--Monday, 01 January 01--
I slept late, 9:30 and stayed in all day and wrote. It was nice to write and do nothing. There are times when there is no substitute for "nesting".


--Sunday, 07 January 01--
An Albanian friend had asked me to make another cheese omelet with bacon for him since he loves bacon and his family doesn't allow pork in the house so he has no way of getting bacon. He came over this morning and his timing was just right since the power had came back on just 15 minutes before he arrived. (It was an hour and 45 minute outage.) The omlets turned out just right and the bacon was good (I had bought the last seven packages in the Maxi for fear that that was all the bacon I would get for a while).

At my friend's suggestion we walked up Germia about five km to the last structure/restaurant where we had some liquid refreshment. The weather was so mild that before long I had taken my coat off and was carrying it. It would have been pleasant to stay in the wood paneled room but people at every table were smoking and the smoke was getting to the both of us.

My friend told me that Princess Di was killed because she was pregnant with Dodi Fyed's child and the British Secret Service "which handles these things for the royal family" would not allow the King of England to have a Moslem half-brother.

He also told me that Macedonia didn't really exist because more than half of it was really part of Kosova and the other part was occupied by Bulgarians and some Serbs. "Believe me Joey, throughout history, every time we turned our back our neighbors stole our land. The Serbs, the Montenegrins, the Bulgarians, the Greeks, the Russians, they all stole our land. I hate them all!"

When asked who he did like, my friend said that he likes America.

After work I told Alan Label that I would get a a copy of the IHT and read it in the Kukri. He said he might stop by and he did. We chatted about various things, I did most of the talking. He listened and evaluated. He eventually left without having anything at all to drink.

Berat Gervalla who works at the Kukri and a customer.

I worked on the Monday crossword and finally got up the nerve to ask the bar attendant what his name was: Berat Gervalla. I have terrible trouble remembering names and it is embarrassing. It was Berat's picture I took with the UN beret on his head.

I came home in a blackout and when you do that, it is easy to forget to turn on the lights. This can lead to a failure to realize you actually have electricity when it comes back on.

Another odd thing about a blackout is that if you were watching the TV when it starts, you have no way of turning the TV off and it will remember that it is on when the electricity returns. Thus you might go to sleep and the TV will pop to life, blaring out whatever is showing at the moment. This can be surprising.

Even in a roving blackout, things are rarely completely dark. When the moon is nearly full, I could see the old city limned by its peaked red tile roofs. In the odd window, the battery-driven florescent fixtures within gave a cold white light that seemed somehow harsh in the gentle darkness.

Suddenly the satellite dish box clicked and lights were back on in the old city.


--Tuesday, 09 January 01--
A translator came to me and said that the Co-Head, would like to talk to me. The Co-Head told me that there was not enough money in our accounts to make the Winterization payments. He asked me to address the problem and I said I would. As much as could be gathered from the information provided was that there was a problem. So much for clarity from the bank.

I tried to check the bank statement but we had not received one in over a week. So I went to the BPK and they told me that I needed 3M DM to make the requested payments. I examined the most up-to-date statement there and noticed that there were substantial deposits in various accounts. I said that I wanted to transfer my positive balances to cover the 3M. The bank locals said I could not do that because the accounts were "owned" by others.

I walked down the hall where I found an expat and he agreed that CFA accounts were CFA accounts and we agreed that I would fax an instruction for a series of account transfers that would cover the needed payments.

A phone call to me could have produced the same result.


--Wednesday, 10 January 01--
At night while writing emails at home I noticed a small black speck moving, wriggling under the desk lamp I use. At first I thought it was a fly but on closer inspection it was an upside-down Lady Bug, that round, red, black spotted insect that gave its name to a very popular car -- the first car I ever owned.

I softly righted it.

Ever since I was a child, I have always had a love affair with Lady Bugs. For reasons I don't know they were special and every child treated them respectfully. When one of them land on you, you didn't slap them flat like you did most every other kind of insect. Instead, you recited a rhyme:

Lady Bug, Lady Bug, fly away!
Your house is on fire,
Your children are burning,
Lady Bug, Lady Bug, fly away!

And then you blew them off you with a gentle, focused breath, watching them float away toward an unknown future. Small, but not dumb, they got the hint and headed on to their business (which I later discovered to be the consumption of large numbers of plant pests).

So here before me, in mid-January, was a struggling, but living, Lady Bug. How did this summer creature survive and find its way here? The Lady Bug was in the warmest spot in the warmest room of my apartment, so that was part of the answer.

I wondered how to feed it. I don't know what adult Lady Bugs eat. What was I to do? All I could think of was to take a beer bottle cap and fill it with water and sugar and put it in front of my friend. There was no response so I put my finger in the sugary water and put a drop in front of the Lady Bug. It wandered around the edge of the water and then stopped. Was it dining? Could I really help it? Out of time, out of place, doomed. What did it remind me of?


--Thursday, 11 January 01--
Yesterday, the left side of my back kept hurting. I assumed that I was sitting in my chair incorrectly and assumed that it would go away after a night's sleep.

Well, it didn't. It was a lot worse this morning and stayed so throughout the day. I had trouble breathing deeply and certain actions, like putting my left arm in a coat sleeve were really difficult. Oddly, my knuckles were better than usual although they had been nearly continuously inflamed for over a month.

Went to the Government Building to see the COP who asked me to defer the decision about my date of departure USAID had approved a replacement. Since that meant only a brief delay, I agreed. I could barely get my coat on to leave and I had to be helped into it.

Had lunch at Golden Road with Smile but couldn't manage to include desert.


--Friday, 12 January 01--
I arranged for Sami to drive Mike Ives, Peter Moore, Ramadan and myself to Mitrovica to see if we could do something about the office situation there. First we went to the office and I was pleased to see that Bali had had it fixed up without making it look plush. At least you felt you were in some respectable office -- even if there was no heat and only occasional electricity.

In the same building was a free Internet access facility open to the public. It was sponsored by USAID and, doubtlessly in a delicate act of ticket balancing had three or more iMacs. I looked at the young people using them and said, "Macintosh!" and gave a thumbs up sign. They didn't seem to get it.

We talked to the the Municipal Administrator who said that we were a regional activity and should talk to the Regional Administrator who in turn said that we were primarily a municipal activity and should see the Municipal Administrator. No progress.

We then tried to locate the Carabinieri building that Customs will be taking over and found it just after three cows and a horse, way out of the center of town. No progress here either.

A Mitrovica menu item: filled chicken buttock.

The "paper towel" memo.

Back in the office, I found that the bathrooms were again stocked with paper towel of loathsome quality. The proverbial straw was on my aching back! I was so enraged that I tore a length of towel off a role and then wrote a memo to the "Corporate Services" head by using a magic marker on the paper toweling. The memo said: "Besnik, Why must we use the crummy towels that do not tear at the perforations and disintegrate upon contact with water? Why? Why? Why?"

I showed it to as many people as I could (they understood the problem) and then took it up to his office door and asked Besa (his office mate) to hold the adhesive tape while I adhered the paper toweling to the outside of his door. Besa not only held the tape she translated the memo for Shukri who had come out of the Co-head's office to see what was going on. Shukri could hardly stand, she laughed so hard. All the passers-by seemed equally amused. Besnik was not but the quality of the paper towels did improve.

I had spoken to Besnik on a number of occasions about the paper towels but got nowhere. Talk, yes; action, no. I started to notice a pattern. When I had politely asked Treasury staff to file the Payment Orders, I got talk but no action. However, when I displayed exasperation (which always makes my voice rise into an intimation of shouting), they visibly squirmed -- but still didn't do the work. Only when I repeated my "shit fit" a second time did the desired action actually happen.

I noticed this response pattern -- you have to shout at them twice before they believe you mean what you say -- in other situations and it made me think about their notion of work. It is very different from ours. Kosovars are very non-confrontational (they never talk back) but they do not associate instructions with work nor work with productive activity. On the other hand, they can be trained. I am pleased to report that the Payment Orders have been well filed for ten months now. I know this because I have occasion to look things up in the files and I can usually find what I am looking for.

Joe