These days, when I hear employees of the U.S. State Department complaining about how tough they've had it at what the foreign service calls the "hardship" posts overseas, I'd probably bust a gut laughing were it not for the fact that their presumed "sufferings" are so...well, insufferable.
With half the rest of the world starving, your average U.S. government employee think he's being given a hard way to go if he can't watch the NFL or Dancing With The Stars.
You see, I used to be a State Department employee. A State Department employee's idea of "hardship" is "There's no Hormel chili here." If a foreign service officer or embassy employee gets sent to some spot on the globe where he or she can't play golf or run down to the corner market for a six-pack of good old American Budweiser, they think they should be entitled to "twenty-percent differential."
That's 20 % above your base salary, just for being in such an awful place. Do the math: if I'm making $80,000 a year and they send me to Khartoum, I automatically get $100,000 while I'm there.
Plus free housing, and free housing like you never saw. The rule of thumb when I was in the State Department was, "the crummier the post, the better the housing." In some place like Abu Dhabi, for example, you might not be able to get Hormel chili, (unless the embassy commissary happens to have it, and never underestimate the embassy commissary; I have seen embassy commissaries as well-stocked as any 7-Eleven), but you're going to be living in a 2,000 square-foot split-level mansion suitable for the Sultan of Araby, furnished with the best local rugs and the finest furniture that Ethan Allen (which had a government contract for years) can fix you up with. Hardship. Yeah.
I don't care whether you're talking about Paris, Capetown or Ouagadougou. State Department employees live in the lap of luxury.
Case in point: at the moment my ex-wife Chris and I are both in Tbilisi. She is here as contract worker for the U.S. embassy. I'm here as an English teacher. I don't represent the U.S. government in any capacity. Not anymore.
I live in a dismal one-room former Soviet dump, in a decaying slum building with dark, crumbling stairwells, miles from the city center.
My "garret," as I call it when attempting to console myself with reminders that the "bohemian" lifestyle was something I always wanted to try anyway, is about 30 square meters in size. It's so small I have to go outside to change my mind, as Daffy Duck once said.
I have a tiny kitchen, a tiny bathroom with a loose, plastic toilet seat and a tiny bathtub with no shower curtain. I have a tiny atelier with a rickety armoire, and a tiny living area which is mostly filled up with two beds. (I asked my landlady--who is 22, by the way -- to take the bigger of the two beds out, which would have given me an extra 20 square feet of space, but she refused.) I do have a washing machine, but nobody in my building has a dryer. We dry our clothes by hanging them on clotheslines outside our windows. It's like living in the world of Henry Roth's Call It Sleep if you remember that novel, which you probably don't. Nobody reads novels anymore, especially classic ones. But honestly, this place does give one the feel of living on the Lower East Side, circa 1915.
My ex-wife, meanwhile, is living at the U.S. embassy's expense (I pay RENT for my dump) in a luxurious two-story apartment right near Rustaveli Avenue in the best part of the city, and every morning she gets picked up and chauffered to the embassy, where, as temporary purchasing officer, she's in charge of ordering things like Ethan Allen furniture, stainless-steel refrigerators and jacuzzi bathtubs for foreign service officers' homes here at this "hardship" post.
And she's complaining, folks. She thinks she has it tough. She can't wait until she gets out of here in December. I'm going to be here until next June, and in this old Soviet dump in the extreme suburbs, not in some two-story uptown lap of luxury with a chauffeur to take me to work every day. What the hell is she whining about?
But I can tell you that U.S. government employees are spoiled like that all over the world. Everywhere. I know. I lived that life myself. When Chris and I lived in the west African nation of Cote d'Ivoire 20 years ago, we had a four-bedroom house with a seven-foot wall around it, a yard and garden and 24-hour guard service. All provided by the embassy, and gloriously rent-free. We also had a big generator in our backyard. If the power went out in the middle of the night, all I had to do was wake up my night guard, who was usually sleeping on his prayer rug outside the back door, and have him go turn on the generator.
A few years after our marriage broke up, when she had become a direct-hire employee of the State Department herself, Chris got posted in Brunei. (You might not know where that is, but it is the richest country in the world. Oil. Look it up.)
In Bandar Seri Begawan, the capital of Brunei, Chris lived in what she herself described as "a palace." And she was alone. No family. (She has a son, but he just turned 49.) So Chris was living like Queen Latifah, and the U.S. taxpayers were picking up the tab for the whole luxurious ride.
If you're a taxpayer, you do pick up that tab. For all overseas employees: State, CIA, the military, you name it. They all live very well, and you pay for it. If any U.S. government employee ever whines to you about how "tough" his life was during those two years he was in Khartoum, ask him about (a) his house, and (b) his servant. He was probably living in a house about the size of your average Wal-Mart, and all foreign service people have maids or house stewards.
Okay, they have to pay for their maids, but it isn't much. When Chris and I lived in Brazil, I paid our maid $110 a month. And she was happy to get it.
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Now this is "hardship." Here I am at the Tbilisi zoo,
trying to make a phone call on a derelict Soviet-era
public phone which is now nothing but a gutted
receptacle for trash. Everyone in Georgia has a
cellphone now. And just as in America, they drive you
nuts with them.
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That was the State Department world. Overpaid, underworked and coddled to death. All of them, and once upon a time, me.
Welcome to the real world. I am now living the way most of the world lives. That is, miserably.
But there are compensations. I discovered one just the other evening.
The electricity is always going out here in Varketili, the district of Tbilisi in which I live. It usually goes out in the daytime, but after the first few outages, I knew it was only a matter of time before a power failure messed up my evening. I went to the bazaar at Didube, a few stops up the Metro line, and bought a flashlight just against this possibility.
It's a good thing I did, because last Thursday we had TWO power outages here in Varketili. They're an inconvenience when you're teaching a class of children and suddenly you can't use the CD player for language lessons. But when they impinge on your private life, they're more than inconvenience. They're a nuisance.
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Georgia's president, Mikhail Saakashvili, at whose
more-or-less invitation I came here to teach English
To Georgian children. Saakashvili joined us briefly
at a wine-country field trip last weekend.
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I stayed on the computer for a few minutes, but it was running on battery power, and in any case when we lose electricity here I lose the Internet, so I had to power down. Okay, I had my little flashlight, and that was a good thing, but be honest with me: when was the last time you stood in YOUR kitchen with a frying pan in one hand and a flashlight in the other, cooking in the dark?
Let me tell you, when I was with the State Department that never happened. All I had to do was open the back door and nudge Mahmoud, and within minutes that generator would be cranking away.
Not anymore. Turn on the battery-operated radio, pass the flashlight...and wait.
But I was in for a nice surprise. While I was standing here cooking in the dark, there came a knocking at my door. Marley's ghost, I guessed. Oh, well. Let the sorry so-and-so in...
No, it was my neighbors from here in the slums. That is to say, the particular slum I live in. They were going around passing out candles to anyone who might need them. They were tiny candles, icon candles. Georgia is a predominantly Orthodox Christian country, and in any Orthodox home or church, tiny candles are almost always available for burning in front of icons.
My neighbors gave me a handful of these little candles.
I damn near wept. Nothing like that would ever happen in the United States, where in such a business as a power outage, it's strictly Every Jerk For Himself. These people are accustomed to such things, and they are not only prepared for them, but prepared to help their neighbors as well.
So all those stories I heard before I came over here, about Georgian hospitality, were true after all.
You know, I once laughed at that naive communist idiot John Reed, whose goopy, credulous paean to the Glorious Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Ten Days That Shook The World, included such brainless Rousseauistic pablum as "The poor love each other so!" (Well, such gunk got him the honor of being the only American buried at the Kremlin, a tribute to the power of true belief, I guess.) Jean-Jacques Reed: "The poor love each other so!"
Yeah, right. The poor are no better than the rest of us. (What am I talking about? I'M poor!) But they're also no worse. (Present company excepted.)
And a little thing like that, going around handing out candles to your neighbors during a power outage, well...it was so unlike anything I'm used to from good old Protestant, feather-thy-own-nest America, that I was not only taken aback, but made a point of telling the story to my fourth-graders the next day. Hey, Georgia is a poor country with little to boast about aside from its countryside, its history, its dances, its music and poetry, and yes, its excellent wine.
And its people. I figured if I could tell these kids about how wonderful their people are...well, that's something, anyway. Good PR, right? I mean, these fourth-graders are tomorrow's adults. And if they don't learn English, or French or German or some other "mainstream" language, they're going to be stuck here. Because Georgia is the only place in the world where Georgian is spoken, and Georgia is about the size of South Carolina, and Georgia is poor. There isn't much opportunity here. Georgia is trying to align itself with Europe in the hope of creating a more prosperous future.
Language is the key to Georgia's future. Its current government understands that, and wants the L2 future to be English, not Russian, the latter being part of the Soviet legacy (aside from buildings like the one I live in) that still lingers here, and from which Georgia wants to distance itself.
L1: Georgian, surely, yes, and always. Georgian is an ancient language, much older than either English or Russian. But to the younger generation of Georgians, the Russian language is indeed part of the Soviet legacy; the Russians are not too terribly popular here, and nobody in Georgia under a certain age wants to speak Russian anymore. They don't want to learn it, and since the Soviets are no longer here to make them learn it, they don't.
Cab drivers still speak Russian, which helps me because I speak a little Russian but no Georgian, but by and large, Georgians under 30 don't speak a word of Russian. The young lady from whom I'm renting this apartment speaks only Georgian. No Russian at all. Her boyfriend speaks a little English, so that's how we communicate, she and I. He interprets as best he can.
Georgian is a lovely language, as lovely as it is ancient, as beautiful to look at as it is to listen to. But it's only spoken by four million people on the entire planet, and they all live here, in this lovely little country in the Caucasus, which its breathtaking mountains and valleys, its matchless vistas...and its poverty. The kids here had better start learning...some second language.
The present government of Georgia, under President Mikhail Saakashvili, wants Georgia's L2 to be English, not Russian, and as much as I love the Russian language myself, I'm here to help with that. And I think it's a good idea. Until the Chinese manage to establish their global empire, English is going to be the international language of business and technology. So I'm here to "spread" English, I, and hundreds of other teachers from The U.S., Britain, Canada and other parts of the world where English is spoken. Just as my ex-wife is here to help the U.S. embassy buy...who knows? Dom Perignon for the commissary? Gold-leaf toilet paper and wide-screen TVs for embassy bathrooms? (Not that I'm bitter or anything.)
My neighbors brought me candles, and I'm doing what I can to help their children learn to speak English. My co-teachers in Georgian school, for the most part, are great, and the kids are fantastic. I love these kids. They're so eager to learn. Most of them are astonishingly well-behaved to those of us accustomed to witnessing the crimes and misdemeanors of America's spoiled brats. And do they make us feel welcome! Just the other day I was standing in the hallway waiting for my 2:10 fourth-grade class to start. (My co-teacher for this class, Medea, is a treasure.) Anyway, I was wearing my Mexican-style straw hat and my "aviator" sunglasses. Within moments I had a crowd of tenth-graders pressing in around me. A CROWD of them. Boys and girls both. They all wanted to shake my hand, learn my name and tell me their names. They recognized me as a foreigner and that made me a novelty. They treated me like a celebrity. The last time students treated me like a celebrity was when I read Green Eggs and Ham to two classrooms full of second-gradeers at my old alma mater, Castle Park Elementary School in Chula Vista, California, about seven years ago. But those kids had been told that I was a newspaper reporter, so they thought I was a celebrity. To thse Georgian kids, I was just "the guy in the funny hat and sunglasses," but that was enough to practically make them ask for my autograph.
I really can't remember the last time I attracted an admiring crowd by simply wearing a straw hat and shades.
Are you starting to understand why I love these kids? Yeah, of course. It's because they make me feel that they love me. It's high time someone did.
I want to meet more of them. And teach them. God, is teaching fun, or what?
Oh, yeah. Before I forget. Those very same neighbors who brought me candles on Thursday knocked on my door again Saturday night.
This time they brought me a big bowlful of grapes.
Well, by coincidence, it just so happened that I, and my ex-wife Chris too, had been on an excursion that very day to the Georgian wine country about an hour or so outside of Tbilisi, and as part of that excursion we had all gone into the vineyard to pick grapes for the production of some of Georgia's famous wine.
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Jump on in and pick some grapes. We watched them make
wine out of this stuff. Then we drank some of it.
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He came flying in by helicopter, accompanied by a cadre of secret service guys, then worked the crowd as politicians do (I've met two American presidents and am familiar with this) and had his picture taken with every pretty girl in sight. That let me out.
But getting back to the subject of grapes, like everyone else, I nibbled while I picked, and by the time my neighbors brought me a bowl of grapes that night, I had already eaten maybe two pounds of grapes at the vineyard and didn't want any more.
But, as Scott Glenn said to Ed Harris in the 1983 film The Right Stuff, "I appreciate it. I truly do."
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