Halfway down the Danube

First hike in Tajikistan

So I'm in Dushanbe, Tajikistan.

Short version: this is a new job, and it may keep me here for up to three years.  I've been here two weeks already.  I'm alone for almost three months; Claudia and the kids will follow in July.  My task is to get settled in the new job, find a house and a car, and prepare the way for them.

Dushanbe is very post-Soviet, and yet much nicer than you might think.  The downtown is planned, but not in a horrible way.  There are a lot of perfectly attractive buildings.  It's definitely a bit of a backwater, mind.  It's a very long way from anywhere.  Most people don't speak English, so learning at least basic Russian is firmly on the menu.  

So what is there to do in Dushanbe?  Well, for one thing, there's the hiking club.  Every Sunday at 9 AM, whoever wants to go hiking gathers at a corner at the north end of downtown.  A local tour group picks everyone up in a couple of vans and off they all go.  This week there were 15 or 20 of us, all expats, plus a couple of local Tajiks who acted as guides and chaperones. 

Dushanbe sits at the northern edge of a flat plain.  Beyond that northern edge are mountains: the Gissar Range, which is a spur of the Tien Shan.  (Trivia: the highest peak in this range, on the border between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, is about 4,600 meters or >15,000 feet... and for many years, it enjoyed the euphonious name of Peak of the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party.  These days it's known as "Khazret Sultan", which is also good.)  So from the northern edge of Dushanbe, it's about 15 km to the foothills of the mountains; within 30 km, you're deep inside them.

These aren't big mountains by regional standards (note: regional standards are quite high), but they're geologically young -- meaning, they're steep and full of interesting geology stuff.  We drove for some miles up the main road, which runs along a brown busy river, and then turned up a side road that wound through a couple of villages and then up, up.

The hike was maybe 6 or 7 km each way, starting at around 1500 meters up and climbing to maybe a little over 2000 meters (~6500 feet).  It was up a narrow valley, almost a canyon, carved out by a fast-running stream.  We crossed the stream seven or eight times; no bridges, one just waded across at a shallow bit.  The trail was literally a donkey path -- we passed a donkey at one point.  Lots of scrambling over scree, some Alpine meadows still green with spring.  Spectacular views, of course. (Though I suspect that my idea of what constitutes a spectacular view may be adjusted a bit over the next few months.)

The end point was a "swimming pool" which was really just a couple of pools in the stream, not much bigger than bathtubs.  We'd been told to bring bathing suits, so I changed behind a rock and... had second thoughts?  The water was runoff straight from the snowpack still visible a couple of thousand feet above us.  And it was obviously cold -- like, you could feel the chill radiating off it.

Well: the trick really is to plunge, before your brain realizes what's happening and can stop you. Because, yes, it's cold.  It's AH AH AH AH very cold. But: do you want to stand beneath the icy waterfall like a samurai in a Kurosawa movie? Yes. you know you do.

Sore legs and a touch of sunburn, but very much worth it.  And more on Tajikistan anon.

Summer in Fladungen

Done with Kosovo, back in Germany. 

Actually, we've been back for a while now.  We had a complicated summer that included a trip to the US and a two day drive back from Kosovo.  The US trip included a trip to Nashville, Tennessee (my sister lives there now).  We all ran in a 5K race there, and the kids all won medals.  Okay, it was the Gay 5K.  So there weren't a lot of kids.  Still: they'd been running regularly for weeks beforehand, up and down Germia Park outside of Pristina, and I submit that 5K in 41 minutes is pretty good for a five year old girl.  Anyway, we were all pretty pleased.

So now we're back in Germany.  July was pleasantly warm, but August is cool and rainy; it's been like that for most of the last few years.  People say, maybe climate change?  Anyway, we have a fire in the wood-burning stove tonight.  Which makes me sigh a little, but that's life in the upper Rhoen.

It's a quiet summer.  We go on bicycle rides -- last weekend we all biked to Ostheim, then took the steam train back.  (11 kilometers, or seven miles.  The steam train goes on weekends in summer.)  Every two or three days we run a few kilometers.  I practice my German a bit with Duolingo.  I'm tutoring Alan in French -- his Kosovo school didn't have it, but the German school here started it last year.  We're still struggling with the move from Kosovo... it's like trying to fit a house and a half worth of stuff into a single house. Friday night is pizza and movies, as always. 

Yes, this is a bit of a placeholder post.  More in a bit, I hope.

A day in Skopje

We spent most of today in Skopje, Macedonia. 

Getting to Skopje takes about two hours, including the border crossing.  It's not a very good road, and it's actually getting worse.  Two reasons.  One, there's a ridiculous amount of sprawl going south from Pristina, so you have about forty miles of bad two-lane road with pretty constant traffic.  And two, they're just about to start work on a fancy new highway connecting Skopje to Pristina.  When it's done, the trip time will drop by half -- but in the meantime, there's no incentive to fix the potholes or add passing lines or shoulders, since the road is going to be obsolete soon.

Anyway.  Skopje itself is an interesting small city with a pleasantly busy downtown.  We visited the one shopping mall with the toy shop and bought a bunch of Legos and My Little Pony stuff.  (Alan was owed a major toy purchase because he had a birthday recently, and younger sister Leah because she'd just finished her Headsprout reading lessons.)  Ate chicken nuggets and pide in the food court... yes, Macedonia has a shopping mall with a food court, complete with Burger King.  (Food courts are everywhere now.  There was a shopping mall with a food court in Ramallah.)  But you can also get pide and Turkish coffee -- in fact, it's pretty much only Turkish coffee -- and that Turkish lentil soup that comes with the puffy flatbread.

After that, we headed for an English-language bookstore that was mentioned in the guidebook.  This turned out to be a pretty large bookstore selling mostly remaindered academic books.  You know how textbooks are constantly coming out with new editions every couple of years, so you have to plunk down $120 for the new edition of Cell Biology instead of paying a third of that for a secondhand copy?  Well, the unsold older editions in the warehouse have to go somewhere, and one of those somewheres is Eastern Europe.  Same thing for five-year-old coffee table picture books that didn't sell, and mass market paperbacks that were overproduced.  Not to sneer; we ended up finding a lot of interesting things (Robert Chambers' King in Yellow: two bucks.  Collected Solomon Kane stories of Robert E. Howard, same.  A "best of Woody Guthrie" CD, like four bucks.) and dropping about a hundred dollars. 

One peculiarity: this bookstore has several large shelves of science fiction mass-media tie-in books. Hundreds and hundreds of Star Wars and Star Trek novels, plus a fair number of Battlestar Galactica, World of Warcraft, and others.  What the market is for these in the lower-central Balkans, I can't begin to guess. But there they all are. About $3 each. We found the Star Trek Novel Graveyard, and it's in Macedonia.

So then we walked around the central plaza for a while, with its crazy statuary -- Alexander the Great, woo -- and looked at sunspots through a telescope set up by a very nice man who was with the Macedonian Astronomical Society.  (I had never seen sunspots directly through a scope before!  They're, dang, spots on the Sun.  Crazy.)  (Yes, the scope had a filter so our eyes were not destroyed.)

Then we went for a walk through the "bazaar", which is what they're calling the Albanian Quarter these days.  And therein lies a tale.

So way back in 2002 -- not long after the Ohrid Agreement was signed, if you follow this sort of thing -- I visited Skopje for a day or two for work.  And I happened to walk north across the Vardar River into the Albanian Quarter.  It was kinda scenic, with cobbled streets and lots of Turkish-style houses, but also obviously pretty poor.  There were few people on the streets, everything was somewhat run-down, and most of the shops seemed to be just-barely-scraping-by subsistence businesses... little one-man tailor shops, coffee places where the locals would nurse a thirty cent cup of Turkish coffee for hours, and so forth.  And when I walked back across the river, my Macedonian colleagues gave me serious side-eye: you went over to *that* side, where *they* live?  Crazy foreigner, you're lucky to have come back alive...

So 2014, back again for the first time in twelve years.  And holy socknozzles, the Albanian quarter is jumping.  It is, I kid you not, Skopje's yuppie quarter.  Restaurants, souvenir shops, antique stores, ice cream stands.  The streets were packed solid with middle-class Macedonians and curious foreigners.

I know that an area a few blocks square doesn't represent a whole city, never mind a whole country.  But... wow, what a difference.  It was just really encouraging.

Oh, and also the ice cream shop was run by a couple of English-speaking Gorani.  I had never met any Gorani before!  Well, not knowingly.

And then we walked back and had coffee and salads in a place by the Vardar (near the skateboarders park... none of the skateboarders wear pads or helmets and honestly they're not very good, but they seemed to be enjoying themselves and the boys enjoyed watching them) and the three younger kids rode on the carousel that's right there for some reason, and then we went home.  Came into south Pristina with the moon rising out of southern Serbia on our right, boys building Lego constructions in the back of the car, and Leah falling asleep to Woody Guthrie explaining why he had to keep on organizing, keep on organizing, won't the boss be surprised, when he finds us organized.

 

In Kosovo

So we're in Kosovo.

A lot has happened in the six month (!) since I last posted here.  The biggest change is, I got a job -- a full-time job on a USAID project -- and it's here in Pristina, Kosovo.  We got the news in early May (just after I got back from a month in Kyrgyzstan; yes, I spent four weeks in Kyrgyzstan and never blogged about it, my bad), I moved down here at the beginning of June, and the family followed in August.  We're currently living in a house on the edge of Pristina, near Germia Park.

There's a lot I could write about Kosovo.  But it kinda feels like I should slowly ease myself back into this blogging thing.  I'm not entirely sure why I stopped.  Facebook, that's certainly part of it -- a lot of the stuff that might have gone into blog posts goes into FB statuses now.  On the other hand, surely there's still room for the occasional long form article about my life and whatever interests me?  Still contemplating this.

So let me just talk briefly about the job thing. I'm actually pretty pleased to be in regular employment again.  I've spent four of the last five years as a freelancer, and while that's been very interesting in all sorts of ways, it's also been kind of a pain in the ass.  Number one, first and foremost, it had me away from my family a lot.  Number two, no benefits -- and when you have four kids, health insurance is a think that you think about a lot.  Number three, it was unpredictable; the Kyrgystan trip, for instance, had me going off to spend most of April in Central Asia at about two weeks' notice.  And number four, while the money was sometimes quite good, at the end of the day working half or even two-thirds time is just not going to lead to putting large sums of money in the bank.  On the plus side, I did get large chunks of downtime at home to hang out with the kids, go on long bicycle rides and work in the yard... nonetheless, it wasn't really how we wanted to be living.

So this job.  Like all USAID project jobs, it's for a fixed period: in this case three years, from May 2013 to April 2016. It's possible I may get another job before then.  It's also possible that come the spring of 2016, I may be back to freelancing again.  TBD.  Meanwhile, I'm working on a lot of contract stuff (very familiar), commercial law stuff (also very familiar) and enforcement of judgments (new). 

The biggest difference between this job and the last two is that I'm not the Chief of Party, the guy in charge of the project.  Someone else is COP; I'm a component manager, one step down.  That has taken some getting used to.  Because of USAID's rather baroque compensation system, I actually get paid exactly the same.  And I'm working less; there's all sorts of COP administrative stuff that I don't have to worry about.  So there's that.  On the other hand, I'm not the boss, and that has taken some getting used to.  But four months in, it seems to be going okay.

So.  I'll try to start blogging at least sort-of regularly for a while; let's see how that goes.  If any of my old readers are still around, welcome back; if you have any questions about Kosovo, or anything else, ask and I'll try to answer.

 

 

 

A weekend in the Holy Land

Let's get the parrot out of the way first.

We spent most of today -- Saturday the 9th -- in Jericho.  Jericho is arguably the oldest city in the world; humans have been living there in some sort of urban setting, town or city or whatever, for something over ten thousand years.  We spent much of the day there.  We took the cable car to the top of the Mountain of Temptation, we walked through the ruins of an Ummayad palace, we saw what's left (very little) of the walls of Jericho mentioned in the Old Testament, we saw the tree that (allegedly) Zaccheus the publican climbed to see Jesus.  The children liked this well enough.

But then there was the parrot.

It was a grey parrot that was sitting on a railing outside the control cabin of the cable car.  When we went up (and a very interesting ride it was -- the scariest and most interesting cable car ride I've been on in years), the parrot was nonchalantly eating a sunflower seed.  The boys liked it very much.  But then, after we went to the top and walked where Jesus (presumably) walked, and was tempted three times by Satan -- you know, turn these stones into bread, leap from the pinnacle of the Temple, bow down and worship me! -- and explored the Greek monastery a bit, and stood on a cliff top with the Dead Sea in the distance and watched falcons flying a hundred feet below us, still hundreds of feet above the ground, and had coffee and ice cream, and chatted with a Filipino guy from Hawaii who had come down from Tel Aviv for the day and was horrified to find that Jericho was in Palestinian territory -- after all that, we got to the bottom again, and then David discovered that he had lost his hat!  The new cap we had bought just yesterday, in Jerusalem, with Power Rangers Mystic Force on it!  So we went back and talked to the very nice lady behind the counter, and she called up to the top, and sure enough they had found it!  But we had to wait for ten minutes for it to come down the mountain in the cable car.  So we went upstairs to wait, to the boarding platform where the cable cars loaded up...

...and the parrot was still there...

...and it was drinking a can of Fanta.  Like, by itself.  The can was almost as big as the parrot, but it was handling it without much difficulty.  It tipped up the can and drank delicately, for long minutes, while the boys -- okay, the boys and I -- watched in utter, slack-jawed fascination.

Eventually David's cap arrived, and the parrot finished its drink and dropped the can on the ground, and we left.  But sitting in the bus going home, when we asked the boys what they remembered from the day's adventures -- the ruined palace?  The cable car ride?  The mountaintop? -- the unhesitating answer was, "We had ice cream twice.  And that parrot was awesome."

So.  Here follow some scattershot impressions of the last two days.

 

Larks and Lice

Hey ho, the blog's still here.  I took 40 days offline for Lent.  -- Well mostly offline.  Could still read, of course!  Ha ha, imagine trying to live without reading the Internet.  No.  But I couldn't write anything, from Ash Wednesday to Easter.

Okay, Easter was a while ago.  What's new?

Here's the big picture: I'm once again between long-term assignments.  That means we are once again back in Fladungen.  This by itself is just fine -- we like Fladungen.  But it's complicated by the fact that I don't know when (or, really whether) I will have another long-term assignment.  Moldova was great for ten months, but it ended, and my employer did not win the follow-on project.  I'm likely to be bid on something in the next little while, but nothing that gets bid in May or June will be awarded until September at the earliest.  So it's likely that we'll be in Fladungen through at least September. 

This is somewhat worrisome because if we're here that long, we should be putting the two older boys into the German school system.  Germany doesn't allow home schooling, you see.  It looks like the system is willing to not-notice kids at home for a month, two months, maybe three months... but six months or more is probably pushing it.  And we're not enthusiastic about putting the boys into school here.  (That probably deserves a post of its own.  In a bit, perhaps.)

An additional wrinkle is that I'm also not getting a lot of short-term work just now.  Not none, but not as much as I'd like.  I survived tolerably well for three years as a self-employed consultant doing short-term stuff here, there and everywhere -- that's why all those posts from Congo and Zambia and the West Bank.  But (to make a long story short) about half my work was doing CLIR assessments, and for various reasons there aren't likely to be many CLIR assessments for the next year and a bit.  So I'm having to scramble a bit.

No, we're not starving -- there's food on the table, we're paying the mortgage, all that.  It's just not where we were hoping to be right now.

Anyway.  That's the big picture; what's happening right now?

Lice!

America again

We're back in the USA.  Yah, all of us.

We plan be around for about six weeks -- basically spending the month of February working, then the first two weeks of March driving around seeing family and friends.

The day before we left, Claudia's parents took all four kids and we spent a day cleaning the house.  (Conclusion: we should do this once per month regardless.)  As we got in the car, Claudia pointed out that this is our first plane trip in almost ten years without a stroller.  Yeahh. -- It's definitely helping that the kids are getting older.  Leah can walk everywhere and we don't need to drag a diaper bag around; Alan and David are old enough to pull suitcases, and can sit quietly and read books (though of course they'd rather play Nintendo or something explosive on the iPad.) 

The trip over was, as these things go, pretty straightforward.  The plane was almost empty, which let us spread out a bit.  We flew over Greenland, which was pretty cool.  (Okay, cool for Claudia and me.  Bunch of mountains sticking up through an ice cap.  Boys were mildly interested for a minute or two.) Then we were through US immigration in about five minutes, which was totally a record.  There was a lot of traffic on the DC beltway -- it took over an hour to reach our apartment -- but otherwise, smooth enough.  Kids fell asleep in the van, woke up, went back to sleep (with a lot of jet-lag addled whimpering and complaining), woke up a few hours later FULL OF ENERGY.  It's now a quarter to six and they've spent the last couple of hours playing Angry Birds and watching Phineas and Ferb.

So, America.  Howdy.

 

 

 

 

 

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:

Towards the end of a project

Our project ends in nine more weeks.

It's not a terribly big project, as these things go -- about $8 million over four years, and just ten employees.  Still, shutting it down is a moderately complex little dance of management.  You have to follow all the local laws, which can be baroquely complex -- we have to give each employee one day off per week to look for a new job (even if they've already found one), and there's a complex system of severance pay (which we're arguing with USAID about, because they're choosing to view some payments as "gratuities").  You have to dispose, and explain the disposition of, every single item that the project owns; it's the property of the US taxpayer, after all.  Our office equipment, from desks and lamps to laptops and fax machines, gets donated to deserving charities and local NGOs.  Other USAID projects occasionally put a claim in -- another Chief of Party wants all my conference room furniture, and our PowerPoint projector, and our camera.  (There's a big argument over the camera.  Don't ask.) 

End of the Fiscal Year

USAID's fiscal year runs to September 30.  Any money not obligated by that date goes pfft, back into the Treasury.  So, the last week of September usually sees a frenzy of contract awards.

And why doesn't USAID plan ahead, and award these contracts in June, July and August?  I truly have no idea.  One would like to think that the world's largest development assistance agency, a multibillion dollar body with half a century of experience, would be a better planner than an eighth grader frantically scribbling his homework on the school bus Monday morning.  But whatever the reason, the last week of September is usually interesting for us.

Case in ppoint: this year, USAID awarded the follow-on contract to BIZCLIR. 

BIZCLIR was the contract (or, to be technical, the contract vehicle) under which I did a lot of my short-term professional work over the last three years.  My trip to Senegal?  BIZCLIR.  To Tanzania?  BIZCLIR.  Uganda, Zambia?  BIZCLIR yet again.  I did a lot of non-BIZCLIR stuff (Congo, West Bank, Macedonia, a bunch of fiddly analytical stuff for the IFC) but BIZCLIR was the baseline.

So I'd been hoping that USAID would award the new BIZCLIR contract (which for some reason is called BEAM, but is universally referred to as "the BIZCLIR follow-on contract") either to my previous employer or my current employer. Either would be delighted to deploy me on new BIZCLIR assignments.  While that's not my first choice -- I really want a stable, steady job somewhere -- it would be a nice fallback.  Basically what I did for almost three years, except as an employee, with health insurance and stuff.

Not this time.  USAID awarded new BIZCLIR/BEAM to a dark horse -- a small, relatively obscure bidder with (seemingly) no relevant experience.  Nobody can quite make head or tails of it.

I can reach out to these guys to let them know I may be available in (glances at calendar) another 90 days or so.  But they're so small and obscure that I don't even know anyone there! 

It's not exactly "back to the drawing board".  But it means it'll be harder to count on the short-term stuff as a fallback. 

Other people's job searches are generally pretty boring, so let's move along and talk about something else.

 

 

 

 

Single Parent, briefly

It's Thursday night.  I flew down from Germany with the two little ones Tuesday. Claudia and the boys start driving tomorrow, so should arrive on Sunday.  (Fingers crossed.  Long drive.)

What's to tell: I had a month by myself, which was nice.  No, for two weeks it was more than nice; it was great.  Caught up on my reading, caught up on my sleep.  But then it really started to pall.  Apparently I like having my family around.  By week four I was, plainly put, moping.  So, I'm good with that being done.

That said, our newly minted three-year-old is making it very clear that being a single parent means an immediate shift back to sleep deprivation.  Leah doesn't like going to bed!  But she does like wandering around after bedtime!  And waking up in the middle of the night because of bad dreams, or because she needs to pee, or simply for no reason at all!

Still: mustn't grumble.  Jacob and Leah are both cheerful and healthy, and it's very nice to have them around.

Job stuff: project going great, client happy.  Project ends in November -- specifically, at COB Friday November 11.  What happens after that?  There are various possibilities, but at the moment we truly have no idea. 

What else... did I mention that I found some Dungeons and Dragons players here?  So I've been running a campaign for about six months now.  That'll end in November too, alas.

Meeting with a Deputy Minister first thing tomorrow morning -- so to bed.

Interlude: back in Germany

Posting from Fladungen -- here for a week on vacation.  Claudia drove with Alan and David, I flew with the two little ones.  Which was fine.  They got a little wiggly on the plane, but that was my fault for not bringing any toys or distractions.  For a five year old and a two year old, they did great.  (And they got to eat popsicles on a train.)

It's strange to be back!  We've been gone four months.  The house is the same but it seems smaller and full of stuff.  (Our back yard, on the other hand, is pleasantly huge.)  Neighbors seem surprised and happy to see us.  Hans and Annemarie have been feeding us large midday dinners.  Claudia's brother Michael and two nephews are also in town, which means there are a lot of little boys running around. There's a lot of bouncing on the trampoline in the back yard. 

My compost pile got ruined.  A squirrel moved in sometime after we were gone and filled it with walnuts.  Walnuts are bad news for compost -- the hulls give off an oil that's slightly poisonous -- and Annemarie didn't discover it until too much time had passed.  So, half a ton of good compost had to be thrown behind the shed with the grass clippings.  (It'll eventually be usable, but only after a couple of years.)

What else: well, it looks like we'll be leaving Moldova in November.  Kind of a shame, since I had some hope that we might get the followon project.  But it appears now that the followon won't arrive until the end of the year or later.  So, come mid-November, we'll have to pack out and leave.  (What happens after that?  We do not know.  Watch this space.)

Meanwhile, I go back in a week to continue working.  Claudia and the boys will stay here in Germany through the first week of August.  Then we'll all go back to Moldova together, for our final three months there.

Until then... I have a week of vacation.  Trampoline!

 

 

May in Moldova

 

It gets hot fast here.

We set up the plastic pool in the yard last weekend.  It's bigger than the one at home!  The kids like it, though it's still pretty cold in the mornings -- nights here are still cool.  The filter pump is broken.  We need to get that fixed, or in another week it'll be a big plastic tankful of slime.

Memorial Day barbecue at Marine House today.  The American expat community here isn't large, but it's friendly.  There was live music and a magic show for the kids.  Leah spent a lot of time running after a basketball and/or sitting on my shoulders.  The boys played with the Marines' ping-pong table and air hockey board.

The black poplars have been producing fluff.  We visited a garment factory today -- we know the owner, and they were having a sale -- and it was all through the air like snow.  You could make fluffballs with it, though you couldn't throw them very far.  The ivy on one side of our house, which looked completely dead a month ago, is now a thick blanket of leaves.  Mosquito larvae are hatching out in our little fountain-pond.  (We added some small fish.  Not sure if they're helping or not.)  In the back yard of Marine House, small cherries were already pink on their backyard cherry tree.

Last week we had hail, which was interesting -- pea-sized chunks of ice, melting in moments. Every Saturday, the park down the street -- "Parcul Dendrariul" -- fills up with wedding parties; apparently it's traditional to have a photo shoot there.  The boys already know a limo from a strech limo, just from that.

Summer in Moldova is just about here.

Moving to Moldova

So I have a job offer.

It's a bit strange, because it's only for seven or eight months.  A project in Chisinau, Moldova has lost its Chief of Party.  The project ends on September 30 of this year, but they need a COP until then.  It looks like that will be me.

Claudia and the boys will come with me.  We're thinking to put the boys in the International School there for the rest of the school year -- three months or so.

Some obvious questions:

Why Moldova?  -- Because that's where the job is.

Where is Moldova? -- Check a map!  It's in Eastern Europe, between Romania and Ukraine.  From where we are, it's about 1600 kilometers' drive. 

What's it like?  -- Briefly, it's a small, poor, former Soviet Republic.  The capital is Chisinau, a small city of about half a million people.  By all accounts it's a nice enough place, if poor.  It's usually pretty quiet.

Moldova is not part of the EU.  They dream of joining some day, but that would be many years from now, if it ever happens at all.

Will this lead to more work? -- Excellent question.  Short answer: we don't know.  The company that's hiring me thinks they have a very good chance of winning a follow-on project.  They also have made noises about hiring me for something else when this project ends.  This is not my first trip to the rodeo, alas; I have learned, through grim experience, that consulting companies may sometimes overstate these sorts of things just the tiniest bit. 

On the other hand, who knows?  My own experience suggests that it's easier to find a long-term position when you're already in one. 

How are the kids taking it? -- Pretty well so far.  They're worried about leaving friends and grandparents behind, but intrigued by the notion of a new country.  More on this anon.

How do you feel about it? -- Honestly?  Pretty mixed, though mostly positive.  I was hoping for something longer-term -- like, years.  Seven months is sort of an awkward period of time.  Also, it's going to knock a hole in my short-term career, which has actually been going really well lately; if this hadn't come up, I was going to make a business trip to DC for a conference, followed by three weeks in Vietnam, followed by another trip to the West Bank.  Basically I was booked through early April, which was nice.

But the short-term career wasn't supposed to be a career.  It was always supposed to be a stopgap until we found something more stable.  And it's been hard on Claudia and the kids, having me away for weeks at a time.  This will give us at least seven months of stability and living together.

Also, to be honest, I'm looking forward to being a COP again.  Being a freelancer is interesting, but running big projects has its own special fascination.

So, what kind of project? -- Oh, the usual.  Business environment, commercial law.  Tax stuff, which will be new for me, which is good.  Helping the Moldovans get past the lingering Soviet legacies of red tape and paranoid suspicion of the private sector.  Very similar to what I did in Romania and Armenia; should be right up my alley.

Well then, what next? -- I have some short-term obligations that I still have to finish.  The biggest one is, I'll be in Washington, DC for a few days around February 14 in order to make some presentations at a conference. 

After that, it's up stakes for Chisinau.  Our tentative plan is to drive, taking three days and two nights.  (You could do it in two days and one night if you put the hammer down, but we don't think keeping the kids in a car for 14 hours is a great idea.)

So that's the news.  Watch this space (and our Facebook feeds) for more information as it comes.

Notes from Kabul (6)

Continued adventures of Larry in Afghanistan, along with a suggestion for bringing peace to that troubled country.

It's Friday. The jirga ends today but we are still locked down. Security is awaiting for information that will let us travel. Friday is everyone's normal shopping and restaurant day. But as they say, discretion is the better part of valor.

SUICIDE BOMBERS. I had a conversation with an Afghan about poverty. He mentioned that a relative or a friend was involved in a suicide bombing years ago. The bomber didn't believe in or support the Taliban. He was desperately poor and the Taliban offered him a great deal of money to do a suicide bombing. It was the only way he could envision taking care of his family.

FLIP FLOPS. I use a shared bathroom. I am pretty much the only who uses it but there is often water on the floor and I can't always trace its origins. So I went to the Finest Supermarket to purchase a pair of flip-flops/sandals. (For you New Yorkers, I was hoping it was an old school Finast but it's not.) There are various sandals and flip-flops there but nothing in an 11 1/2 or 12. A young clerk came over to help me and said, "This is impossible, sir. You have very big foot." I bought a size 10.

Notes from Kabul (5)

Meanwhile, continued adventures of Larry in Kabul.

DEMONSTRATIONS. I was supposed to take a car to the Export Promotion Agency this morning but I was asked to wait because there was a demonstration. Apparently, there was a local TV program last night that reported NGOs and security companies are trying to convert Afghans to Christianity. This morning there was a demonstration in front of Parliament. The aftermath of the demonstration was the worst traffic I've experienced in Kabul.

KREMROL. At the office, they usually bring in bulani for breakfast. It's kind of like of a scallion pancake in a Chinese restaurant. Today, they brought in kremrol, a local breakfast pastry. It was a round pastry with sweet white stuff inside ... a creme roll.

Notes from Kabul (4)

And some more from Larry.  I'll do one or two more of these, probably.  I'm off to Uganda this weekend, which may affect blogging.

MORE STREETS OF KABUL. Today I saw a goat drive in downtown Kabul. Somebody drove approximately 30 goats to a vacant lot to let them graze on garbage. I didn't see any vegetation just old Dr. Pepper boxes, cans (Afghans don't like bottles. They like cans. Why? I don't know.) and all kinds of other crap. When we drive from our office to the Ministry of Commerce, there is a big mountain in our way. In order to avoid traffic, our driver decided to drive the mountain today. All I can say was Holy Sh--! Not a speck of macadam, asphalt or concrete on the mountain. The mountain was paved with stray dogs, trash, dirt alleys and houses crammed together. When we reached the bottom of the mountain, I felt as if I had sparred with someone and took way too many body shots.

While driving, I try not to stare into other cars. Afghans are very private. We are specifically warned not to look into the yards of neighboring buildings from our villa's roof deck. While we were stopped in traffic, I peered into the car next to us and saw three guys in an SUV sitting with semi-automatic rifles. The car wasn't marked as a police, military or even a private security car. As soon as I saw the rifles, I whipped my head straight forward in case the penalty for rudeness was a shot across the bow. On the lighter side, I saw a ferris wheel on our ride today. It looked like it had never been used.

GURKHAS. Our upper level security guys are Gurkhas or Gorkhas. The Gurkhas from Nepal form a special regiment in the British military. Unfortunately, after their service in the UK armed forces, they often return to Nepal for a life of poverty and alcoholism. Joanna Lumley, the British actress in the original Absolutely Fabulous television series, made a big splash last year campaigning for Gurkha retirement benefits. Anyway, Gurkhas are prized in roles for ex-military personnel because they are highly trained and cheap relative to an American or a Brit. When we drive directly from the compound to the office, we have a driver. The driver is trained and armed. When we go to an external site, a Gurkha comes for protection. When we drove to the Ministry of Commerce today, a Gurkha came. Upon arrival at the Ministry, we were unloading some materials for one of my colleague's presentation. The Gurkha insisted on carrying the projector inside. Realizing he could not enter the Ministry with his sidearm, he quickly passed his gun to the unsuspecting driver who fumbled it like Tiki Barber before Coach Coughlin made him change his grip on the football. The .45mm hit the ground about 6 feet from me and I was very pleased the safety was on.

Notes from Kabul (3)

More from Larry in Afghanistan.  If any of you have questions or comments, BTW, just post them here and I'll e-mail them along.

STREETS OF KABUL: The traffic is horrendous. The roads are amazing. I thought the roads were bad in rural Romania. Not even close. It took over an hour to drive from the Ministry of Commerce to our office which is probably a distance of 1-2 miles.

The long drive did give me a chance to watch the goings-on. Every woman here has her head covered. Some women cover their faces but it is a significant minority. Although the dust is so bad here, most Afghans have a scarf around their necks so they can cover their noses and mouths when the dust kicks up. Motor scooter and bicycle riders don't wear helmets but wear scarves. We drove by the Central Mosque and it was modern looking but still a pleasant looking sight.

Every important office is behind cement walls and has armed guards. There are guys with rifles on every block. Scarier than the terrorists are the organizations with low-end security comprised of one toothless guy out front with AK-47 in hand. God forbid one of those guys gets spooked. We passed by several schools. The schools were a welcome visual relief -- young, bright smiling faces in matching uniforms of dark pants and pale blue short sleeved shirts. Until I realized I didn't see any girls...

Notes from Kabul (2)

More from Larry in Kabul.  Here's his first Friday (Afghanistan being a Muslim country, Friday is like Sunday).

One thing I don't think I've mentioned: Larry is an experienced international consultant who's been around the world any number of times, and who has lived and worked in some odd corners of the world.  So if he says that the food is tasty or the roads are bad, it's a judgment based on broad experience -- the food probably is tasty and the roads likely are, in fact, quite bad.

VISIT TO ISAF MILITARY BASE: There is a large flea market held on Fridays in the parking lot of an international military base. Two colleagues and I went there today. The main products for sale were Afghan hats, furry boots, lapiz, knives, rugs, scarves, and counterfeit DVDs, watches and sunglasses. I bought Rosetta Stone for $10. I am sure it will be as good as the real thing. [For readers who don't regularly travel through international airports: Rosetta Stone is an extremely expensive software program for learning a new language. - DM]

Notes from Kabul (1)

I have a friend -- let's call him Larry -- who is in the middle of a six-week tour of duty in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Larry is a civilian contractor.  In fact, he's a freelance development consultant, just like me.  So I've been pretty interested to hear how he's doing there: it's not impossible that I might end up in Kabul myself someday.

Larry is keeping friends and family informed by a series of candid and funny e-mails.  With his permission, I'm going to reprint some of them.  There's some editing for space and confidentiality concerns, but mostly these are just as they've arrived in my inbox.

So, without further ado:

Dakar, with butterflies

In my stomach.

Had to give a 40-minute presentation to a large room full of government officials (including a couple of Ministers) and high-end investors.  Rehearsed it the night before in my room and it was okay, but with some problems... some clunky transitions, too many "uhhs" and "ums", that sort of thing.  But not bad.  More like, run through it again in the morning and it will be fine.

Here's the thing: I don't get nervous in front of crowds.  I like doing presentations.  I present (I am told) as relaxed and affable, but in control of my facts.  I radiate (again, I am told) breezy confidence.  And I like talking to groups.  My major vices are (as you'd expect) a tendency to ramble and to run overtime, and years of practice and a modest level of self-discipline have mostly corrected these.  I'm not afraid of Ministers, and I'm certainly not afraid of PowerPoint.  I give good soundtrack.  And I don't worry about it.

But come the morning, I found myself inexplicably twitchy.  I felt unprepared, and not... competent.  And about ten minutes before the presentation, I caught myself pacing in the hall muttering to myself, and I suddenly realized the hell, I am really nervous here.

And realizing that I was nervous -- for the first time since, ohh, my first jury trial?  Which was in 1992 or thereabouts? -- abruptly made me much more nervous, to the point of breathing heavily and sweating.

Thanksgiving, slightly belated

We had our Thanksgiving dinner Friday night.  Alan came down with some sort of vomity stomach bug; as of Wednesday, he was starting to mend but still wobbly.  We didn't think he was 24 hours away from being able to handle a major meal.  So we called everyone ("everyone" being Claudia's parents and the neighbors from down the street) and asked for a reschedule to Friday.

And it was fine. Claude had started preparing in advance, but the extra day made things much more relaxed. (Meaning, merely hectic as opposed to frantic.) We got the table set up, dishes cycled through the oven, and everything pretty much good to go by early afternoon.

The turkey was a butterball.  I gather that serious foodies turn their noses up at butterballs.  Well, maybe some day we'll (1) live in a country where organic free-range turkeys are available, and (2) have a lifestyle that allows us to ignore four small children for long enough to baste, and baste, and baste.  Meanwhile, we're pretty happy to have our butterball. 

Sandwiches yesterday, and soup tonight.  It's all good.

Oh, and!  A very nice apple pie from the apples in our yard.  Complicated slightly by the fact that each of the eight apple trees in our yard seems to be a different variant, so we have a bunch of different flavors mixed together.  So the pie literally changed taste from slice to slice.  But very nice nonetheless.

Meanwhile the vomity bug seems to have moved on to Jacob and David.  But that's normal.

How was your Thanksgiving?

Reading

In Norman Rush's excellent novel, Mating, the nameless protagonist is a female expat living in Rhodesia. 

She falls in love with an attractive but difficult scientist who spends most of his time in the bush.  The rest of the book is about how that works out (complications ensue, of course), but that's not what this post is about.

A recurring theme in the book is how difficult it is to get news, or anything good to read, in Rhodesia -- especially once you leave the capital.  Books get endlessly passed around.  There's a scene where one character hoards back issues of the Economist for months, in order to deliver them in a pile to another character.  (Who is very, very happy to get them.)

I mention this because I lived through something very much like it. When I moved to the Marianas Islands -- more than fifteen years ago!  -- that was more or less how things were.  There were no bookstores on the island, and no public library.  The local newspaper was better than you might expect, but you'd still be finished in five minutes.  The International Herald Tribune would arrive in a couple of hotels and one cafe, but always two or three days late.

So we expats spent a lot of time trading books back and forth -- my friends Bruce and Maya had the biggest book collection on the island, and a little box with file cards where they'd keep track of who'd borrowed what -- and we got a lot of magazines.  At one point in the mid-1990s I was subscribing to something like eight or ten.  They arrived late, of course, but in a monthly magazine that's no big deal.  And we handed them around, sometimes tabbed with a Post-It note where something was particularly interesting.

Armenia, too, has few English-language resources for readers.  There are no daily newspapers (there's a weekly, but it's pretty bad).  There's a library -- two if you count the lending library at the Embassy -- but it's small and hard to get to.  There's no English-language bookstore.  If you haunt the local booksellers, you can sometimes find a few English books -- I've mentioned the mysterious shelf of books from the 1940s in one store -- but it's a lot of time spent to turn up a Harold Robbins paperback from 1979.  Objectively, it's as bad or worse than the Marianas Islands.

Yet we don't feel terribly starved for things to read.  Sometimes one of us will wander around the house saying "I've finished my book... there's nothing to read...", but that's the normal peckishness of the reader who's between books, not the cold-sweat desperation of the reader who really has nothing to read.

What's the difference?  Well, for one thing, we have less time for reading.  Back in 1995 I was knocking off a book every day or so.  Today... well, it's less than that.  Kids take up a lot of time.

But the big difference, of course, is the Internet.  If time allowed, I could read stuff online all day long.  Supply is no longer an issue!  Quality, perhaps, but not supply.

So anyway.  Below the fold, some articles that I've read online in the last little while.  Imagine me handing you a magazine with a Post-It note.  There's nothing here that's particularly deep or astounding, but all of these made me chuckle, or at least say "Huh -- didn't know that."

The countdown begins

So the project will end March 1.

This was the outcome of a pretty intense negotiation process, which ate most of the past week.  There were funding issues, there were exchange rate issues, there was this and that.  It could have been better and it could have been worse.  (There was another project that was on a fixed price contract -- paid in US dollars -- with tangible deliverables, i.e. construction stuff.  Those guys are in much more pain than we are.)  If we're not delighted with the outcome, neither are we bitter; this is very much the nature of the business. 

So what happens next? 

Saturday, Sunny and Cool

Short post today.

Saturdays are usually busy... kids at home. It was a lovely sunny day today, so we spent a lot of the day outside.  I raked leaves!  -- I am not very domestic and don't enjoy most chores.  Two exceptions: washing dishes and raking leaves.  No idea why.  But it was a lovely day, and there's just something about raking leaves on a cool sunny afternoon in autumn.

Tonight we go to the Marine Ball.  Every November, US Marines around the world celebrate the birthday of the Marine Corps.  In certain quiet corners of the world -- places that have a US Embassy, and thus Marines, but not a lot of American citizens -- this is the big social event of the year.  No, really.  So, the baby sitter will arrive in half an hour.

What else... oh, yes, the gas has been off since Thursday. (Not just for us.  The whole neighborhood.  Some sort of work on the pipes, nobody can tell us the details.) So, tonight will be our third night without heat.  Fortunately the evenings have been mild for November, so with an extra blanket and a space heater in the boy's room we're all right.  That said, the cool house makes Claudia (who doesn't  thermoregulate) walk around sort of clutching herself.  So, fingers crossed that this is done by tomorrow.

Life in the developing world.

Enigma

   Jacob displayed first signs of sickness in February.  It started with mouth ulcers, and then came diarrhea.  Not just any kind of diarrhea - it was a diarrhea that never stopped.  It would be bad, really really bad, for a day or two.  Then he would have very soft stools for a couple of days.  Then he would get very bad again.  Sometimes, there were days with no stool at all, then there would be 10 exploding diapers the next day.  He never had any diarrhea at night but he would wake up and immediately have an extremely watery poop.  If I wasn't there to catch him when he woke up, I would find him soiled, wet, and very stinky.  He had lots of undigested food in his stool.  He lost weight, then regained it.  On bad days, he would simply sway and fall over, out of a stand.  He was weak, he was grumpy, he changed.

It was scary.

Interlude

   Two weeks by myself!  That should be a lot of fun, but actually I find I end up sleeping badly and sort of slouching around. 

But the family will be back together in a few more days, when we all head off to America.  Which won't improve the blogging much, but at least if I'm short of sleep and dopy, there'll be a reason for it.

Meanwhile, I'm back, at least for the next three days.  I climbed Mount Aragats yesterday, and there will be a post on that anon. 

Otherwise... what do you want to read about?