--Wednesday, 05 April 00--
I woke in the night to a spectacular thunderstorm. It was wonderful, in
the middle of such inclement weather, to turn over and fall back to sleep.
When I got up at 6 AM it was still thundering. I measured the distance
of some of the lightening strokes and they were only one km away. Thank
God for lightening rods. Does the Grand, the tallest structure in the
immediate area, have a lightening rod?
The thunderstorms had finished shortly before I walked to work at 7:15.
I got my stuff in the office, checked my email, worked on writing procedures,
and then went to the UN Building where I honchoed the six regional people
through the UNMIK ID card process. This is a good example of how expensive
time is squandered on normally trivial tasks. In an ideal world, we would
have sent them and their approval to get UNMIK IDs over and they would
have come back with the IDs. It would have taken about 90 minutes, or
less, of THEIR time.
In this world, I had taken them over with the approval only to discover
that a final approval was needed and that person was not around. I went
into an adjacent office and asked for help and a very nice woman named
Connie told me that she would try to get the approval but bigwigs were
visiting from headquarters and the guy was hard to find. That killed chances
on Monday.
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On Tuesday I called but Connie was away from her desk.
When she called back she said that she would have to check an out-basket
to see if the paper was signed and could I check back in an hour. I did
but since civilian IDs are only issued in the morning and the hour took
us to 12:15, that left only Wednesday which was a risky situation since
the Peje office (some distance from Prishtina) was being opened on Thursday.
We HAD to get the IDs on Wednesday.
I met Connie as she was leaving the building for lunch and she told me
that the approval was in the ID room. I returned to my office and instructed
the affected staff to meet me outside the UN Headquarters at exactly 8:30
so we could be very early in the line.
Today, everyone showed up on time and I got them past the guards and into
the line. Since it would be a while before they were processed, I took
the time to walk to the Government Building to get the previously prepared
IDs of our Prizeren person. There I discovered that all new CFA IDs required
a written clearance. I got the staff there to give me samples of a request
memo and the lists that should be requested and went back to the UN Headquarters.
There I discovered that that the guy in the ID production room could not
find the authorization. I told him that Connie had told me that the approval
was there and he looked around and then asked a woman who came in the
room to ask Connie. I waited about five minutes and then went to look
for Connie myself. I found her in her office, getting ready to come to
the ID room. She immediately found the approval and production of IDs
began. I was able to leave one partial English speaker behind to facilitate
things("What is your eye color?") and went back to the office,
where there was a phone call and two people waiting to process expenditures.
And that was the beginning of another pillar-to-post day. I figure that
in three days I had spent at least 2 1/2 hours getting staff IDs. This
is a low level function but it is not possible to pass off the responsibility
because our local people simply don't understand the system and don't
know how to push to get things done. (When the door of the person whose
signature I wanted was locked, I simply went next door and expected someone
to help me. A local would never have carried that off.)
One nice feature for today was that Hilary called and told me that since
I had worked a local holiday (Bajram on March 16), I was entitled to take
a day off. I loved hearing it (it means that I will get other local holidays
off) but I have no idea how I can fit in a day off.
I have it rough but George has it much rougher since he is filling in
for Alan at the high level meetings. Amongst other things, this means
that he is out of the office much more than usual. So today I started
taking his phone calls as well as his visitors. All in a days work.
--Thursday, 06 April 00--
The morning was reasonably nightmarish. People kept showing up for expenditure
processing so steadily that I could do nothing else. The quality of the
materials they brought varied from correctly filled in forms to blank
forms (which I was told I was to fill in). I sent the latter person back.
She told me that George had filled in the forms before and I said that
obviously someone wanted to take advantage of that.
David Douglas called to ask if he could stop by to go over the pile of
paper that I had sent him. I stepped him through the forms and he wrote
down the numbers and circled places that had to be filled in. He is not
a finance guy but can understand what needs to be done. I was amused that
during our discussions, we were interrupted at least six times by people
seeking something or other (with blank forms or other). He must have left
with the notion that I was the Finance Director for Hell and responsible
for processing requests from an endless series of demons.
I cut up some of the pepperoni I bought in Skopje and brought it to the
best pizza place in town and had a wonderful pepperoni pizza at Fjala.
It is not possible to describe the satisfaction this provided me. Ooooooh!
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The afternoon calmed down considerably and I actually
had a few spare moments. I used them to go downstairs to the Tax Collection
division and initiate talk about how we can reconcile deposits to our
account with the sources (primarily tax payments and customs payments).
The whole group seem amazingly helpful and cooperative. Jim Westrick was
particularly cooperative. I gave him one of the "bank statements"
that I had received and he took the time to reconcile all the deposits
labeled as taxes and it worked perfectly.
George has been in a tizzy because the new ink stamps had not arrived.
One of George's phone calls given to me turned out to be someone working
to get the stamps to us. He told me that the stamps would be in a box
that originally held a table top Christmas tree and would be on the UN
bus from Skopje that arrived at 7 PM. Since the bus arrives at UN Headquarters
which is on the same block as the Grand, picking up the package seemed
to be easy. Of course, that was also true of the bus George and I had
taken back from Skopje which arrived more than four hours late.
While waiting for the Christmas tree box, I passed some time reading the
security notices posted in the entry to the UNHQ and got quite a revelation.
The notices were only a few weeks old (dated after my arrival) and spoke
of roadside mines and UXO (unexploded ordinance) that was placed on the
roadside by peasants who thought they were supposed to place it there
so KFOR could pick it up, like rubbish. Then there was the announcement
that a popular park about six kilometers from downtown was mined and that
no one should go there until it was de-mined. Then there was the description
of mid-night placement of mines clearly intended to kill and maim. What
I had regarded as a secret inconvenience pay was really what it was described
to be: hazardous duty pay.
Surveying the situation, and perhaps seeking some relief, I noticed that
a bar across the street had a view of the spot where the bus would stop.
Waiting for a bus in the chilly evening air wasn't nearly as interesting
as waiting for a bus in a heated bar while drinking a beer. I enjoyed
two beers and got the rubber stamps without having to deal with any roadsides.
Joe
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