Students met with language coaches today. Things are going normally.

Let me tell you, metronidazole is great for curbing the runs abroad. My previous favorite drug was ibuprofen, but I don't get headaches very often nowadays, so maybe metronidazole is my favorite now. :) My current course of treatment will run out soon. I'm half tempted to buy a second course for the way home, just in case.

A subgroup of our students has to do some extensive testing due to their scholarship requirements. Today they did the listening and reading tests. There was only one time slot available for today, 2-5 p.m. Exhausting. Particularly since the testing room is on the west side of the building. The AC in that room has ceased to function. I saw a few students were nearly nodding off. Still, they all completed today's test, with the exception of the student who had food poisoning and didn't make it.

Our second wave of students today had the privilege of visiting the Honorable Richard Miles, former ambassador to Turkmenistan and current chargé d’affaires to Kyrgyzstan. (In other words, he is effectively the acting ambassador until the new ambassador arrives.) The students loved the visit. Ambassador Miles (we can still call him Ambassador since he previously fulfilled that role) has a lot of experience in the countries of the fUSSR, so his opinions have a certain weight to them.

One of those opinions was quite interesting to me. Current relations between the US and KG have decayed quite a bit recently, and the putative reason was the granting of a human rights award to Askarov, who is currently serving a life sentence. When I first heard this, it struck me as a profound overreaction. KG could hardly say no to the millions of dollars in US aid simply because they were upset by a human rights award. The award is simply not significant enough. I concluded that the award was not the motivating factor, that Russian influence or the desire to appease Russia was the actual cause.

Ambassador Miles contradicted that opinion. He said that he had seen no evidence so far that the Russians were the causal force behind the current spat. That very much surprised me, but of course the ambassador has a wealth of personal experience here, and his opinion is definitely weightier than mine here.

That said, he did agree (and cited the opinions of other ambassadors to the fUSSR) that the reaction was excessive.

He also noted that certain representatives of the Kyrgyz government seemed to be acting on a fairly immature/primitive set of reactions. This comment rang true to me. It doesn't take much to see old alpha-male behaviors in much of Russian politics, so it is no surprise to see the same thing in the politics of those who were trained by the Russians. Certain American and European politicians have a complexity to them (an openness to rational thinking and to the goals of plurality and environmental sensibility) that many representatives of less-advanced nations lack. When a politican reverts to motivations of personal offense or fear of economic loss to himself or his kin, this is no surprise. But we Americans and Europeans need to bear in mind that this is still entirely possible.

One interesting encounter: an attendee at the event asked me whether I thought whether the hierarchy of human needs was applicable to nation states. Wow, that was an unexpected question. First I had to ask him whether he meant Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which he affirmed. I'm not sure that Maslow is the best way to measure nation-states and politics, but as a topic for conservation it was certainly intriguing. First I said I didn't have the complexity to answer the question... then three seconds passed, and I changed my mind. I responded that, yes, in a certain sense it does apply. A government has to be able to respond to its citizens needs for food before it could respond to things like equality for despised minorities.

I then asked the attendee to answer his own question. He responded with an analogy about girlfriends that suggested that KG was responding somewhere in the love/belonging level of Maslow's hierarchy. That's a unique way of thinking about the situation. Myself, considering how close Russia is and how weak KG's military is, I would more likely assign the issue to the ‘safety’ level. I doubt I'll have time before the grave to consider the question seriously, though.