Visa

List of documents you need to prepare and collect to obtain a non tourist visa extension in Nepal:

1- write a letter to the Social Welfare County requesting a visa extension, with the following attachments:
1.1 - application form with picture. you and your dependent.
1.2 - copy of the General Agreement of your NGO with the Government
1.3 - copy of the Project Agreement (the reason why you need a visa)
1.4 - report of the activities of the last year
1.5 - personal report (how did you improve in the last year thanks to the fact you were in Nepal)
1.6 - marriage certificate (if you have a family who needs also a visa)
1.7 - birth certificate (if your family comprehends one or more child)
1.8 - translation in English of points 1.6 and 1.7, done by a certified translator. Please notice you need to submit 1.6 and 1.7 even if it's a visa extension. Like if in the meanwhile, my child decided to change parents.
1.9 -  Assignment letter from your employer
1.10 - CV


2- they will answer with a letter to the Ministry of Women Children and Social Affair. you should pick up the letter and bring it to the ministry, with the following attachments:
2.1 - application form with picture. you and your dependent.
2.2 - copy of the General Agreement of your NGO with the Government
2.3 - copy of the Project Agreement (the reason why you need a visa)
2.4 - report of the activities of the last year
2.5 - personal report (how did you improve in the last year thanks to the fact you were in Nepal)
2.6 - marriage certificate (if you have a family who needs also a visa)
2.7 - birth certificate (if your family comprehends one or more child)
2.8 - translation in English of points 2.6 and 2.7, done by a certified translator.
2.9 -  Assignment letter from your employer
2.10 - CV

3 - The Ministry will answer back to the SWC, and so your visa request can finally go to the Home Affair. A part of printing the umpteenth cover letter just changing the letter head, you should provide:
3.1-  their own application form with picture
3.2 - please copy from point 2.2 to 2.9
3.3 - their own CV format

4- if everything is ok, your folder will pass to the Labor Dpt.
A part of all the documentation, plus some extra pictures, they come to visit you office (for which you have to pay a per diem, even if not even them know why exactly they do the visit) and they interview you, with question like:
Why exactly a Nepalese cannot take your place?
How are you sustaining Nepalese economy and social culture?

then they tells you that from this year you are oblige to do the working permit, for which you have to pay 10,000 rupees (100 USD). Plus other 10,000 fine because you did not do it last year...when it wasn't required. And you pay.

5- Finally, you see land and you arrive to the IMMIGRATION DPT.
You can see the queue from a satellite picture. In the High Season is longer than the Great Wall.
That is because there are a lot of people, expat and tourist, who wants to renew the visa and because the people working at the immigration office are the slowest, nastier, arrogant guys ever.
You cannot apply for a renewal but just at the very last moment...and during this last election there was a 10 days strike which blocked many offices. So many people ran late and the visa expired.
The officers recognize it was a case of force majeure.

And then, smiling, the prepare the fine receipt.

Relativity

It's election time now in Nepal. But not everybody agrees.

There is a party alliance that call for a ten day national strike to prevent the election.
The situation is very complicated, I'm a swot in political analysis and I can't tell which ones are the good and the bad ones. If they are any.
Anyway, we planned a visit in the countryside (we call them 'missions'...jerk...) and to avoid the strike, which in Nepal means that all the streets and road are blocked by a yelling crowd, we went during the weekend.

We drove for seven hours, we spoke with some people, we met an NGO acting in the area, we slept in a tiny freezing room on a harder than wood mattress and, as usual, they brought us to visit a school.
I don't like to visit schools.
Especially if, as in this case, you do not have any plan to work with this particular school.
I don't like it because you always bring with you a high expectation...
"Oh!, the foreigners are coming! We are safe! We will finally have water, electricity, a computer and internet. We will not be isolated in this country side Nepalese mountain freezing village"
Then, I don't like it because they always use children to offer you flowers, to sing or dance.
And finally, I don't like it because generally children are so dirty and poorly dressed that you'd prefer to go to visit HAVING some future plans to develop in the school.

This visit was the compendium of all this, plus a icing on the cake.
The local NGO is implementing in that particular school a project aimed at increase the awareness of the students and the teacher about child and education rights.
Well, not only the children (dirty and poorly dressed) were waiting for us with flowers in a row at lunch time standing under the sun, but then they sang, played and three of them danced.
One of the dancer, one of those whom should be aware of her right as a children and a student, was forced, by one of these teachers formed in child and students rights, to dance even if sick.
For us. The ones who perhaps were coming with money.
Rights relativity.

The sick one is the one on the right almost fainting

  

Before

When I came to meet this man, he was at the end of his career.
Thirty-five years in cooperation. He was one of the first. He worked for everybody and everywhere. He met legendary people like Nyerere and the king of Afghanistan.
In those times only mercenaries and missionaries were living in countries like Congo and Cambodia, and so he was in the interesting situation to be considered one of the only objective eye on the spot.
He wrote for dozens of international magazines and, to make more money, also he started to take pictures.
He had thousand of interesting anecdoctes of this era where real adventures where not sold in internet for groups of 8 or more.
And, of course, he was an alcoholic.
Once, after a very heavy shift in Angola, he decided to take a break and, thanks to some friends, he was embarked on a luxury ship cruise as photographer.
"It was great", he told me, we were in a bar in Arusha.
"As part of the staff I could drink for free. And I was the only staff member who was allowed not to be always sober"
"And the pictures?"
"That part was also ok. But never try to work in the darkroom during a storm. Or to pee standing up. Or the two together. But, my god! what a superb whiskey, almost arrogant! And the champagne...friendly as a curious girl...Ah, the first week was memorable..."
"The first week? What then?"
"I start to vomit blood and I had to stop drinking"
"...yeah...there are more funny things to do than vomit blood"
"Of course, but you I did them before"
And his laugh was superb as a whiskey.

women wisdom

In this job, you have to accept a huge number of invitation:
schools graduation ceremonies, wedding parties of some relative of a cousin of a colleague, also funerals, Hindu festivals, Buddhist mountain climbing, and thousand of lunches or dinners.

I don't know how to explain it, but you always feel uncomfortable.
Once they asked me to do a speech  during a wedding of which I've never met before the groom or the bride. Just because I'm the foreigner, the attraction. Inexplicably, you become the guest of honor wherever you go.
Just because you belong to that part of the world the majority of the people in developing countries thinks is all looking as Hollywood.
It's annoying that the only reason why they want you at their celebration is so vain.
Even if you stink, or you are a pervert, if you are the expat, you will be always invited.

A part of the speeches, and the fact they always serves you first, and they always try to make you TOO comfortable, in Tajikistan was an additional reason to feel bad about those dinners: women were not allowed in.
Once I was invited by Makhtob, a translator, a woman, at her place for dinner. And I didn't see her at all during the evening.
Women were in the other room preparing the dishes, and kids were sent to bring them. In the dining, only men.

I asked about where Makhtob were, and his uncle explain me the reason: "She's not allowed"
I said I had to go to bathroom, a declaration that always create panic in the room (will our inadequate toilet be enough adequate for a foreigner pee?), and I sneak out to find Makhtob, imagining her in a tiny, dark, cold room preparing food.

I found her. She was with other women in their own female party. They were laughing, joking, chatting, and preparing the plate. When  she saw me she was surprised: "What are you doing here?"
"Well, you invited me for dinner...And I didn't know you were not supposed to actually be in the dinner"
"I knows, this is how it works...That's why in Tajikistan, between women we say: If you do not want to see someone, invite him for dinner!"

I don't know if she actually ever realized her gaffe

All men

Like a man

In each project there is a component of gender.
Of course also for the water project.
Women are the one (and child also), fetching water, managing it at home, using it. For cooking, washing, cleaning, take care of babies and all.
A full time job.
So our duty is to stress the communities to bring the attention to the great value women have in the family economy and try to involve them in the decision making for the project activities.
At the end, they are the one fetching water, isn't it normal they discuss where the pipeline should actually pass by?
Isn't it one of the most important achievement to bring equity for all those women and girls not allowed to go to school, married as a child to old men, sold as prostitutes by fathers, killed while still in mother's belly because considered inferiors?

As I told you already, we were living in a camp in the savanna with a Masai community.
The chairman of the village was also the manager of the camp, Isaac a pure Masai. He was helped to go to school, to send his children to school, his community has benefited from all the projects on the NGO: water, renewable energy, agriculture and so on. They were our neighbors, we were living together, we shared food, water, space, drought and floods, elephant incursions, sad and happy moments.
There was also a volunteer in the camp, a girl, Beatrix.
One day she stumble on a root and felt down badly, injuring her ankle. So I gave her my super arnica liniment and she recovered in a blink of an aye.
Few days later, also the Isaac felt down, badly, and because he was wearing the Masai dress, a blanket passed over a shoulder and tied with a belt, he got all the haunch injured.
I wanted to offer him the same liniment and so I addressed him: "Hey Isaac! I want to give you something. Remember when Beatrix felt down the other day..."
Suddenly, offended, he stopped me: "Hey! She felt like a woman. I felt like a MAN".

After five years of gender oriented project.

the camp. 

Justice. Expat heir.

There was a baby girl,
running naked in Chinese's hotel in Lhasa.
Her name was Justice.
Speaking Chinese and English.
Borne in Tibet, from an american couple.
The father was an expat, the mother...a Expat wife.

And then was Kaya,
Borne in Tanzania from a Dutch girl and a Tanzanian boy.
The mother was a beautiful, powerful Dutch girl giving her life to teach a job to the last Arusha's teenagers, the father a Tanzanian putting together slum's boy playing football as a team.

And then is my daughter, Frida. Spanish and Italian parents.She's two now and she had been living in Tanzania, Haiti and Nepal. Visiting Spain and Italy. She speaks three languages, she had been playing whit Masai, her first nanny was Creole.

Sons of expats. What they will do?
They will never have a country, they will learn different cultures.
They will not understand many thing, because they will not belong to a culture. Mr. Bean, for example, Sharuk Han will be more attractive than DiCaprio, maybe.
I they will have jokes we will never understand.

What are we doing to them...or are they the luckiest ones?

The snake

This is a short story to tell, no matter how good are your intentions,
you can always
fail.

There was this spring, down there in Tanzania
and there was a snake living there in the neighborhood.

People was forced to go to that spring because it was the only water source available.
And sometimes people was not coming back.

One day they decided to kill the snake, and so they did.
And water stop flowing from the spring.


This was because the snake, crawling between the rock's cavities, was keeping them clean, from mud and pebbles, giving water a clear path to follow up to the spring.

The village though they were cursed, and they moved in another place.

South African mother has priorities

In Tanzania we had this field camp, close to the project area.
It was a beautifully equipped tented camp, whit a dining, kitchen, solar heated water, office and solar panels. And so batteries and transformer.
The solar system was installed by the same Ben who was killed few weeks ago in Nairobi (the-man-who-raped-chicken ) and whenever there was a problem (let's say every 10 days), he was happy to took the occasion to go in the Savannah.
Apparently I was the only one hating that place: dust, huge swarms of killer bees during dry season, snakes during wet season which brought rats. all the others found those thing extremely romantic. But I'm not a volunteer.
Anyway once Ben was bitten by a snake while moving one of the batteries and he immediately called his mother, a snake expert, in South Africa to know if that species was poisonous or not.
"Mother, I was bitten by a snake!"
"Not now darling, I'm busy".

And so he decided to shock himself with a car battery, because electricity degrades venom proteins.
He survived.
That time.

entrails market

I've met this man.
French, ex mountaineer, ex rugby player, ex UN consultant...he WAS many thing.
Now he's an old man living in Nepal since decades in the countryside, with a Nepalese girlfriend.
I guess that at a certain point of his life he gave up his body and stopped to take care of what people think about him.
His arm was cemented in a solid block so that, to put sugar in his coffee, he had to move 3/4 of his body. After an accident he lost some parts of bones between the elbow and the hand.
He had some bolts in a foot and other in a hip.
But also he had long nails, oily hairs, yellow teeth, huge fat body and he was spitting while speaking.
Not knowing how NGO are working, he was asking for some funds to run a small project in his area. AHAH! I don't have a dime!

Anyway, he was also an engineer, and he followed the construction of a new private clinic in Kathmandu, and he told me about a new profitable business catching on in Nepal.
In the new shining expensive ultra equipped clinic there were something like 50 beds and 11 dialysis bed.
A not insignificant ratio.

"It's a new form of tourism"
"What. For people with kidney problems?"
I knew a lot of Europeans use to go to India to visit a cheap dentist or to North Africa for a plastic surgery, probably also dialysis is too expensive in some countries.
"Not dialysis, no...but kidney are"
"Oh, no"
"Oh yes! At the end of the works, they offer to my crew, all poor skilled workers, a free kidney visit"

But he had no idea how much a kidney can cost. To the clinic to buy and to the 'tourist' to install.

Football match goats against human in the countryside 

Europeans are crazy

At certain point looked like we were selected to participate in a kind of 'world wide water project championship', organised by a private foundation and one of us was invited to go to Europe to assist at the awards ceremony.
We decided to send the engineer.
God, he was exited. He was so exited that driving in the Savanna and speaking about is next trip, we got completely lost, in time and in space.
But obviously at the end, after hours driving having as only reference the Kilimanjaro down there, we found our way back to the camp and Simon did not loose his flight toward north.
Everybody envy him, but did not want to admit it.
So someone was murmuring that the water project wasn't so spectacularly good, and others that had to be very cold in those days in Europe and there was not better climate than the Tanzanian one. "Dry season is so good for the skin".
But when Simon came back, with a fancy and sporty new jacket, and an horrible and huge and heavy copper trophy, all of them were around him, the brave engineer who actually managed to go out from Africa, expensed.
And he past like seven full working days to explain and tell about this so called First World.
I was thinking he was impressed by things like traffic lights at each crossing, elevators in each building, dust bin in each sidewalk, pine scented toilets, tunnel through the mountains, women in high heels carrying the fat fruits of their abdomen in a stroller and not in their backs, but the storyteller, the water engineer, was fixed on that point: from the aqueducts they do not have water, they have BEER!

Someone in a bar just served him a draft beer.

His name is not actually Pedro. A Masai leader  

The man who raped a chicken

I had this friend. Ben.

A big South African serious and funny at the same time.

Even if he was born in SA he pretend to be a Dutch, but the way he was drinking beer and talking about the African Governments left little room for doubt about is real origin.

He came to Tanzania from South Africa by car to take up a two months job, and when I met him, he was in Arusha since 5 years.

He was curious, passionate about technology and extremely suspicious. He was one of this exhausted white thinking that in every man was a thief. He made this IT Company and the guy working for him used to go around visiting the client by motorbike. Well, Ben put a GPS in each motorbike and then he used to monitor constantly where his workers were. And if a motorbike stopped where it was not supposed to, or taking a suspicious way, Ben was calling the astonished guy, like he was the Big Brother or a kind of minor God.

But as a friend he was fantastic. Always present when you need him, always ready to move his connections to solve a problem and, at the end, very proud of himself when able to help a friend or solve a situation.

As a good South African, he LOVED to organise barbeques with tons of different dead animals, and his speciality was the “Raped Chicken”: open a can of beer, take a chicken (already dead and plucked) and ‘sit it’ on the beer. Salt, oil and spices on the skin and then on the barbeque, cover. When the beer in the can is finished, you will have to most delicious chicken ever.

He also had a very strange sense of humour. More than strange I would say overly bastard. If you accidentally left your mobile unguarded, even for a single second, on the bar table or in the jacket pocket, he took it and start to send embarrassing messages to whoever in the list. Your boss, friends, other’s girlfriends, providers.

When it was possible, he preferred to send those messages from and to people in the same room, to spy secretly the reaction and taking reason for intimate fun.

Once, at 4 in the night, a message woke me up. It was from my boss, the one I deeply dislike. “I feel horny, please meet me now. I won’t tell anybody”.

“Fuck Ben, I was sleeping...”

Then I lost him: he moved first to Dar es Salaam and then he got a better job in a security company in Nairobi. I moved to Haiti and then to Nepal.

The other day he was chatting with my spouse: he was getting back to South Africa soon to get married.

This morning I received a mail from a common friend: That night Ben was shot eleven times in his house in Nairobi by a bunch of robbers.

I hope they did it quick.

What people want to see of Africa

lesson 6: preparing to start to plan to think how to implement a project

Ok,
You have a contract to implement a project written by an intern in Europe.
You flow to the country, met the staff or selected one, and your staff had many meeting to decide if trying a friendly or professional approach. Somebody proudly and altruistically decide to kamikaze with a sexual joke, just to see the reaction.
You met the government stakeholders and the community. Everybody is enthusiastic of you well written project whom expected results are something like "annihilate forever poverty, discrimination, malnutrition, pimps and mcdonalds whole over the universe". You signed Memorandum of Understandings until your pen exhausted and then...
You fill lost.
Lost in translation, lost in eternity, lost in space, lost and in need of mammy and daddy. You feel like a lonely cell in a plasma so far bigger than your human possibility and not strong enough to change the life of thousand, thousand of people.

After years I learned how to emerge from this quicksand of bureaucracy and politeness: you go to the staff and illustrate again the project activities, one by one, and then you say something that sounds like: I want this team to be committed and participating and I want to empower you and give you self-government till the day you fail me.
And then: If you were walking in my shoes, what you would do next?

This always work

this is what happen when you call for a meeting in a Masai community.

Future plans

I saw a Masaai newborn.

The father was proud of his boy and told him: "you will be a warrior and you will attend the university in Dar es Salaam".

I wish your life will be beautiful.

I saw an Haitian newborn.

In a shelter after the earthquake.

In a mixture of Voodoo, Christianity and  indifference the majority of the visitors wishes for her richness luck and beauty to marry an American.

I wish your life will be beautiful.

And then my daughter was born.

My mother could not resist holding her, my father waited out of the room, not daring to enter.

And then my sister looks at her and said: My-my! You still don't know that Darth Veider is the father of Luke Skywalker.

tibetan village, the closest internet connection is four days far (by yak). p.s. we have made an aqueduct there

wrong assumptions

Just today I had a meeting with the ministry in charge of deal with disable people.
Saying 'deal with' I mean the ministry in charge of issue policies and action plans to fight discrimination, create accessibility, integration, equal opportunities.

There is a call for proposal focused especially on development if the rights of disable and women.
And so, people like me, specialized in water and sanitation, and struggling to hit a donor, starts to read thousand of pages on human rights, disable status, women empowerment. And also go to talk with ministries to know which are the national action plans, priorities, and so on.

I admit I did not, of course, meet the Ministry itself, but still, this man working for the Ministry, after a thirty minutes speech, where no interrupting question were allowed, but often interrupted by his own greasy laughs, ended with:
"My advice is not to work with blind people. They are extremely touchy"

"EXCUSE ME?" 

expat disease number 3: they don't scream

the third and most insidious expat disease is:
is...I'm afraid to spell that word,
but is: racism.
there are two different shape of racism.
The first one, and the most simple to explain, is the racism against institutions. If you work in Tibet you end up hating Chinese government, that all see and preview, and if you work in Palestine, at the end you hate the government that prevent you to give basic service to women and children.

The second one is more difficult to explain. Maybe because, fortunately, I'd never fell in that trap.
Let me try to explain: you come from a so called developed country. You have social security, free education, democracy, newspapers, hundred of choice for university, motorbike with compulsory helmet, traffic lights, and credible policemen. And you have the right of all this.
You arrive to a country where there is not even water. Where communities are left alone to solve their basic problems because government cannot, economically, take care of them.
And then you start to visit the communities to identify the felt needs, and they tell you they are missing water. And in the meanwhile it's raining cats and dogs.
And so you simply ask: why you do not put a bucket now, to harvest enough water at least to cook and wash dishes today?
And the answer is: Ahhhh!
But then they don't.
Why?
Why the hell Masaai do not put a fucking bucket to collect water when it's raining?
The fact is they are not really waiting for the Mzungu to come like an Harry Potter and waving the stick, solving the problem.
The fact is that life is like this.
Always been.
Since centuries ago.

And whites are coming spreading incomprehensive circumlocutions about cooperation and community building.
And if at the end, they have a tap close to their house, they say: thanks god. Of course, thanks to the NGO, but thank god who brought the NGO to us.

This kind of racism, the one who make you think that some communities are hopeless, usually come to people who lived for more than ten years in the same developing country, in this case, in my mind, Tanzania.
They see the infinitive possibilities they have, and they see them not taking advance from them.

You loose hope, and you start to hate them for what they are loosing.

I saw a girl, the day before resign, saying 'bloody monkeys' to a community. She was definitely burned out, and,
she was crying.
She could not understand.

For me, I was lucky.
I understood all the day I saw a woman deliver a couple of twins in a Masaai hut.
They called me to drive her to an hospital because she was too far in pain.
I was waiting out of the hut, at 6 in the morning, and then the father came to tell me that was all gone, and everything went good, and I could go to work.
The thing that surprised me?
She never screamed.

first bucket of water celebration

in the car

The car is you first home, first office.
You spend more time in the car than in the bed.
doesn't matter how close is a village in kilometers, in rural areas you can also spend seven hours to make 30 km.
That actually was my record, and that day I was driving. Rainy season in Tanzania.
You can imagine that, once arrived, was too dark to do anything.
I almost cried thinking on the way back.
It's never entertaining get stock in the mud in the savanna by night.
Alone.
With a water war ongoing.
And your car, white, with a huge logo of the organisation working in water.
Fucking visibility.
And a crazy elephant in the surrounding killing people, so that they were organizing patrols to kill him.
So everybody was already armed.
But that is a border case.
For example, Tajik people are not famous to be cheerful, so in the long hours to the villages listen to so much music that I could not stand silence anymore.
In Tibet we were chatting all the time, sharing stories.
In Nepal, so far, road are quite good, so I work. Reading stuff I've never time to read.
In Haiti, everything but watching outside. Half naked people living in moldy shelters and you knew that 70% of them had AIDS and almost the totality of women were raped since after the earthquake.
The car.
When it's broken you feel lost, worst than a tragedy. All your plans become ash. you held improvised and nervous meetings with the staff in order to get the car ready yesterday and try to stick with the plans.
Once I almost deliver some pipes with donkeys, just because the day before, after a almost violent arguing with a chairman, we ended up like this:
"I do not gather the people to dig the trenches because I do not trust anymore Mzungu (whites) who come here to help us"
"So tomorrow you will have your pipes and then you will explain your people why they are not having an aqueduct. I swear on my mom"
Of course the car brake.
And when I start to rave about donkeys, my driver told me about this car of a relative.
Saving a donkey.

Now I love to stay so many hours in a car. In Nepal I have a driver, I didn't drive yet myself, maybe because it's too crowded and messy, between cars, monkeys, cows and chariots, so I sit and think.
Hours a day to think.

About future and about past.
Missed opportunities and improbable developments.
And still I like it.

limit case...but also happened. Tajikistan 2006. The car is a Niva.

Fishing (expat disease number two)

Burning out is when you are so stressed, so under pressure, so exhausted that you lose the north, and you start to make reasoning that doesn't look fool only to you.

Is not a pleasant situation.
You do not sleep, you do not eat, you do not have sexual impulses, you get hungry for a trifle, simple problems appear like insurmountable peaks that drives you in a blue and dark deeep hole.

It's more frequent in places where the word 'airiness' is a dusty fossil, like South Sudan, Iraq or the refugees camps, but the Burning Out is like the devil rabbit of Donnie Darko. It's pops up whenever you are not ready for.

Not funny.

Even if some funny stories comes from this.
Like this man, so exhausted but still too proud to resign, first he purchased a gun because he was sure the logistician wanted to kill him, then went for a weekend on the sea side trying to relax, and finally he tough was a good idea to use the gun for fishing and shoot his feet. The last drop.
But he won a long holiday.
Nobody knows if he shoot himself in purpose to run away, I was told that he confessed so once.
But maybe because, when is mind came back on the straight way, he realized the idiocy he made, that he felt ashamed.
That was his last mission forever.

Expats has an expiring date.

Expat diseases number 1

I just read an article ten minutes ago.

Expats are subject to alcoholism, pedophilia and burning out.

Alcoholism it's true. when you go home and you have to digest all the work you have done is felling apart, that you built an aqueduct based on community cooperation , and now people is chopping neighbor fingers off with a machete to have some more drops of water, you drink.
You are stressed. You work 14 hours a day and then you go home and still you have to reply emails, then you go to sleep and you think about all the problems waiting for you tomorrow, and to escape from all this, you drink.
You pass all your week in the field, with no water, no electricity, no girlfriend, you come back to the city and you drink.

You often live in places with no cinemas, no theaters, no TV, no bookshops, no parks, so you meet with the few friends you have (temporaries and selected by necessity), and drink.
Moreover alcoholism is a wide spread problem in most of the ex-violent or still-violent countries. Drunk men do not do the revolution, at the most the beat up wives and children. But those categories are not famous to have their right recognized. So alcohol is usually very cheap. And very bad.
And because not everybody has time to open a bottle and share with good friends, they often sell surrogates of gin or whiskey in plastic mono-dose bags. If you have a couple of coins in your pocket, you can drink at least a sip. You have no ideas of the thousand of those small plastic bags sold in the last small village lost in the savanna. So everybody drinks because it's easy.
But the alcoholism of the in-country people is different and much more bitter than the expats' alcoholism. Expats run away from the stress, people run away from their lives taking the only path available.

You don't care if you turn yourself into a sub-human monster unable to speak clearly and to walk to the toilet. In a year or two you will change country and you can start fresh to ruin your reputation again.
Or, worse, become the king of the expat social life.
I was unable to drink before starting this job. My friends made fun of me saying I was getting drunk with a coke.
And then happened Tajikistan. At the beginning I though was funny to be received in the villages always with a vodka. At the beginning.

Everything it's funny at the beginning.

and Russel Crowe do not dance

There is a whole word importing culture not from United States but from other sources.

From India.
I'm speaking about literature, music and movies.

When in Europe we think about Bollywood, we think about B-movies with fatty dancers and incredibly long love stories between humans with no sex scene and no car accident. More or less is like this, but in Tibet, Indian movies was the non plus ultra of the imported goods.

Drudak, our driver in Lhasa was a little tacky and thug. The car was his empire, and one day, arriving to the office, I discovered that he just put fake bullet holes stickers along all the car side, just all around our NGO logo and that he installed, at his own expenses a small TV, just over the ashtray.

The interiors of the car were changing from leopard spotted to the Manchester United flag every month.

Anyway, he probably spent all his money on this TV, and so he had only one DVD to play. Video music from Bollywood movies.

I think I watched 'It's the time for Disco' at least 20 times every day, because the villages were very far.
A gang of women, beautiful and very fat compared to the LA standards dancing. The One Diva in front and 50 others in the back all making the same not very athletic and archaic typically Indian movements. Let's say that the lack of choreographer was repaid by the abundance of human being.
The song was technically very poor, but the girls twirling their wist were cute enough.
But then, something disgusting happened.
Another gang of men started to do the same hips shaking and hands cute movements, singing in play back.
And, if the Diva woman was beautiful, the man was, well, he was Shahrukh Khan always him since fifty years, always playing the role of the teen in love.
"Guys, do you really think is cool for a man in his late forties to dance in a disco with a group of men?"
But I wanted immediately to cut my fast tongue for telling to a group of Tibetan that the only foreign stuff allowed was in fact a crap.
But they just looked at me as my taste for art was completely underdeveloped. That, in fact, was the coolest thing to do for a real man. Also for Drudak, the one sticking fake bullet holes in the car.

So I shut up, and started to think about Fred Astaire and also Michael Jackson, all good dancer and looking cool, and I started to think that also other Hollywood movies, with some song and dance in the middle, would not appear ridiculous...No fucking way!
What would be of the Gladiator if he starts to dance in the arena with his fellows morituri te salutant?

Mr Crowe would have say goodbye to his Oscar, and to his fun club.

As a Gladiator would say: "to Caesar what is Caesar's...and to Indians what is Bollywood"

Amen

That's amore

There are still some romantic expats...they fall in love, they struggle in wet bed sheet by night, they over drink to forget, they eat irregularly and...they speak a lot.

Anita elected me as her confident.
My duty was to listen almost every night by telephone or live at least two hours about Nicholas.
Quite boring, but sometimes I'm compassionate.
I knew EVERYTHING about this guy. Who he was talking to, which movie he was downloading, where he was going, with who and why.
Because love pain it's talkative. At least for women.
And I was forced by Anita to interpret his every gesture in a perspective that was favorable to her, such as:
his t-shirt are full of stains because unconsciously he wants to say he needs a woman, or
he was kissing this other lady only because with you would be something serious.

Until the day our friendship broke up.
She called me overexcited, like a mongoose was running up her trousers, anticipating some good new: "Can I pass by, I mean NOW?"
"I was going to sleep, it was a terrible day, this pipe blew up and..."
"Ok, thanks, I'm coming"
Because friendship between man and woman cannot in fact exist.
She arrived ten minutes later, waving the mobile as if it were the hero of the day, what did I say? Of the era.
"Look! he send me a message!"
But I could not look, because she decided it was much more effective if she read it directly, declaring like a Shakespearean actor: "Take off my skin! And I wont scream! But if you smash my heart, I promise to make you cry!", all the exclamation marks were added by her.
"I'm not sure about the meaning, but looks like he actually loves me!"
I didn't know who to tell her, so I simply did: "Onion"
"What?"
"It's a riddle...the answer is 'onion'..."
"It's not possible! Look! He's speaking about his heart, and.. and..."
"Anita, it's onion"

And I've never seen an onion to make someone cry more than then.