Getting the word out is her trade mission.

• Position: Carey Stacy, president of the North Carolina chapter of the National Association of Women Business Owners - People

Getting the word out is her trade mission

Four years, Carey Stacy organized an all-female trade mission to Japan, where, she says, newspapers dutifully reported the arrival of "American women businessmen."

Apparently not every country is accustomed to women business owners, but that hasn't stopped Stacy, 52, from jetting around the world in search of opportunities for her Raleigh company, Dialogos International.

With seven full-time staffers and 400 under contract Dialogos teaches more than 50 languages, translates training and technical manuals and provides interpreters.

Stacy, who was raised in Cornelius, headed to Europe right after she graduated from Coker College in Hartsville, S.C., in 1961. In France, Spain and Germany, she taught English to locals at U.S. Information Agency centers.

After five years, she came home and taught high-school Spanish in Garner. She earned a master's in Romance languages at UNC-Chapel HIll in 1972 and headed back to Barcelona for another year of teaching.

In 1977, she decided to open her own business, teaching foreign languages. "I started with just me, a desk with a telephone and Rolodex, a table with six chairs and a chalkboard," she says.

Pretty soon she hired instructors and her company started to grow. Nine years ago, she signed a contract with the Wake County school system, and now she provides 25 foreign-language teachers for students in kindergarten through fifth grade.

She quickly rose to president of the state chapter of the National Association of Women business Owners and was selected in 1985 as one of 13 from across the country for an all-women trade mission to Germany.

The next year, she organized the Japan trip, and she's hardly touched ground since. AS NAWBO's president, Stacy helped organize a Soviet association of women business owners in April. She also got a contract for Dialogos to help a Leningrad company improve the way it teaches employees English.

The travel leaves her tired but exhilarated. "I come back with opportunities for my company and for the country," she says.

Between Iraq

and a hard place

Indiana Jones doesn't have anything on John Norman - at least not until the archeologist-adventurer escapes across the Iraqi desert in a taxicab.

Norman, a resident of New Hill, near Raleigh, works as a manager with the Ernst & Young accounting firm. His job takes him all over the world to modernize banking operations. He had just spent 10 months in Baghdad working with Rasheed Bank, an...