Honorary consul represents Ukraine in Texas (10/29/00)

Honorary consul represents Ukraine in Texas

by Roma Hadzewycz

HOUSTON - One of the best-kept secrets about Texas, at least for those outside the state, is that Texas has an honorary consul who represents Ukraine.

Gregory Buchai, a resident of Sugar Land, a suburb of Houston, was named honorary consul of Ukraine for Texas of this year, making Ukraine the 73rd country to be represented in the Houston Consular Corps - the second largest consular group in the United States. (Other large cities home to large consular corps are New York, San Francisco and Chicago.)

News of his appointment was reported in the Houston Chronicle in the column "Houston's International Scene" in spring of this year. But the process actually began three years earlier, after a visit to Texas by Ukraine's Ambassador Yuri Shcherbak. During that 1997 trip the ambassador met with officers of Ukrainian organizations in Houston to discuss what the local Ukrainian American community could do to assist in promoting Ukraine in the state of Texas.

Ambassador Shcherbak subsequently asked Mr. Buchai to travel with him to Mexico, where he was scheduled to work on a trade agreement between Ukraine and Mexico, and open the Embassy of Ukraine in that country. After the trip the ambassador asked Mr. Buchai to serve as honorary consul in Houston and Texas.

"I was named to this position because the Ukrainian government wanted to secure a presence in Houston. Ukraine was planning to develop trade relations with the United States and Mexico, and having a foreign trade office in Houston would be advantageous, since Houston is the oil and gas capital of the world and the second largest port city in this country," Mr. Buchai explained.

Mr. Buchai brings to his position experience and contacts in the business world, most notably as a former director of the Independent Oil and Gas Association and as a businessman involved in oil and gas joint ventures in Russia and Ukraine, as well as contacts with Latin America established while he was on the Chrysler Corporation's international staff for that part of the world.

Mr. Buchai is also a member of the Houston World Affairs Council, which helped promote Ambassador Shcherbak's visit to the city, including stopovers at the Texas Medical Center and NASA, as well as a visit with former President George Bush and Texas Gov. George W. Bush in Austin.

Asked about his goals as honorary consul, Mr. Buchai said, "There are many problems that Ukrainian is now facing. But the most critical, in my mind, is meaningful employment for the people and regular pay for a day's work."

But his No. 1 priority is to "simply let others know about Ukraine." To that end, he is busy establishing contacts with other countries' representatives, the business community and political leaders, as well as trying to bring together Ukrainians with contacts in the business world. "Ultimately, perhaps I can in some way contribute to meaningful employment in Ukraine," he observed.

In fulfilling his functions he keeps in touch regularly with the Embassy of Ukraine in Washington, speaking with Ambassador Kostyantyn Gryshchenko at least once a month and with Consul Valeriy Hrebeniuk an average of three times per month.

Mr. Buchai, a financial adviser/portfolio manager with Prudential Securities Inc., was born in Germany, where his Ukrainian-born parents were sent during the Nazi occupation of Ukraine. The family moved to Venezuela, where they spent 10 years before coming to the United States in 1959 and settling in Los Angeles.

Mr. Buchai went to school in Los Angeles and obtained a degree in engineering. He worked for a time on the Apollo space project at North American Aviation and then joined the U.S Air Force in San Antonio. He remained in the Air Force through the Vietnam era and earned a master's degree in international finance and management.

His wife, Nadia, is originally from Montreal. The Buchais have two children, a son, Andrew, 24, and a daughter, Tanya, 16.

Mrs. Buchai, a geographer, environmental planner and paralegal, said she and her husband are now heavily involved in Houston's diplomatic circles. About half of the consular corps, she explained, is foreign and half are honorary consuls who are U.S. citizens.

With obvious satisfaction and tears in her eyes, Mrs. Buchai described the first gathering, in May of this year, at which Ukraine was introduced to the Houston Consular Corps: "It's as if all the grunt work of the past had paid off. Ukraine had arrived!"

The entire family is active in the Ukrainian community in Houston, where they moved 14 years ago, purchasing a home in Sugar Land, a beautiful residential community of elegant homes and golf courses.

They found a community that is quite different from others. Mr. Buchai said: "We are a pragmatic community that approaches problems and their solutions via consensus. And, we are not burdened by the problems of the past, such as [political battles of] Banderivtsi vs. Melnykivtsi."

What really galvanized the Ukrainian American community in recent years, Mrs. Buchai added, was the plight of 16 sailors stranded in Houston in 1998, as a result of financial problems and improprieties of the owners of a commercial cargo ship on which they were to serve as crew. The community organized its efforts and those of others - non-Ukrainians from the area - to provide the sailors with food and funds, including airfare to return home.

The key, according to Mr. Buchai, was that "We worked with our contacts and made new connections. In the case of the stranded seamen the message was clear: we need help and the response came. We could not have helped the sailors without outside help."

He underlined that both Ukraine, and we as a community, "have to use our contacts and develop new ones" in order to be successful.

| Home Page |