D Time

Sunday is a great day in Belgrade, as the streets are quiet, traffic is low, and everyone is taking it easy, including me. So time to put on a little jazz and catch up on some writing. The following is impressions I wrote after my first few days at work.

~18/6/2008~

The Lady with the Che Mug

Two days of work are behind me now, and I have yet to figure out exactly what it is I am meant to be doing on a daily basis. More over, I only just got access to my computer (email and Internet also) and still am waiting on my security debriefing, at which point I also get my security pass. Well, ok, these are irrelevant details and I must say that on the whole, it has been a dobro experience, both Belgrade and work. I have also had a positive reception from all the people at work. That is, except for the IT department, but I blame my boss for that, as moments before they came to set me up, she fried my computer! Luckily the problem was quickly solved and we all got on our way.

So far, the only down side I can see is the fairly lengthy bureaucracy for any and all procedures. It really get in the way of work! I watched two of my colleagues spend tri hours just to fill out a funding request for a small project. At one point, one of them commented that you needed to fill all this stuff out even you are only asking for more pens... Then again, this is all tax payer money we are spending. So the level of transparency should be fairly high, and these bureaucratic methods do ensure that to some degree. Still, it does have a knack for killing creativity and spontaneity.

What intrigued me the most on my first day was being greeted by the department head as she sipped kafa from a Che Guevara mug. This evoked two responses from me:

1) I felt a fool for having left my Che shirt in Maine. I had done so because I was nervous about working for a major western political organization by day, and supporting repressive socialist ideologues by night.

2) I wondered if the department head used this as a conversation piece. It gave her a certain distance from the American regime (a desirable thing in this political climate.) and was thus a hit with the Serbian ministers.

Who knows? In any case the irony was not lost on me: here was a woman heading the department most intimately involved in re-education of the Serbian political and social community to adopt a more western ideology, and she was walking around the office accompanied by one of the most ardent critics of that very ideology.

Maybe she had a more sinister agenda here: maybe this was her form of victory dance. Western liberalism had won out over socialism and now she was drinking for the head of the vanquished. Is this her nod to tribal rituals of past eras? One day, I'll have to ask her.