7 Quick Takes Friday #12

I arrived in Klaipeda, Lithuania just in time to contribute to the 7 Quick Takes Friday meme hosted by Jennifer at Conversion Diary. This, though, is only because while it is near the end of the day Friday here, it is the high point of the day in the USA. It has been an eventful week, beginning with sadness last Friday with the death of Ray, only one day after Shane lost his job, and ending on more positive tones. So, here is a quick round-up, not by day exactly, more like by topic, of this week.

1. Mass. Thanks to Martin Luther King Day being a holiday, I was able to go to daily Mass twice in a row: Monday and Tuesday. I had taken Tuesday off because I had thought I would be flying at that time, but the situation with Ray threw some of those plans out of kilter. I even had time on both (!) days to have coffee (milk for me) with friends who had also been at Mass. I have been traveling so much they had forgotten who I was (not really), but catching up is always fun to do, especially when there is no real time limit.

2. SFO. Sunday I attended our Secular Franciscan meeting. I have not been in a few months. November I was in some state/country or other -- forget exactly where. December was cancelled. For some reason (well, actually because I brought up some requests), it turned into a prayer fest (inspiring), followed by a delayed holiday exchange of gifts (fun). Everyone had brought food donations for a local project, and I offered to take them to the project director. Good intentions rarely going unpunished, I managed to back the car into a tree when I backed up to get closer to the door for loading the food. Inconsiderate tree! It just did not seem to want to move out of my way. So, I have a dent in the back bumper that proves to Donnie that I really am as bad a driver as he thinks I am.

3. Prayer Group. I always look forward to our Monday night prayer group. I co-lead with a spiritual director, Robert, who comes down from the St. Francis Retreat Center. Actually, he does the leading, and I do the shepherding in the sense of networking, reminding people, gathering the clans. Since I had not expected to be in town Monday, I did not send out the routine notices, and I learned how important they are: no one showed up except Sr. M and me. From a selfish point of view, that was great. I love Sr. M and learn a lot from her, and we had two hours or more to share scripture, experience, and prayer. What a great way to end the day!

4. Shane moving forward. Shane has spent the week recovering from the shock of losing his job in spite of just having received a raise for outstanding performance. Although the Human Resource office has forbidden his supervisor, who disagreed with the decision, from telling Shane the reason, it would appear that little Nikolina's $2 million insurance bill accompanied by the significant amount of leave that Shane had to take at one time was the reason. The reason does not matter as much as finding insurance coverage for Nikolina, and surprisingly, Stanford University Hospital offered to try to help. Apparently, there are programs now for people in such dire circumstances. So, Shane spent some time in Palo Alto this week. I will provide an update to the Clan under Siege post on Clan of Mahlou once I get settled in here on the cold Baltic Sea.

5. A Matter of Attitude. The United Airlines plane that was supposed to carry me to Frankfort for transfer to a Lufthansa flight to Vilnius did not leave the San Francisco Airport on Wednesday. Flight 900 was simply a doomed flight, all because of as broken PA system. Apparently, planes cannot fly without a way to communicate between crew and all passengers, not just those in some of the cabins, and since the plane we were on had a PA system that ignored the back rows of economy class, we returned to the airport three times after trying to take off while mechanics scratched their heads over how to fix the system. They wanted to turn off the broken speaker but did not know which circuit breaker to pull. As a result, they pulled us -- off the plane and into seven hours of waiting for another plane. People became cranky, as did some of the customer representatives. (I think I shall send some suggestions to United; Shane used to work the complaint counter at Sears when he was 16 and did a better job of not personalizing the comments of frustrated people than did some of the senior airlines people on Wednesday. Patience is a virtue in such cases.) Of course, it is a two-way street, and not being cranky usually gets one a better deal. For me, it paid off: a hotel room in Frankfurt and dinner. Yes, I was a day late in arriving, but at least I arrived during the day. The alternative would have been to debark the plane in Vilnius at 0001 in the morning, with no place but a snowbank for a bed, Klaipeda being four hours away, the driver snoring away in the comfort of his own home, and the only nearby hotel having closed its doors two hours earlier.

6. Frankfurt. Oh, the lark of it! Yes, I was stranded. Yes, I was supposed to start teaching Friday. Yes, both the students and I would have to make up the missed hours. Nonetheless, there I was in Frankfurt, speaking German. Rusty German, to be sure, but I was able to practice it at check-in, dinner, the ticket counter in the morning. I rarely get a chance to speak German (although a trip earlier this year did help to refresh my memory), and for me the practice and renewal of the language was worth the irritation of an interrupted flight. Oh, and did I mention that the duck dinner was sumptious?

7. Klaipeda. Finally! I arrived in Vilnius in the early afternoon on the coldest day in history for that date's temperature, easily picked out the tall driver from the university, clambered into his station wagon, and proceeded to chat for the next 3-4 hours, the length of the drive from Vilnius to Klaipeda. The driver did not speak much English but was quite at home in Russian. A chance to practice another foreign language although Russian does not seem "foreign" to me. The only difficulty was my lack of a four-hour bladder, four kids having demolished the only bladder I ever had with constant kicking throughout pregnancies. Fortunately, we found a roadside facility about an hour from Klaipeda, and I was much more lively after that.

However, now I have to go to bed (yes, I know it is only noon in the USA), so that I can get up and prepare to teach six hours of class tomorrow (down two hours from the eight hours that the dean had promised (threatened?) the students. We can get in all the hours required for the semester in the next two weeks with only six hours a day on weekends. Only?? It will be interesting to see if the students can match my fortitude for work. And so, without further ado, good-night!

Dona Nobis Pacem

The blogosphere, as most of you probably know, is celebrating today as a peace movement day. More information can be found at Mimi's site, where you can read the contributions of other bloggers on this theme.

As so often happens in my life, I experienced a moment of synchronicity as I was preparing this blog post. In the afternoon, I was in Arizona to give a graduation speech to a class of Arabic specialists. Without giving any thought to today's peace blog, I nonetheless spoke about peace, beginning my speech in a way not atypical of graduation speeches I give whenever linguists are among the graduating students. The Cold War, I tell them, was not won with weapons. It was won with words -- the words of Americans who understood Russian language and culture and the words of Russians who understood American language and culture. I was thrilled back then to be one grain of sand in the cement of the span that bridged the two superpowers and brought both to a cautious ally status. So, too, today, it will most likely not be weapons but the efforts of the Americans who speak Arabic and understand Arabic cultures and Arabs who speak English and understand American culture who will bring the current hot war to an end. General Abizaid has ascribed the success of the surge in Iraq to the contribution of American linguists.

Years ago, at the approaching end of the Cold War (although no one knew at the time that the Cold War was going to end), I served as interpreter for a remarkable man, Pyotr Volkovich, then vice president of the Belarus Peace Committee. During the Cold War, every major city in the USSR had a peace committee, composed of citizens dedicated to promoting world peace. You see, the Russians were honestly afraid that the USA intended to start a war against them. The members of these committees can today be considered veterans of the Cold War, So, too, I would argue can be that handful of us Americans working and studying in Russia at the time and those Russian scholars living and studying in America. My daughter, Lizzie, cherishes a button that says "Veteran of the Cold War." As the only Westerner in her Soviet 7th grade classroom, coping with distrust and dislike of Americans at the time, she considers rightfully that she has earned the title.

Pyotr I knew from my work in Belarus, one part of which in 1989 was to prepare bilingual documents for the Ministry of Education for an exchange with the USA. Therefore, I was subsequently brought to Portland, Oregon in 1990 to put together the corresponding set of bilingual documents for one of the Portland school districts to establish an exchange with Belarus. Since the Peace Committee provided the financial support for the exchange from the Belarus side, Pyotr had come along with the superintendent of Minsk public schools. The timing had been manipulated to allow Pyotr to be the keynote speaker at the International Rotary Convention that took place in Portland that year. I went to the convention to provide moral support for Pyotr or so I thought. However, Pyotr surprised me by ditching his Soviet interpreter and called out as he approached the podium, "Beth, so mnoi." (Beth, come with me.) And that is how I ended up being the interpreter for his very moving speech which focused on the need for peace. (I have posted details of his speech on Mahlou Musings.)

Perhaps the most potent advocacy for peace I have ever encountered is a poster drawn by a child, who contributed it to a contest for peace advocacy organized by the Moscow Peace Committee. Against a pure blue (sky?) background, the child had drawn a chalky white frame of a house encompassing a globe inside. At the top, the child had scrawled five words: "U nas net drugogo doma." (We have no other home.) No other words were needed, I think. That pretty much says it all, doesn't it? So, let's wrap the only home we have in the protection of peace!

Katya of Tula

Is anyone following -- or interested in -- the story of Katya from Tula, the blind orphan I have been trying to pry out of Russia, which is similar to the story of Shura, the spina bifida boy from Siberia whose story is chronicled throughout Part I of Best Atheist. I began the story of Katya in Part II of Blest Atheist, but the book came out before Katya's story was finished. We left Katya in the process of getting a visa from the US Embassy in Russia, no easy task but one that had seemed to be facilitated by my trip to Russia last August.

Today I learned two very heartwarming facts. First, the lady who adopted Katya's younger brothers has completed all the paperwork for sponsoring Katya to live with her in the United States. Second, all the medical records have been assembled and reviewed. We had hoped that once Katya got to the USA she could receive excellent palliative care, her care being hit and miss at the moment in Russia although she has a wonderful nurse/caretaker there who really cares about her. Then, looking at old records, the doctors at Tufts, who would be the ones to care for Katya, thought that perhaps the terminal diagnosis, particularly the 5-year timeframe, was not the inevitable outcome. Today, with all the medical records updated and available, it was determined that all of Katya's tumors are benign.

Bottom line: Katya will be coming to the USA to live, not to die!

- e mahlou