Halfway down the Danube

Last Friday links of 2011

Claude out shopping for a new faucet (because the one in the downstairs bathroom is shot), kids watching Rocky and Bullwinkle (because they've lost the Wii remote).  Quiet Friday evening in Fladungen, the sky clearing for what looks to be a frosty night.

So for a while it looked like we might be going to Mongolia next.  But now it appears not.  Oh, well!  That said, here's an interesting thing: most of us have heard the factoid about how X million men are descended from Genghis Khan.  Well, it appears that it's true.  Yes, one out of every two hundred men -- or more like one out of every four, in some parts of Asia -- is a descendant in the direct male line from the late Khan of all the Mongols.

A link I stumbled across while looking for something else: Devil's Lake, in North Dakota, has been growing steadily for years now, very probably because of climate change.

I used to live in Illinois, and I used to like driving around on two-lane roads.  Over time, this gave me a rather low opinion of small towns and cities in America's middle west -- most of them seem, frankly, kinda depressing.  But just from the wikipedia article, this small city looks like a nice place to visit.

A short article about childhood in the classical world.  There are things here I'd like to know more about.

So a Russian prosecutor's office opened a prosecution against the holy text of the Hare Krishnas, and it has turned into an international cause celebre.  Apparently this is part of a general crackdown against the Hare Krishnas, which in turn is part of a broader pattern of Orthodox churches encouraging state aggression against minority religions, especially ones that are "odd" or "foreign".  Which arguably is just part of an even bigger pattern of assholic behavior by state-sponsored churches worldwide, but never mind that now. 

The Hare Krishnas are an incredibly tempting target, because they're prominent and easy to spot (shaved heads, robes) and kind of obnoxious (chanting, proselytizing). That said, there are probably better ways of dealing with them.  The real world doesn't give a Gouranga Bonus.

The last ten years (part two)

The last post covered 2001 to 2003.  What happened then?

2004 and 2005 were good years.  We were living in Bucharest, Romania, in a nice townhouse in a somewhat run-down but pleasant residential neighborhood.  I had an interesting job as component manager of a large USAID project. Claudia was pregnant with our second boy, David, when we arrived; David was born in July 2003 and was a baby and toddler throughout this period.

Bucharest is an interesting town, and those were good years to be living there.  Romania was desperate to join the EU, so my work was pretty easy and straightforward.  The economy was growing rapidly, so you could see things getting better from month to month.  We were two hours from the mountains and three hours from the beach.  The expat community was friendly.  I had a Dungeons and Dragons group.  There were large, green parks with playgrounds, great for the boys.  We lived in a small townhouse with a friendly landlord, easy walking distance from the supermarket.  What was there not to like? 

2006 was a complicated year.  In January, I got a job offer from BearingPoint, a large consulting company.  The job was to take over CLERP, a USAID project in Yerevan, Armenia.  CLERP was a troubled project and USAID had asked BearingPoint to fire the Chief of Party.  BearingPoint was casting around for a replacement, and they found me.  Meanwhile, Booz Allen wanted me to go to Southeast Asia for a month.  I ended up going to Southeast Asia (Laos and Cambodia) for a month and then moving to Armenia.  At this point we had just-turned-four Alan, toddler David, and new baby Jacob, so things were getting a little challenging.  But we found a pleasant house in the Arabkir suburb of Yerevan and settled in.

Here's a summary of my time in Armenia: I was there just over two years, of which the first six months and the last six months were pretty horrible.  The year in between was just fine.  The first six months were rough because the project was pretty messed up and needed a salvage job.  The last six months were rough because 1) USAID cut our budget, which meant we had to end the project several months early, while slicing off a bunch of workstreams;  2) we got a new COTR (the client representative who gives direction to the project) -- the old COTR had been very good, pedantic and meticulous but honest and fair, while the new one was a crooked local with a chip on his shoulder; and, 3) BearingPoint was spiraling downwards into bankruptcy, causing the home office to become both incredibly difficult and almost completely useless.  The year in between, none of those things were true, so it was actually pretty good. 

We never did fall in love with Armenia -- we found it a difficult country in a bunch of different ways -- but we did have some good times there, including a wonderful trip to Nagorno-Karabakh.  Alan had a good teacher, David had a good preschool, and Jacob learned to walk in the back yard (and ate figs right off the tree).  And the view of Mount Ararat never palled.

But CLERP ended in March 2008.  I stayed on another three weeks to do wrapup and write the final report, and then flew back to Germany -- where we had just bought our first house, in the small town of Fladungen, and where Claudia was several months pregnant.  Good things both, except that I was now without a job.

 

 

Chisinau, last days

And so back to Fladungen.

My project was originally supposed to end in late September.  It turned out that we had extra money -- a fair bit of it, actually.  The previous Chief of Party, the guy I replaced, had been pretty frugal.  (Actually way too frugal.  He'd let several key personnel go, and the project was several hundred thousand dollars under budget.)  So I was able to get a "no-cost extension" and stretch the project nearly to Christmas.

But everything must end. So now I'm back in Bavaria, looking out at our snowy back yard (actually not that snowy; it's an unseasonably warm December) while Claudia teaches English spelling to the boys at the kitchen table.

Odds and ends: