Grave-Robbing

I can't decide if this is a good idea or not: I want to take the metal detector (which has mysteriously been sitting on top of my wardrobe since I got here) to the outskirts of my site where all the buildings are crumbled piles of bricks with perhaps a stray cement foundation pillar or two still standing, and I want to search for old Soviet crap and perhaps metal detritus from the war with Abkhazia. Pro: old Soviet stuff and metal detritus from the war with Abkhazia would be incredibly interesting to find, and they have it out the wazoo here. Con: The war with Abkhazia was just under 15 years ago, and I wonder if that's too short an elapsed time for me to go poking around a former war zone. I'm not actually sure that the buildings crumbled as a result of the war... buildings usually crumble here because of their high-quality Soviet contruction. Maybe that's it, though I have the same feeling in my stomach now that I had when I realized my friend was really offended that I'd told him he smelled like a marshrutka (turns out it was onions in the kitchen), so perhaps it's a horrid idea and I should be ashamed at contemplating such grave robbery.

Mom wants me to skedaddle back to America for her graduation in August. While I am obviously in favor of this-- especially since the fake itinerary I've drawn up puts me in Maryland for Dad's annual pig roast-- I am also obviously broke. And why shouldn't I be? I'm the one who chose to volunteer for almost 2 1/2 years when I could have been making minimum-wage CA$H in the US. To my precious friends and family: do any of you have any frequent flier miles that are about to expire? Do frequent flier miles even work that way? In any case, I'm checking out whatever options I can along that front and am open to ideas that don't involve embezzlement of development grant money.

Speaking of grant money, Writing Olympics got funded! Huzzah! Sitemate Ian and I set the contest dates for our town, so now all that's left is to pester the rest of the volunteers until the March 30th deadline (if you're a volunteer reading this, are YOU doing Writing Olympics? Why or why not?). There's some pretty sweet prizes involved for the winners... framed certificates, English books, pens, notebooks, a backpack for the Best of the Caucuses winner. And we're gonna have the winners' essays compiled into a little book again, though there's one wrench in that gear: the tension between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Last year, they had to make two versions of the book since the host country nationals didn't want the children's essays from Azerbaijan to touch the Armenian essays and vice versa. Maybe we'll just make the one version this year, where the essays are separated by country rather than by grade (the latter being the sensible format).

Another thing I can't decide: whether I'm being culturally insensitive by finding the publication problems maddening. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, IT'S A BOOK OF ESSAYS WRITTEN BY CHILDREN!!! Then again, it's easy for me as an American-- citizen of a heterogenous state with no historical nationality-- to see conflicts of ethnic nationalism as petty. Can I picture myself as a citizen of a smaller country, fighting violently against a neighboring country that'd just as soon wipe my country from existence, and then some ignorant, arrogant chick from the world's hegemon waltzes over and rolls her eyes at hundreds of years of history? Sorry, despite trying my best to write that second POV from the perspective of an Armenian or Azeri, it's still not convincing. Even to me.

Maybe this distaste for the mechanisms behind ethnic conflict is what leads me to disagree so vehemently with crackpot writer Gary Kah. Check out his theories on how Satan is using New Agers and Freemasons in a global conspiracy to create a One-World Government at http://www.garykah.org (he knows! he was in Who's Who in the Midwest!).