I made it safely to Kyiv this afternoon on Northwest/KLM and I am staying in a daily rent apartment until I settle into a long-term flat, which will hopefully be tomorrow. Plenty of mundane stuff to take care of this week settling into the country. Starting next week, I’ll have some more exciting updates on how the Fulbright project is taking shape.
I had a strange mixture of feelings as I became more aware of the the fact I was in a foreign country. The man who met me at the airport, Nikolai (Neeck! He said excitedly), was absolutely fabulous. He didn’t seem very friendly at first, and he spoke all of two words in English, but once I engaged him a little in conversation, he just exploded with his tales of travels to Poland, Ukrainian politics, etc. In Ukrainian, of course. All I could do was sit back and take in as much as possible. I surprisingly felt pretty good about our conversation. He was just really excited I could answer simple questions and understand chunks of what he was saying (Thank you, Pani Tourtchina). We passed a group of official cars and police going in the opposite direction, who Nick believed was President Yushchenko on his way to the airport. I checked his schedule online and it said the President would be visiting Kharkiv today. I don’t know why you would take a plane from Kyiv to Kharkiv, but I suppose trains and/or cars are too inefficient for such business.
What was strange was that, I was excited to be doing something new in Ukraine, and at the same time, I felt like I had never left. For a moment, the last year and change disappeared and I was coming down the same highway stretch from the airport I always come down. It was like coming home to a place I didn’t grow up in nor had any childhood memories of. Strange, strange feelings.
Anyway, I hope everyone is well at home. Not to worry about me. I’ll figure things out with the help of my fantastic Ukrainian friends and the incredibly efficient Fulbright office here in Kyiv.
In 1996, Ahmed Hassan and his daughters and sons came to the United States from the Utanga Brava and Kakuma refugee camps in Kenya, after living there for several years after fleeing worn-torn Somalia. Safia Munye, his daughter, seemed to get a little quieter when telling me that her mom had passed when she was much younger. Their story was published last year in an Artvoice two-part series on the Somali community. The description Peter Koch gave of Hassan is both accurate and thoughtful-
Hassan is bald on top, though he still has graying hair on the sides. He has a trim moustache set on a friendly face, and gray stubble sprouts from his chin and jaw line. He is a genial man, though he doesn’t smile as much as you’d expect. It’s when he talks about his children that his face softens and his eyes smile.
Now a student at Grover Cleveland, Safia helps her father run the Somali Star on Grant Street. This small yellow building shines on the block between Auburn and Lafayette at 195 Grant. I stopped there today for lunch and talked to Safia for a bit while Mr. Hassan made a delicious Somalian chapati with chicken, peas, and onions. As I have since the restaurant opened last year, I paid $4.99 for an incredible amount of food. I even splurged and grabbed a couple of beef sambusas for home at $1.00 each. I know, I’m a high roller.
As I watched my food coming together, Safia gave me a warm cup of chai with milk and entertained my questions. By the way, the chai was fantastic. I like the chai at the local coffee shops, but there’s nothing like chai made from scratch. Oh, the mango juice is really good, too. She told me about how her family took the small building and renovated everything inside. Once they got the equipment in, finding the ingredients also proved to be a challenge.
Now the Somali Star has a small, but delicious menu including spiced basmati rice and curry goat or chicken (come on, be adventurous), Somali injera or chapati (a flat spongy bread used to scoop up meat and veggies), as well as some American sandwiches I didn’t see on their menu before. They even do catering, which turned me on to the fact that the Somali community in Buffalo has some great parties I’m going to need to get to when I get back next year.
Safia was excited to tell me that their customer base has expanded beyond the Somali community, which allowed them to do further renovations in the spring. She wants to go on to study culinary so she can expand her father’s work.
So when you stop by to pick up a delicious and affordable lunch, don’t be afraid to say hi to Safia and Mr. Hassan. They’re great and friendly people, and their family makes Buffalo a better place one sambusa at a time.
What appear to be internal documents detailing an exchange between Kazakhstan’s intelligence service and President Nursultan Nazarbayev suggest that Kazakhstan conducted intelligence operations against international monitors during the presidential election in 2005, aimed at swaying the conclusions of the monitors’ reports.
Woops. And the next Parliamentary elections are scheduled for this Saturday. Good thing this realization came only two years after the last election. Fortunately, the international monitors weren’t swayed as the OSCE final report on the election concluded:
a number of significant shortcomings during the election campaign limited the possibility for a meaningful competition whereby all candidates could enjoy equal opportunities to convey their views to the electorate.
and
Voting was conducted in a generally calm atmosphere. Overall, observers assessed voting positively in 92 per cent of polling stations visited. However, there were observed instances of multiple, proxy, and group or family voting, violations of secrecy of the vote, ballot box stuffing, and failure to seal ballot boxes properly. There was evidence of pressure on students to vote in a number of places. In numerous polling stations, a significant number of voters were added to the voter list, often without proper documentation. In some cases, observers were not given full access to the process.
The article raised questions about elections in the former Soviet Union as a whole, which is kind of a sweeping statement to make. How many of these countries are forging ahead with improving their democratic systems? Poland, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Romania, and yes, Ukraine. I was fortunate enough to monitor the last Parliamentary elections in Ivano-Frankivsk through the Ukrainian Congressional Committee of America and I probably will go through this organization again. I was hoping monitor with the OSCE this time, but the process is a bit confusing. In fact, I’d have to be from the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, the European Parliament, and the Parliamentary Assembly of NATO just to be a short-term observer for the ODIHR’s mission. However, the OSCE Project Co-ordinator in Ukraine has been great about giving me permission, as well as setting up appointments, to conduct research on their anti-trafficking activities and I will be able to meet with them not long after I get in-country.
Anyway, when I was observing in March 2006, it was a fascinating experience and things went pretty well. There were anywhere from a few to more than a dozen monitors per site at each of the polling places we visited throughout the day. They were from political parties, the OSCE mission, or the Russian mission. The UCCA and the OSCE both released favorable reports on the overall handling of the run up to the election and the voting and counting process. Of course, not flawless. But I hardly felt pressured to forge my findings. For as much as the Orange Revolution gets snubbed because Yushchenko has obviously had some problems getting his reforms together, it was a major step forward for Ukraine to undergo peaceful, genuinely competitive, and transparent elections. What ensued afterward is another story…
Spies, bribes, and Nemiroff. Oh my! Wait. Where did the Nemiroff come from? Oh well. So should I be worried? Nawwwwww.
This Saturday has two competing events on my agenda. One of which I will definitely be at, which is the Amherst Museum’s 23rd Annual Scottish Festival & Highland Games at 3755 Tonawanda Creek Road from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm. The list of activities includes
I’m just going for the sheep herding, I don’t know about you. There’s going to be a crazy amount of music and pipe bands as well as food, dancing, and shopping to your heart’s content. It’s $8.00 for adults and children 12 & under are free.
Also, because I get a kick out of packing my schedule two weeks before I’m supposed to leave the country, I think I’m going to try to get to an event at UB hosted by the India Association of Buffalo. I just found out about it today from a flyer at the International Institute.
They’re celebrating India’s 60th Independence Day with the India Day Mela from 2:00 pm to 10:00 pm at the UB Center for the Arts at UB North, also in Amherst. This event is FREE and open to the public. You can enjoy Indian food and dance as well as a fireworks display at sundown. There will be children’s games and activities as well as jewelry, artifact, and clothes shopping. I finally have an opportunity to wear my fabulous (and expensive) sari that I bought in India earlier this summer!
Both of these events are well worthwhile to go to. It’s going to be two amazing celebrations so get out there and enjoy WNY’s vibrant cultural life!
This is a fresh issue for me as I completed a study abroad program last year in Chernivtsi, Ukraine at Yuriy Fedkovych National University. It was an amazing experience and Chernivtsi is a beautiful and charming city near the Romanian border.
Despite all of that, the actual process of studying abroad is one giant paperwork-infested, hoop-jumping and exhausting process. Especially because I decided to study somewhere my university did not offer a program in. An article in today’s Times (sorry, I know I’m on a Times kick lately) revealed a little more about the whole Study Abroad industry (yes, apparently its an industry).
At many campuses, study abroad programs are run by multiple companies and nonprofit institutes that offer colleges generous perks to sign up students: free and subsidized travel overseas for officials, back-office services to defray operating expenses, stipends to market the programs to students, unpaid membership on advisory councils and boards, and even cash bonuses and commissions on student-paid fees. This money generally goes directly to colleges, not always to the students who take the trips.
Critics say that these and similar arrangements, which are seldom disclosed, typically limit student options and drive up prices for gaining international credentials compared with the most economical alternative — enrolling directly in a foreign university, paying generally lower tuition to that institution and having the credits transferred. Some campuses require students to use one of several affiliated providers, but some even have exclusive arrangements with study-abroad agents, further limiting options.
In and off itself, it doesn’t sound that bad. It is probably a good idea for Study Abroad Administrators to visit campuses they plan to form a relationship with and, there are some legitimate reasons why colleges and universities limit where the students go for safety or quality concerns. But I love this quote from Mr. Nassirian, of the registrars association who marginally defended how institutions limit student choices on study abroad, and then said:
“But what is objectionable,” he said, “is, if the student decides at his or her own risk to go overseas, the outright refusal to take credit from a legitimate foreign institution.”
Now, I didn’t run into that problem, thankfully. All of my credits transferred over from Chernivtsi to Lock Haven University in Pennsylvania (who does have an agreement with the Ukrainian university) to Canisius. It took some time, but it happened. I could not imagine being in a position like the former Columbia student interviewed for this article who studied at Oxford, no less, and could not get credit for it.
What does bother me is that I went out $5,000 in scholarship money because it wasn’t a Canisius program. What did I do instead? I applied for a Gilman Scholarship for study abroad and got it. Almost as much as my Canisius scholarship- $4,000. It was a huge help in keeping my debt down. But what about people who aren’t able to get scholarships like the Gilman? Hell what if I didn’t get it? Granted, Ukraine is quite a bit cheaper to live and study in than Western Europe and I would have found some way to pay for it. Although this sort of blind ambition has landed me in tens of thousands of dollars in debt. Then again, I also have a year of research paid for overseas. The point I’m trying to make is that, yes, there are individual cases that muddy the waters.
However, this is what I want to do for a living so of course I will put up with whatever nonsense I have to in order to do what I am passionate about. Study abroad is not just for students that want to be involved in international fields! Those students who are not as passionate about the experience as I am may not take as well to the process and expense of study abroad, and as I have come to find, they tend to be more difficult to convince of the value of spending a semester in a foreign country.
Additionally, is it really acceptable for universities to be sucking more money out of the system at the expense of a student’s choice in education? According to the article, study abroad has no formal regulations governing how universities conduct their relationships with middle-man institutions and foreign universities. There’s just a voluntary code of ethics. Now, all of this information is coming out about the student loan process, which apparently has triggered investigations into other areas where some universities are milking the system.
Many of these perks are similar, if not identical, to ones uncovered in multiple investigations into the student loan industry, where lenders gave colleges bonuses tied to loan volume, seats on advisory boards and free travel to conferences in the race to get on so-called preferred lender lists. The similarities raise questions about how many aspects of higher education involve such little-known incentives that may have large impacts on the college experience.
I don’t regret studying abroad. In fact, I encourage it as often as I have an opportunity to. How many of you working people out there really think you’ll have time to stop what you’re doing and spend four to six months in a foreign country studying and traveling? Probably not many and college students should be more aware of the opportunities they have to take advantage of. And trust me, I’m not accusing Canisius of anything. I don’t know the inner workings of the decision-making process for study abroad agreements and so forth. But that doesn’t excuse the people who do exploit students to make a buck by restricting the choices students have not necessarily by saying “no” but by making it so difficult, that it becomes cumbersome, expensive, discouraging and, ultimately, not worth it to the student. The first concern of the university should always be the quality of the education they are providing to their students and fostering the ambitions of those who want to make greater contributions to the domestic and international community, which should be entirely possible without kickbacks.
So I’ve been getting a little feedback from some of my readers (ya know, all 10 of you [just kidding]) and one thing people have been commenting on is how serious I seem to be about most of my posts. Which is true and I stand by the seriousness of what I write about. But I can see the value in a good laugh, even about subjects that need a critical eye (and mouth more often, really).
Unrelentingly, I have to start out with something serious. I read the Times this morning and found an extremely long, but well written article about the consequences of taking the focus off of Afghanistan since 2003. The article provides disturbing evidence of the deterioration Afghanistan has been going through during the last few years.
Then, conveniently, a good friend of mine sent me a video of The Word from the Colbert Report. It was related and it’s the kind of humor that throws my head back, but can still be disturbing if you really think about it.
I went over this article today in the Times about the Iraqi refugees that have flooded out of the country in the last two years. The topic has been a dominant appeal from the updates I receive from the UN newscentre, whose bodies are helping to deal with everything from IDPs (internally displaced persons) to refugees in neighboring countries. Syria and Jordan are apparently handling the brunt of the situation with somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million Iraqi refugees according to the UNHCR. Ironically, the U.S. is housing less Iraqi refugees now than it did in any of the years between 1992 and 2001. NPR reported in June that the first Iraqi refugees had arrived to the U.S.
The first wave of Iraqi refugees has arrived in the United States: 63 resettlement cases arrived in June and more are expected to come in September. U.S. officials have pledged to resettle 7,000 Iraqis by the end of this year.
Apparently since then, the U.S. has taken in, in total, a little less than 200 and the UN has referred about 9,100. But still, seven thousand? There are over 2 million Iraqi refugees that have fled the violence since 2003 and we’re accepting 7,000 of them? The UNHCR also estimates there are about 50,000 Iraqis fleeing every month now. The Times article cited that there were so many Iraqis fleeing to Jordan that, “Rejections became so common that Iraqi Airways now offers a 30 percent discount to returning passengers who have been turned away [by Jordanian authorities].”
The Jordanian government, under pressure from the United States, finally agreed to let Iraqi children without residency attend public schools, which is service that has not been extended to any other non-resident foreigners in the country.
Not only is this a burden on the surrounding countries, but it has consequences for trying to build a stable Iraq because the people that are fleeing Iraq are the former middle class. Or at least they were the middle class. Many of them are struggling to survive abroad with the cost of basic living stretching the last of their assets in the face of joblessness.
It is a painful new reality for an important part of Iraq’s population, the educated, secular center. They refused to take sides as the violence got worse. And their suffering augurs something larger for Iraq. The poorer they grow and the longer they stay away, the more crippled Iraq becomes. “The binding section of the population does not exist anymore,” said Ayad Allawi, a former prime minister, who now spends most of his time in Jordan. “The middle class has left Iraq.”
The article also includes a few personal accounts by Iraqi refugees living abroad that are truly difficult to take in. Most of them include the story of family members being killed or left behind. There is a very well done video of one such story through an interview with a woman and her family who now live in Jordan (mixed with statistics).
All I have to say it really bugs me when people give the UN a bum rap for their role in this whole crisis, but the UN agencies have been busting their resources to alleviate the burden this situation has placed on the international community. The Security Council didn’t even back the war, and yet here the UN is raising funds, helping Iraqi refugees through resettlement, getting their children into school, etc. Sometimes in the intensity of controversy, we forget that the UN is more than the Security Council. We forget the extent of their work in every corner of the world.
Anyway, the article is a great read because Americans are obviously not as exposed to the plight of the Iraqi refugees as the numbers are so small. Check out the video if you get a chance, too.
Sorry for the delay in posting. Most of my online time lately has been drained on trying to find a flat in Kyiv and it has been a pretty brutal process. I should have my flight to Ukraine booked by tomorrow for August 29th so let’s hope I find one before then.
But the past is passed, the future’s now. Today marks the 62nd anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. I can imagine this year’s events were marked by a little uneasiness as the topic of the necessity (or lack thereof) of the use of the atomic bomb by a major public official was breached earlier this year in a June speech by former Defense Minister Fumio Kyuma.
“I understand that the bombings ended the war, and I think that it couldn’t be helped,” he said.
He subsequently stepped down after public outcry. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe apologized on Sunday for the former Minister’s remarks and today, he spoke to a crowd gathered in Hiroshima of about 40,000 (including some of the 252,000 survivors) for the memorial that he is committed to upholding Japan’s non-nuclear stance in international politics.
“Japan has been taking the path toward global peace for 62 years since World War II. The tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki should never be repeated in any place on Earth,” said the Japanese prime minister, in a speech at the Hiroshima ceremony.
“We will take an initiative in the international community and devote ourselves wholeheartedly toward the abolition of nuclear weapons and realization of peace,” Abe said.
Not that I’m ever cynical, but I wonder if the contents of his speech are at all provoked by his party’s rather dismal loss recently after a series of scandals, including the former Defense Minister.
The Prime Minister’s speech was followed by a rather passionate address by Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba that clearly stated Japan ought to abide by the pacifist Constitution and to ” say no to wrong and outdated policies of the United States.” Secretary General Ban Ki Moon also contributed to the ceremony through Sergio de Queiroz Duarte, the U.N.’s high representative for disarmament affairs.
“Today our challenge … is to make the world safer for succeeding generations. This requires us to continue to work toward a world free of nuclear dangers, and ultimately, of nuclear weapons.” -SG Moon
This all brings back American Foriegn Policy in Fall 2006 because we were talking about this very issue: whether Japan should respond to North Korea’s testing of nuclear weapons. The topic was being brought up by prominent Japanese politicians at the time, some of whom felt the topic should at least be debated and the Constitution should be reviewed. Prime Minister Abe and the Japanese public have at least made a decision on that for the moment.
“We promise that we will comply with provisions of the Constitution, sincerely seek global peace, and adhere to the three non-nuclear principles,” he said.
NPR released today that both the DOJ and the U.K.’s Office of Fair Trading fined British Airways for illegal talks with other airlines on how much extra to charge on passenger and cargo flights, to cover fuel costs. So the U.S. charged them $300 million, which, by the way, BA had set aside before May apparently in anticipation of fines and the cost of legal action. Virgin Atlantic, another airline in cahoots with BA, was given immunity for blowing the whistle.
Kind of surprising to me was that this was the first time first time the U.K. and the U.S. have simultaneously brought action against a company. And this investigation has been going on for a more than a year.
The reason this grinds my gears is because our group took British Airways to and from India and the whole experience made me nuts. It wasn’t the first time I’ve flown BA or the first time I had to go through Heathrow, but man, what a disaster. First, BA lost our luggage in Heathrow, even though we had about a four hour layover and we were using the same airline. I would have taken both my bags aboard if they allowed two carry-ons because it was just two parts of the same backpack. Regardless, I didn’t have any other clothes than I what I wore to India for the first week I was sweating in 100 degree weather in Chennai. Did it matter a lot to me? Not really. It was just the fact that a major international airline could be so inept. And apparently crooked.
When asked about the situation,
British Airway’s CEO Willie Walsh insisted that passengers had not been overcharged because fuel surcharges were “a legitimate way of recovering costs.”
However, he acknowledged that the conduct of some of the carrier’s employees had been wrong and could not be excused. “Anti-competitive behavior is entirely unacceptable and we condemn it unreservedly,” he said.
If you’re caught, right? Just hope you’re able to handle the heat once the criminal investigation is over.
