Zhive Belarus! Long Live Belarus!

On June 3, my boss got called to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Minsk and was told that the embassy had to lower the number of diplomats in the country. It has to do with retaliation of our sanctions against Belarus for, well, not treating people nicely.

Here’s a fairly succinct summary from https://diplopundit.net/.

In 2008, the Belarusian Government imposed restrictions on the number of U.S. diplomats allowed in Minsk, and the State Department was forced to reduce its embassy staff from 35 to five diplomats as well as withdraw the U.S. Ambassador. The number of U.S. diplomats was later increased to six in July 2014. We are not sure how many were at post prior to this latest development.

I arrived to Minsk in October 2019 and was American No. 11; people told me that so often I felt I should have a jersey made! We added a few others after I arrived, so when we had to cut back again, a handful of us were told on Sunday that we would be leaving the following Saturday.

Photo from the tweet about us
being forced to leave Belarus.

Initially, I was told I was just going to have my tour cut short and that I would be getting some well-earned time off, but once I pointed out that I did not, indeed, want an additional 280 hours of annual leave, someone at a higher pay grade than me determined that I’d go at least temporarily next door to Vilnius to work.

 So that’s where I am at the moment – Europe’s G Spot. (Not kidding: https://vilniusgspot.com/ - “Nobody knows where it is, but when you find it, it’s amazing”). It’s been a gut-wrenching and emotional ride and no one can say for sure what will happen. For me, it’s easier because I was, and still am, destined to end my tour in mid-August, but the others affected were to be in Minsk for much longer and they are fairly clueless as to what tomorrow, next week and next month bring.

 In a span of less than a week, I found out I’d be displaced and packed out my entire apartment, threw everything else in a couple of suitcases and convoyed three hours. I’m now camped out in a Marriott and working out of a big room with a table for a desk. The embassy in Vilnius was already full when we arrived and we’re cramping them, but they’re being really nice about it.

 My successor is SOL; she will have to find another assignment. It occurred to me that this is the third consecutive tour where my position’s been eliminated, and the second where I’ve had to leave post early. Last time, I headed to Washington, D.C. to finish my tour but for whatever reason that wasn’t on the table. I would have been fine to do that again and don’t really understand what happened, but I’m fine working here for now.

Vilnius is a lovely little city and the weather has been really nice. So nice that I had to go buy a sun hat; I packed up all my hats to ship to Baghdad. I did the same with my workout clothes, so I’ve taken advantage of a chain of thrift stores here to go and buy some what will be disposable exercise gear. There are plenty of places to buy new stuff, but Lithuania is on the Euro and it’s way, way more expensive than Belarus. Someone in my displaced group pointed out that as far as prices go, the numeral is the same but the value is different. Something that cost 10 Belarusian rubels, like a decent sandwich, costs 10 Euros here. The difference is the Euro is worth three times more than the rubel, so it’s quite an increase in price.

My hotel room has a fridge and a kettle, plus offers breakfast. That’s my big meal of the day, and after six days, my “regular” is already known. Today, a Saturday, there were a lot of families down in line for breakfast and one of the employees asked if she could just get mine for me. I was fine with preferential treatment in that case. Unless something goes South, I’m here for 21 days initially and then have the option of this hotel or moving to another. Since I have a lot of stuff, I’ll likely just stay here but I do loathe the thought of two solids months in a hotel.

What is happening in Belarus makes me sad and it hurts to leave. We had a “hail and farewell” and I essentially broke down; on top of everything, it was also one of my employee’s last days and I tried to give a little talk about how amazing it’s been working with him but I could barely speak.

The people of Belarus deserve what they voted for, which is not the dictator at the helm.

Positives First

Everything has changed, but at the moment, this is going to be about Hrodna, the last city I visited in Belarus, which was over Memorial Day weekend. I managed to cover quite a bit of the little country in my time, and I am grateful for that.

Zhive Belarus! This is considered a protest in Belarus;
whoever did it could be fined $1k or be
put in jail. Not kidding.

Hrodna is about 3-4 hours away, on the border with both Lithuania and Poland. Three of us went and stayed in a really nice hotel on the edge of (or maybe in; I wasn’t clear about that) a national forest. It had a pool and sauna in addition to the lovely breakfast. The first full day we explored the city and the second we went to the Augustów Canal, which is almost on the Polish border.

There’s been a lifetime full of stuff since we went even though it was only two weekends ago. Hard to believe.

Anyway, we walked into the city and saw another cool old town. I’ve seen lots of ruins in this area and in Turkey, that is for sure. We saw several churches and a synagogue, plus the old castle that’s there. It was closed for renovations but it is definitely the highlight of the “skyline.” (Not so many skyscrapers, you know?) Had pretty good schwarma (I felt like it was legit because the guys at the next table were speaking Arabic, and they would know.) Didn’t buy anything because I felt like I had everything I needed from Belarus. I have so many magnets that I no longer pick them up from every place I go. I have one from Belarus already (a tractor) and just don’t have room for each individual city.

Boats and flowers. My favorite combination.

So I took pictures. A lot of pictures. We had bizarre weather in that we covered several seasons in a day. I’d brought a rain jacket but didn’t take it, although we did get sprinkled on. (It’s a heavy-duty rain jacket and seems wasteful for a sprinkle.) I wore my Chacos for the first time in the season and got the annual horrible blisters that I get, but I’ve learned to arm myself with Bandaids so it was fine.

The canal was much tinier than I thought it would be. I have nothing to base any opinion on, but I was thinking Suez and this was small enough for a tourist boat to squeeze through. But it was very cool to watch; we saw a boat go through it. A guy manually opened the gates and we sat there and watched the water level lower so the little party boat (maybe 50 people) could pass on through.

One of the cool churches in Hrodna.

We rented bikes there and had an hour-plus ride, which reminded me that I am not a biker, but it was pretty. We just went down the trails – over the river and through the woods to the little tent refreshment stand by the river. My colleagues had the wheat beer (barely any alcohol) but I just had a soft drink and an ice cream bar. There was no indoor plumbing, so we used the outhouse. I went into a wooden one across a field, where someone had thoughtfully left some really big leaves to use as toilet paper.

I liked this little guy. Saw him crossing the
road and felt it was photo-worthy.

On Monday, we headed back but stopped by the Lida Castle, which looks more like a fort. There are differences and we discussed them, but I really don’t know which is which. But Wiki calls that one a castle, so I’ll go with it. At this point, I’ve been in dozens of them so we didn’t stay long, but there was a field trip of kids there at the same time and we got a kick out of watching them because the employees had staged activities from them: Tandem skiing, sword fighting, archery and the like. After that, we went to the drinking establishment by the river and had either a cold or a hot one (beer vs. chocolate and then headed back home.)

Flash forward to two weeks and now I am sitting in a hotel room in Vilnius. More on that later, but much has happened. However, at the moment I am working on two classes and the paper due dates are on Sundays, so I need to spend the day doing that. When I catch my breath, I’ll update.