Some Impressions From a Move In Process

They came and took our air baggage on Monday morning. Of course, since that is the little bit of stuff that is supposed to get to Dushanbe more quickly than the rest of our household effects (and since we now know that all our other "HHE" will go via slow boat first to a US government site in Belgium and then on some unknown route to Dushanbe, perhaps taking many months), we felt some pressure to choose wisely on what went into our air freight.

We hadn't really done the forethought to realize, for instance, that we'd want our desktop computer (and would therefore need to back up the hard drive and all) to go by air, so that was stressing us out on Sunday, once we'd realized. And of course there is always more sorting and organizing than you realize. But now we've had a little breathing room with the first packout day out of the way, and we are gearing up for the remaining packout to be done on this coming Monday and Tuesday.

At least next time, when they come for everything else, all we need to do is separate out what we'll take on the plane with us, and all the rest just needs to get packed and shipped -- not as many choices to be made.

Although, it's true that this packout is the one where you need to make sure whatever you don't want packed up is either nailed down, sealed in a secure and properly marked location, or forced outside where it can't hide and die in the shipment (that last again referring primarily to the risks involved with cats, but of course if a stray diaper were left in a diaper pail for the several months the shipment were travelling, that too would very quickly smell like something had died). This is the packout where your nightmare is that your passport gets packed up into one of the boxes -- then what will you do? (They even have a public service announcement about that on Armed Forces Network TV -- it's one of my favorites, right after the toddler choking hazard warning, "shady character from the nuthouse," spot.)

Of course, as we are preparing to leave I'm having little exchanges of both the positive and the negative kind, and they impress me differently than if I knew we were staying. The main negative one: the single, solitary response I have gotten to my public, online advertisements trying to find new homes for our cats was an accusatory message about "how dare we not try to take our pets with us," how "we humans are responsible for the animals we take into our homes" -- which made me furious and unable to shake my anger for several hours. (It subsequently has come to light that the sender was dumped with her parents Angora cat when they moved, but, hey, why take out your bitterness on me, lady? Take a moment to think before you press "send"!)

But I've also had some good interactions lately that make me feel good about the life we've had here in Vlad and in Russia, and not so much sorry to go, but I guess confident in some way that I'll be able to find similarly comfortable modes of being in Dushanbe.

I took in a bunch of old, too-small baby clothes the other day to donate to a local church, something I'd been meaning to do for a while. Of course, you can imagine that that wouldn't be a terrible experience, but in Russia you never know what can go wrong or turn out to be unpleasant. But, sure enough, I went into the lobby of the church out on the peninsula leading out to the lighthouse on the edge of town, and the lady manning the religious items and books kiosk that seems to always precede the actual sacred space in Russian Orthodox churches was all aflutter and happy to show me where to leave my boxes, and assured me that even little baby clothes would come in handy for the kids the church supports. It made me feel good to finally check something off of my list and of course -- an easy one -- to know I was doing something small that might benefit the local community.

Yesterday I took in a CD of photos to get them printed (I'm making a surprise gift for Marina of a little photo book with pictures of Anya all throughout our stay), and the guy in the photo shop was really nice, wanted to speak English with me in a friendly way, and in general the transaction went very well and the printed pictures were good quality and very cheap. (It even made me realize I should go back and print up another set to make a little photo book for Anya, as a keepsake of her first two years, spent in Vladivostok. What a concept -- digital photos on paper! It's been so long since I've developed photos...)

And then Anya and I went to the open market for some veggies and fruit, which has become my habit, finally, after many months (and on earlier visits to Russia, the equivalent of years, I suppose) of anxiety that made it difficult for me to tackle the market on a regular basis. But now I feel confident enough of myself and my Russian that I won't get ripped off (I can even demand unbruised pieces and can bargain a cup of berries down from exorbitantly expensive, if need be!). Now I enjoy going to the little market down the hill from us to get my fresh produce and dried fruit and nuts. This time the lady behind the counter where we bought our grapes was helpful when I had my arms full with kid and produce, and when Anya remarked "you hungry!" as the little bag of fruit appeared, the seller asked with a chuckle, "Does she know Russian too?"

I realized that I feel a confidence just being out and about a lot of the time here in Vlad that is a nice counterweight to some of the doubt I feel about how I've pursued my professional work here. For the most part I'm happy with the research I've done, and I know I've gathered a hell of a lot of material that will make a good history. But I guess I have learned something about myself in the past few years, and that is that I will always have trouble contacting live people who might be good to talk to for my work, and that has been true here for sure. Books and archival documents are just so much easier, there's so much less risk of a bad relationship! Anyway, I've been feeling bad that I am somehow unable to contact and speak a bit more to one of the virologists in town who studies tick-borne encephalitis today, feeling that I'm no good for having that trouble and, when all is said and done, for most likely never calling or meeting with her again. But then when I go around town running my errands or whatever, I realize how much has gone well in life here, how much I've been able to accomplish (and have needed to accomplish: the bottom line is we've been in a new, foreign place, not at home!) in other, more mundane, but no less important realms: knowing my city and driving around with confidence (I guess for the past year I've actually been the only spouse** here in our American group to drive at all!); shopping and getting what I need and what pleases me either food-wise or things-wise; having a few friends and balancing that with my work, and having success at gathering data and working with inanimate legible sources, if not with the animate kind; and taking good care of and having fun with Anya, whether at home or at Montessori or on the playground. I guess that is a pretty good set of things to have achieved, and I'm not unhappy with that.
[** Ha! I realized only belatedly that this idea really shows how much I've swallowed the reigning sexism of the Foreign Service: I'm of course the only female spouse (weaker sex, anyone?) here who has driven among all who've lived here this past year, but the one male trailing spouse, well, of course, he'd probably never dream of not driving -- not to mention his apparent views on not working...]

All of that is positive, but I have to at least note -- it is such a terrible set of events that I still don't know how to understand, so I can't write much more -- that we've also been following with trepidation as Russia and Georgia came to armed conflict in the past week. We've been thinking of our friends in Tbilisi, have been shocked at how quickly it all came to pass, and depressed about what it means for the people on the ground and for what it demonstrates about the political and foreign relations realities.

What we are saying:
all kinds of colors: yeyo, bwu, red, white, oinge, bwak (and a similar range in Russian)
comparisons: big, "hmah" (and sometimes even "small" -- we're getting better at s + consonant pronunciation)
(And, interestingly, Anya has made a very strong connection between big and heavy: to the point of even thinking and saying that if a butterfly is big, it's also heavy, or a hug that is big is also heavy.)
A series of numbers that demonstrates at least the start of an understanding of the concept of counting. Whenever there are more than one of an object, you're likely to hear "wann-too-fee-fawf," which is Anya's version of 1-2-3-4-5, with 4 and 5 sort of smushed together into one word. (Hey, those are big numbers, once you get up into the stratosphere, what's the difference?)
Many requests, and many of them accompanied by "please." Here is a typical exchange these days in our kitchen:
"More milk!"
"What do you say?"
"More milk, pweeeez..."
"Very nice, here you go."
Also: "kiss it!" and "hug!"
Also some past tenses: "kisst it!"
And some rocky starts to the use of pronouns, as in: "you hungry!" "you tired!" "you finished!" and "you scared!" when really what is meant is "I'm ....," or "carry you!" and "help you!" in place of " ... me!" I guess when your main mode of learning is repeating, of course you're going to get those things wrong when the perspective changes and you're saying it yourself instead of mom or dad asking whether you feel or did something.
Also a pretty good memory: especially getting reinforced when we turn down the leafy street that leads to the Vlad Motor Inn, and Anya remarks correctly that both sausage and slides/playground will soon be enjoyed.

What we used to say (for the record, an attempt at compiling past idiosynchratic words, with an asterisk denoting those that are not yet obsolete):
appi
bop
happa
bik
manna
wawa*
yaindann*
sseepie
uppadeez
noi
pafo*
hmoon
fumm
fingam
ayah
tikka*
payday
Tay-tay
Agga
tututu
bayo*
pato*
psai-psai
bayefai
aissee
tahs
tah-fee
pishi
yeg*
yabb-i*
yek*
Nimma
H'mp'hah
paya
fawf
oyay
e'feh*
gaggy
kroya
akkapiya*
pla-puh*
gai-yay
yips*
(Translations available on request.)

Long Overdue

Ugh -- I have been feeling terrible for the lengthy bout of "radio silence" here on the Vladiblog. And the longer it gets, the more I feel behind, the more stuff there is to report on, and it just snowballs and I feel like I'll never do it all justice. Clearly it would be better to just take the heat off of myself and dash off a few little updates, but that just doesn't appear to be my style, try as I might.

I'm not sure why it's been so hard for me to write any updates in the blog for so long. Partly it's that I've been really busy, which has mainly been a good thing.

I took two research trips in the months of June and July to the other major city in the Russian Far East (yes, there are others aside from ours), Khabarovsk. I've been a big fan of this city since my first visit there with Anya and Dan in fall 2007. It makes a nice escape from Vlad -- green; broad straight avenues to stroll on; clean, well cared for, etc. I went to collect some material in the archives for my history of tick-borne encephalitis in the RFE. My June journey was the first time away from Anya alone, and both of the trips were hard to take in the direct sense of having to leave her, and in having to arrange for Dan and Marina, her nanny, to pick up the slack on things that I normally do for her. But in the end, of course, she barely missed me, if at all (and as Dan's July post shows, they made a great dad-daughter connection without me here, which is really nice to see).

The trips were great from a research perspective. I gathered so much more material than I ever would have been able to in a comparable amount of time in Vlad, given the way the archives here work. And they also amounted to a really positive experience in allowing me to feel a professional confidence that I still find hard to fully grasp here at home, where I'm fulltime juggling being a mom, being the primary (if only by a hair) person responsible for keeping the domestic front running smoothly (which has its own difficulties in Russia), and being a historian. And from a personal point of view it was good to get away, have a little alone time strolling around the town, and enjoy Khabarovsk a couple of more times before we leave.

In general, I feel really good right now about my project -- I feel I've exhausted most of the avenues I was trying to research, gotten as much as I can in a place I'll likely not return to, and I've basically shifted completely to writing and getting two overlapping papers ready to present this fall.


Also, by way of explanations of what's been keeping me busy while I've ignored the blog: it's been summer, of course, so there's been much more opportunity to spend time outdoors (although that doesn't completely hold up as an excuse, since there have also been a number of the typhoons that regularly hit Vlad in summer, so we've been stuck inside on plenty of days while the blog has run dry). And then we took a quick trip to Beijing -- you know, we figured, why not hit it right at the height of the summer heat-humidity-pollution index, and just ahead of the Olympics? (Actually, although the weather was indeed amazingly energy-sapping, it was great. Have to sum it up in some other post, or maybe in the Flickr captions...)

And now here we are back in Vlad, for just 3 short weeks, as we try to wrap this puppy up: get our stuff given away, dumped in the trash, packed up & shipped off, or left on the stoop with some extra food for the next few months (OK, that last one is only likely for 2 of our possessions: the cats), with as few regrets as possible for the way we pursued and for the most part did not find happiness in this town. (I guess that's my way of expressing what else "partly" explains my silence, in addition to being busy: the anxiety level rises as we get closer to departure day, and that has to do not only with the logistics of moving but of course with all that is being left behind and left undone or unaccomplished or insufficiently enjoyed. While overall both Dan and I are glad to be moving on, that doesn't mean there aren't some things we're sorry to leave and people we're sorry we didn't spend more time with while we had the chance. And that bittersweet feeling, and the anxious ways that each of us tries to avoid it, don't make it easy to update the blog.)

As of August 22, it's back to the US for some time with family and friends, until early October, when we fly to Dushanbe. I'll try to practice brief update skills as we leave, but I can't make any promises. In the meantime, the ballot box is open for blog names/concise 'n' snappy URLs for the next incarnation of the Vladiblog...

In Bloom

Often the irony of life in Vladivostok has meant that for one reason or another I haven't really been able to describe life here very well to those who'd like to hear about it. One reason comes at times when nothing much is going on, and the general mood has been a bit melancholy, and therefore there really isn't much inspiration to write either e-mails or blog entries about news here. The other reason is at play when there's a lot going on, when the mood picks up, but when there's just so little time to write something about the developments and news. We've gone from a winter of a lot of the former to a spring with already a bunch of the latter, so I feel I need to force myself again to at least try to write entries to the blog a bit more often and make them a bit shorter, just so I can get the news out the door. It feels like I've been jotting down ideas of what I want to report throughout the past month since the previous entry, only to lack the time to really edit it well, and then I watch as things change yet again, and the news of the day or the week shifts. I need to catch things more often and offer them up so that you can see them!

Play
The Pink Elephant is no more. Sometimes it seems like all the good things in Vlad just end or disappear right after you've found them and have started to get used to them being a joyful part of your life. I was pretty bummed about the closure right after I became aware of it, just before May Day. But then I decided we should just get right back up on the horse again and check on another local Montessori center I'd heard about for the under-3 set. Who knows, I told myself, maybe this one will actually be better than the P.E.! Then, in the couple of weeks after the Pink Elephant breathed its last, life of course sort of oozed into the cracks where that activity had been fitting, and after one frustrating unsuccessful phone call to get the basic info on "Vershina" ("Summit" -- a decidedly less interesting name...), it took me a little while to make another attempt to get us signed up and try it. An update on the new place will follow in the next post.

We did exchange phone numbers with the class leader from the Pink E. with whom we clicked the best, though -- Vika. Well, since we encountered three different leaders there in our 3 months of going, all of whom were named Vika, that isn't very precise. But we know which one we mean, and we are planning to meet her tomorrow for our first attempt at the children's performances that are given at the Regional Philharmonic. Tomorrow will be "The Ugly Duckling." I told you, there is so much going on, I need to set myself to writing a little shorter posts a little more often to really report it all on time -- so news of performances will have to go in the next entry, too.


Drive
OK, I admit that I was kind of a whiner about the car. It probably sounded like I was a spoiled brat who couldn't bear to take public transportation (except that, for those of you who have seen our location, really, it is not the easiest place to move around from without a car, am I right?). It was mainly the shopping (getting there and back AND lugging groceries or other purchases, e.g. big bags of diapers) that I did not relish having to do on buses. But, to be honest, I've actually had fun this past month viewing the city from a new perspective, taking the bus and marshrutka (minivan fixed-route taxi) to get around when it's just me and my work. And what has undoubtedly allowed me to have that fun was our decision to go ahead and use the car a limited amount, for grocery shopping and going places with Anya, just to try to stay off of it, like a bad ankle, as much as we can. Well, that, and the fact that it really is finally spring.

For some of the places I need to be for my research and writing, the bus can actually be a better way to get around. Right now I'm working at the state archive down next to the railroad station, and sometimes at the regional medical library, down across from a large candy factory and just up the hill from the regional clinical hospital (and upstairs from the regional blood bank - just in case!). Both of them are on easy and reliable bus routes, just a single bus to get there and back. And taking the bus certainly lets you see your surroundings in a different way. I'm really able to look around in a way that isn't possible when you're driving -- I see the ads for the latest performances in town, plastered on all the fences (Tibetan yaks at the Vlad Circus, anyone?), notice new businesses that either just opened or never caught my eye before. And you're just able to coexist with people in a more direct (if anonymous) way on the bus than driving around in a car lets you.

(And about the car itself: oh, it is a long and drawn-out saga indeed. Let's see, when I last reported in, we had had our steering wheel mauled by a particularly mal-meaning Russian mechanic, had made first contact with Nissan USA, who then made first contact, before first light, with the Riverside branch of the family. Everything from there just kind of got more and more mired in the muck. The well-meaning Nissan rep apparently gave us the wrong contact number, so all of Dan's increasingly urgent calls over the last two weeks of March went unheard. A few more calls at hours when most of us are asleep, to Riverside and to Vlad, and we determined that nothing this side of Irkutsk has enough of a legitimate connection to the Nissan corporation for the folks to send the part. But we determined we could get reimbursed for a part and labor we paid for directly, as long as Nissan is on the bill(s). Dan immediately ordered the part from a dealership in Virginia and our feet seemed to be loosening from the mire.

Cut to this week, when the part finally arrived via diplomatic pouch (no special delays, that's just how long it takes), and Dan goes with the help of a friend and colleague to begin getting the work done. One disappointing moment is when we learn that indeed neither of the 2 places that appear to have a connection to Nissan have enough of a true claim on the name to put it on their official bill. But the more depressing and frustrating news arrived when the better of the 2 choices of mechanic, apparently a thoughtful guy who was very willing to hear Dan out and not leap in where he didn't have enough information or didn't know what the heck he was doing, noticed that THE PART SENT BY THE U.S. MECHANIC GOT BROKEN IN THE MAIL! So, who knows what recourse we have with them: as Dan notes, they probably just threw the thing in a box to our Dulles address, not taking into account the beating it might take between State Department warehouse and plane, etc., and if they hear the whole transit itinerary they will surely withdraw all responsibility for its loss of integrity en route. We are just heading into the weekend, so we haven't had a chance yet to take stock or investigate what our next steps are. All I can say is: what a royal hassle!)


Work
Whether thanks to the bus, or spring, or just an unrelated change in momentum, my research is resurgent. I returned to the archives in March and I've finally found a lot of interesting primary documents on regional public health and tick-borne encephalitis. I have a bunch of things I hope to get a chance to look at (and the time left is just starting to seem like perhaps too little to get through it -- but regardless I'll have time to collect a bunch of interesting stuff).

It's also just fun to be back in the archives, after an absence essentially since last summer, before I took the Consulate job. There is a weird kind of feeling you get working there and being accepted by the ladies who run the reading rooms, one of whom especially here in Vlad is very serious and bureaucratic until you crack her, and she then really is friendly and supportive when you need it. It sounds good, but there's a weird side that emerges when you see someone flailing who hasn't cracked the unsmiling exterior, and you feel a little superior and comfortable in your position -- I don't necessarily like that feeling, but somehow having a little success in Russia in the face of adversity can do that to you.

My experience generally in archives so far in my career, primarily during my dissertation research, was a very needle-in-a-haystack experience, mainly because of my topic. I think that feeling is actually pretty much par for the course in archival work, but I suspect that the way my dissertation topic was defined so very differently from the way the archives were organized (and from the way any Russian asks questions of Russian history), it made it difficult to easily pinpoint what files might be useful. But now, simply by virtue of the fact that I'm interested in a particular disease, one that has a regional significance, for the first time in my work I've actually had the experience of writing in my notes "Jackpot!," after finding a file titled "Data about the morbidity and mortality of tick-borne encephalitis and malaria for 1940-41."

A Brief Update

What we're saying:

This month we have turned to verbs! And we're just recently getting into prepositions, noticing when those that are essential to a particular verb get attached to words in English. So, "put your shoes on" gets repeated as "shuzon"; "let's take your hood off" becomes "hoodoff."

tawai! = "vstavai!" ("get up!" in Russian)
go-oup = go/get up
syajish! = "syadis'!" ("sit down!" in Russian)
shiji! = "sit!" or "sit there!" in Russian
sit down! (very well enunciated - no need to translate - and almost always all of these sit-related imperatives are directed at "Beah," the funny little stuffed puppy whose species in the sleep-deprived mode of new parents we evidently could not identify, and thus he received the name "Rabbit-Bear," which for Anya is now and will surely always be "Beah.")
want (another one that really is pronounced pretty much on target, and is starting to be used to good effect.)
no (unfortunately this one is now in VERY wide usage. I know it would have gotten in there inevitably at some point, but I think I can actually trace its integration pretty well to the week we received a gift from Cousin Stacey and family: a really good little book, "Where's Spot?," whose refrain in every location where Spot is sought is, sadly, "no." Anya picked up on it very quickly and has run with it.)
pway! = play!
syuda = this way, over here in Russian
syagi = sadik, "preschool" (what I call Montessori center) in Russian
bai-sik-ull = bicycle (a real obsession for some reason, surely related to the appearance of our neighbors' tricycle outside, Anya's recent notice of the adult bikes perched unused downstairs in our house, and the existence of a picture of a trike on one of her blocks)
yogurr = yogurt (more to report next time, but I'll note here that we have ourselves a fan of homemade yogurt. And a person who has trouble distinguishing between the concepts "yoga" and "yogurt" when they are referred to too close together in conversation.)
syippah = slipper
tapogi = tapochki, "slipper" in Russian (For some reason, the little slippers with the velcro closure that I picked up on sale for the equivalent of about $7 at the local Bubbl-Goom store are a real hit.)
caw = car
mahina = mashina, "car" in Russian
crukk = truck
bussss! = bus (often followed by the comment "biiiig!" and more often followed by the comment "noi[se]" -- and in general when the identifying-vehicles mood strikes, it seems like every third one is a bus, so this word gets a whole lot of play.)

History in the Headlines

This past week has been a whirlwind of professional activity and inspiration for me.

In the couple of days before last weekend, an international history conference held in Vlad brought me into a lot more contact with fellow historians than I've had the chance to enjoy in recent months. Thanks to that contact, I also got a leap start in work at the Far Eastern state historical archive. And, perhaps most surprising, the current topic of my research came back to bite contemporary Russians, quite literally.

The federal health agency in Russia recently declared an epidemic of tick-borne encephalitis (TBE), with over 30,000 people across the country infected with the disease, and 15 dead. Apparently the region suffering the most is Novosibirsk, with 12 thousand cases of infection, about a third of which are children. The Far East, where TBE was first observed and studied by modern medical virologists exactly 70 years ago this summer, is not among the very worst hit, although the region surrounding the other major city out here, Khabarovsk, apparently has reported about 4,000 cases.

It's not very clear what explains this year's rise in the incidence of infection. Gennadii Onishchenko, former Minister of Health (he now heads the federal Consumer Rights Surveillance Agency, which performs some of the functions that the FDA and the CDC are responsible for in the US), says the unusually warm winter and unseasonably warm spring that hit in Siberia and the Eastern parts of Russia are partly to blame. He also calls attention to lax planning on the part of regional officials. Apparently every year health officials in the regions are supposed to order up doses of preventive vaccine and the immunoglobulin treatment that is really the only recourse once a person is infected with TBE. This year, perhaps because 2005 and 2006 saw a downturn in infections, Onishchenko says the regions ignored his calls for orders and now find themselves scrambling for treatment doses that were not manufactured.

Some reports note that localities often spray parks and recreational areas to keep the tick population down. A Kommersant newspaper article points to local officials skimping on such spraying or doing it too late this year. Personally I was surprised to hear that they try to spray at all to help prevent this disease, since in my understanding the danger of being bitten by an infected tick is much higher out "in nature," as Russians like to say -- in other words, outside of town, at a remove from urban areas, and in places that cover enough territory that I would assume spraying is really not a feasible option. But apparently now that this year's epidemic has been declared, officials are trying to be particularly vigilant about spraying around children's camps, as most of the young population heads out for the summer.

Evidently the joke among virologists right now is that the ticks' heightened activity is their way of marking the anniversary of modern medical scientists having taken note of their viral baggage. I wonder what Lev Aleksandrovich Zilber -- head of the 1937 medical expedition whose participants sleuthed out the fundamentals of the disease -- would think if he were here today?