Wednesday, May 16, 2007

I would like to first apologize for the long delay in writing here. The last few months have been crazy to say the least. They have been the most adventurous I have ever experienced in my life.
For those who do not know, I am now working in Moscow. The job in Kazakstan went south due to a conflict with our former boss and a run in with some of Karaganda's finest (if you could call such corrupt cops the finest of any city!). I don't want to go into an extended explanation about what happened. It would take hours to do so. In short, we were taken into custody in mid January due to issues with our registration in Karaganda. In order to live in any city in the former USSR, you have to register at a special office for foriegn residents. We tried to do this in October, but were given the run around. We went in on three different occations to register, and were given different stories as to what to do every time. The last time we went, we were allowed to see the man who registers foriegners, and he refused to register us, saying that since our inviting organization was located in Almaty (the business capital of the country) we had to register through their office in that city. This was a lie. We later found out that he always tries to avoid registering foreigners either because he is lazy, wants a bribe, or both. We ended up registering in Almaty because we only had three more days left on our temperary registration. When we were picked up in January, we explained this. But this makes no difference to people who want to increase their puny salaries and move up the career latter quicker. In Kazakstan, cops try to collect the most bribe money to move up in rank. Our boss was forced to pay quite a large sum of money to get us out of the situation ($1000). We decided to leave the country after this plus some issues with our boss.
I can only hope that Americans will try to fight anything that looks like this kind of corruption in our country. I have never in my life entertained joining a revolution more than in this situation. But I know that the kingdom I serve is not of this world. None the less, I encourage all or my countrymen to do what they can to fight corruption in the US. By not doing so, we could one day have to deal with this kind of nonsence. We must not underestimate the corruption of the hearts of men.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home