Updates and such!

Not much new has happened here since the protests. All of the 'angry' political activity has died down, and the opposition and the sitting government are in talks. It'll be interesting to see what happens to the opposition in the next 8 weeks - the elections are coming very, very quickly, and there haven't been serious frontrunners to challenge the sitting president (at least from my vantage point in Akh).

While the situation is calming down, the PC is still concerned about keeping us safe and secure - they're maintaining our standfast as long as the state of emergency is in effect, which will continue for another week or so. So, until then, we're going to be sitting in Akh hoping for the best. I'm a little disappointed by this as a handicraft expert from CHF is going to be in Tbilisi, and I had some models for handicraft distribution I wanted to go over with him. I guess I'll stick to emails though. I'm not allowed to travel outside of Akh, so my main source of job time has dried up pretty good. I'm disappointed to miss out on the meeting in Tbilisi, but it's for the best.

I've been nothing but impressed with the competency of the PC safety and security staff. They've been working REALLY hard on the phones, getting info out to us quickly. Kathleen, our country director, called every volunteer personally to discuss the situation and how the PC was handling it. That doesn't seem like much until you realize that there's over 60 volunteers in country - she's doing a ridiculous amount of work, and it's really appreciated.

We just had our second snowfall of the autumn (ha! autumn... also known as "winter without the hopelessness") - it probably dropped 2 inches in about an hour. Visibility was down to less than a hundred yards. Most of it is melting now, and I don't think there'll be much left on the ground tomorrow. It's still lightly snowing, but it melts pretty fast. Akh really has some excellent mud, though, to make up for the lack of snow. :-)

C and I are trying to finalize plans for our mini-vacation to Turkey for new years - the elections are complicating things in that we can't travel in country between the 3rd and the 5th, so we're trying to figure out what we want to do. There's a lot of great stuff to see in Turkey - the photos should be excellent. Plus, they have Starbucks. That, my friends, is AWESOME.

I've upgraded to a feedburner feed over at my blog (brendenpg.blogspot.com) - check if out if you have time. I'm still experimenting with all of the settings and trying to figure out how to best use it, so please be patient with me. :-)