's operation.

Next summer for the first time, the Experiment will penetrate the Iron Curtain and send a group to Poland, it was announced recently. It has been rumored that there are plans for an Experiment to Russia the following year.

Although the State Department was recently having trouble in its relations with Yugoslavia, the Experimenters who went there this summer had no difficulties developing friendships with the Yugoslavs, reports James D. Lorenz '60, one of the group members.

Lorenz and eight other Americans who Experimented in Sarajevo were the fifth group to visit the Communist country. The first Experimenters to Yugoslavia, in 1851, spent the summer working on a volunteer labor project.

Of the five girls, one was Joan Bart, a Radcliffe graduate student in Harvard's Russian Studies Program. A 19-year-old girl from the University of Michigan, an 18-year-old student from Scripps College, Calif., who had lived all her life on a cattle ranch, and two working girls who had attended Smith and Mount Holyoke completed the group.

Lorenz and the others arrived in Rotterdam by student ship on July 12, and traveled by train to Yugoslavia. For the next three and a half weeks, the Harvard student became a member of the Kamakovsky family in an apartment-housing project in Sarajevo. The five-year-old housing development, built by the government for factory workers, contained some 1800 apartments, an elementary school, and a shopping center.

Mr. Kamakovsky is an engineer in the local Famus motor factory. (The name "Famus" was coined from the English word "famous," Lorenz learned.) The engineer's position is one of the top five in the strategic industry. His full title is Ing. Kamakovsky Evon--the Ing for engineer, and Evon, his given name, is written last.

Lorenz' Yougoslav "Mother," Mima, spoke no English. "She understood a little of my terrible French," Lorenz said. "Enough to feed me every day."

There was only one child in the Kamakovsky family, a little boy of eight, named Dusko. Unlike most Experimenters, therefore, Lorenz did not have a foreign "brother" or "sister" close to his own age.

"Mr. Kamakovsky served as my host," Lorenz said. He described the Yugoslav as " a very powerful man," about 45 years old, who smoked three packs of cigarettes a day.

Mr. Kamakovsky spoke eight month's worth of English which he learned last winter by going to the city after an eight and a half hour workday to take a four and a half hour language class. Arriving home between 8 and 9 in the evening, he would begin his "homework" for the factory.

Yugoslav Laziness