Yesterday..................................

(written Friday, 10/19/07). Yesterday was a big day. First, when I got to the office and checked my email I found I had email messages from both my son Craig and my daughter Molly which asked that we call them right away concerning an emergency involving our son Drew, who is a Peace Corps volunteer in Panama. They had each tried to call us, but neither could get through (no one can). Of course it was the middle of the night for both of them at that point, but I tried unsuccessfully to reach them by phone none-the-less. When they didn't pick up, I left messages for each. The emails which they sent were not particularly enlightening as to the precise nature of Drew's problem, which caused us additional angst. As far as we understood, he was in a hospital with what was thought to be Dengue Fever. Since Drew was just about to get get out of the Peace Corps to begin a two month trip around South America before returning to Panama to serve a 6 month stint in the Crisis Corps (an adjunct organization of the Peace Corps), we didn't know if he was in Panama or in a hospital somewhere else in South America. After a flurry of calls, we finally succeeded in getting in touch with our son Craig who said that he had received a voice mail message from Drew the day before asking him to get in touch with us to let us know. He said that Drew didn't sound good on the message, and that prompted him to "declare an emergency". As it turned out, Drew was scheduled to end his Peace Corps service and fly to Lima, Peru on the first leg of his South American adventure two days after he became ill. He is presently in a hospital in Panama City where he is recovering from Dengue Fever. We were able to get in touch with him by phone and he sounds like he is on the road to recovery. However, because of the nature of the disease, they want to be sure that he is okay before turning him loose. Apparently there are two varieties of illness, one "not so bad" and the other "very bad". They want to be sure that he has the former variety and not the latter. Hopefully, he will be out of the hospital within a week. The Peace Corps has administratively extended his Peace Corps service, and they are supervising (and paying for) his care. I guess if this had to happen, it was better that it happened when it did, rather than few days later when he would have no longer been in the Peace Corps and would have been on his own in Peru.

The second thing of significance that happened yesterday was that I got back my computer that had basically gotten so many viruses that it stopped working. After unsuccessfully trying to deal with the problems myself, I brought the computer in to a computer store in Zugdidi, where they said they would take a look at it and see what they could do. Of course, I did not bring to Georgia any of the original installation disks for the programs I have on the computer, and I was also concerned that something they might do would endanger either the data in those programs or the many pictures which I have taken since our arrival in Georgia back in June. Fortunately, no data was lost and the computer now works again, although I did lose some of my programs. All in all, I feel fortunate. The results could have been much worse.

The final item of particular significance which rounded out the day yesterday was that I received the World Space Satellite Radio that I ordered about 6 weeks ago. It will allow us to receive some English language programming (NPR!!). For reasons that are not worth the telling, the radio was shipped from Dubai to Glens Falls and then to Georgia. The radio arrived a month and a day after it was sent by the USPS express delivery service from GF! I was beginning to think that it it had gotten "misdirected" along the way and that I would never get it. You can imagine my joy when someone delivered a note to my office that said I had a package at the post office. Now I've just got to figure out how to set it up.

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Today, a Georgian fellow who I had earlier met took me out to have Khashi for breakfast. Khashi is cow's feet which have been boiled. It is sometimes served in a soup made of broth and milk. You put salt and hot mustard on Khashi before you eat it (probably to help mask the taste), and you either drink beer or vodka when you eat it. There are only a few restaurants in the area that serve Khashi, which is always eaten in the morning (the place we went to served Khashi from 7 am to 10 am). The restaurant was packed with other Khashi eaters when we got there, all of whom were men. Apparently, only men go out to eat Khashi (when I was invited to go, I suggested that maybe Lisa would like to come, and it was explained to me that women generally don't go out to eat Khashi). We had vodka with our Khashi (at 8 am!). Khashi is traditionally eaten by those who have had too much to drink the night before; kind of like a "hair of the dog" approach. Depending on how late the festivities run the night before, revelers can go directly to eat some Khashi before retiring. It is supposed to settle your stomach and counter the ill-effects resulting from the over-consumption of alcohol.