Tuesday, July 01, 2003

I'm still in Yerevan as due to Seta's son and his illness, they had to delay their departure by a week.

The good news is that after taking her son out of the hospital, we started to feed him a type of yogurt called "Narineh", which was invented in an Armenian laboratory back in 1949.

A couple of nights ago, we noticed that his temperature was going up and we knew from the night in the hospital that when we force-fed him water (which was no fun for any of us), that did help. Also was helpful in the hospital was something they added to his IV to bring the temperature down.

So here was this kid sitting on the bed not wanting to drink water. I pulled out the bottle of Panadol (sp?) and asked Seta if she thought he would drink a little since it is intended to bring down the temperature. She said probably not.

She left the room to get something and the next thing I know, he is asking me for water. I gave him the water bottle, which he unscrewed the cap and began to drink. I almost cried from joy.

The days to follow and his appetite for "Narineh", of which he is now eating 1.5 liters of this stuff a day, caused him to start gaining weight (he lost 20% of his body-weight while he was sick), not to mention eradicated all his bowel problems and vomiting.

On top of all this, his energy level is incredible. Today he missed his afternoon nap (even though Seta and I needed one) and as we were napping, he was playing non-stop.

Anyway, enough about "Narineh" and it's incredible effects, though in the near future I'll be writing more about it.

Now for a little bit of bad news.

The trolley lines are being ripped out a record speed and today I heard that one of the reasons they are being removed (though I think this is just a weak excuse to justify what they are doing) is that they are removing them to sell them at $80 a ton so they can pay pensioners their monthly pensions.

You know I was thinking of other ways they could pay pensions rather than ripping out infrastructure.

The first one that comes to mind is to get these well connected business people, like that guy that was related to Vano S., who had some huge tax debt that Kocharian when he was elected forgave him for 90% of it. Anyone remember that one?

I mean if your going to destroy unneeded infrastructure I would think you could pick some other government owned structures to disassemble and sell off like the Parliament building and all the parliamentarians. Or how about sell of the fleet of government registered imported cars? I think selling off the Presidential rest-house of Sevan could cover at least a years worth of pensions.

Anyway, I'm really not too happy with the way our "elected" and "appointed" officials are mismanaging things these days and I would hope that they would really reconsider their chosen policies, as I would certainly hate to see a repeat performance of what happened in October of 1999 (which looks to be nearing again).

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