Borrowing a handy photo from Stuff on My Cat .com to illustrate what my day at work was like.  Started with a 5 am international conference call with people in Canada, Europe, the Russian Far East, and the US East and West Coast.  Only one action item and it was tasked out to moi.

Then I dove into untangling some reports from grant recipients - and there's one guy who sent in half of his report, two months after his THIRD report extension, with no subject line and an e-mail address that Outlook can't translate, so I can't see who it's from.  He contacted my supervisor's supervisor to say that he was concerned that I hadn't responded.  I never caught his half-report in the first place.  So now I'm called out for not reading every single e-mail I receive (I get about 50 a day).  Then there's another high maintenance grantee who sends me a full set of reports, but with the wrong grant number on every part of the report, so I don't know what she's reporting on (and plus as usual she didn't meet the reporting requirements- she deletes all the formulae in our Excel reporting form every time, no matter how much I explain it).  I asked her to clarify, and she responded with a Word document with what is apparently a budget for some project, but she doesn't identify which-- and we have four open grants with her, plus one project advance, and a new project we're starting.  So I had to read all her back e-mail to identify what she was sending me and why.  And of course, she still hasn't clarified what report she submitted belongs to which grant.

We want these wonderful little projects to continue, and the wonderful organizations that organize them to continue, but if these people were negotiating with a real foundation instead of a $600K / year small grants program they would be S.O.L.

Sigh.

A month ago my organization collected environmental leaders from the Far East and Siberia, together with leaders from the national groups based in Moscow (Greenpeace, WWF), and we retreated into the Siberian wilds of the Altai Republic, geographically north of Pakistan (thereabouts on the globe).  We discussed that big sucking sound called China (and its resource needs) and the general state of the environmental movement.  Here in this photo we're on the 6 hour bus ride into the Altai Republic.  Foreground: Oksana, the leader of the top environmental organization in Kamchatka, on the right the lovely Aitalina from the Sakha Republic's top enviro org, Eige.  On the left, sitting behind Oksana, is Natasha, from the enviro group Dauria, located on the border province of Chita (where Chinese companies are taking forests in order to make your Ikea furniture).


This was on the first morning, before the cooks realized how early we get up and start looking for food.  Oksana foraged for raspberries, someone else produced dried salmon filets and red caviar, someone else brought out delicious homebaked rolls-- it was a greasy yummy jovial picnic breakfast.








 Nearby the chilly Katun River shone in the morning light.













We started our first day (after the requisite welcome speeches) with a report-back from Marina Rikhvanova, from the Baikal Environmental Wave.  We featured her (among others) in our Environmental Heroes talk this past Wednesday here in San Francisco-- she just two weeks ago came to NYC to pick up an award from Conde Nast for her outstanding environmental leadership in protecting Lake Baikal this year.  In this September photo she's showing slides of the 5000-strong crowd that gathered in Irkutsk in April 2006 to protest the oil pipeline planned to run within a few hundred meters of the lake, which holds 20 percent of the world's fresh water, and is home to many unique indigenous species, such as the nerpa, the world's only freshwater seal.  In the photo the banner reads "Baikal is worth more than oil."

Minutes at our four-days of meetings were taken by the enviro and journalist Anatolii Lebedev, who types with his two index fingers (typing HARD), and transcribes rather than outlines the conversation.  I sat next to him most days, partly because I was fascinated to watch him work.

Larisa from the ethno-ecological center Lach in Koryakia is seen here on the left.






We took a field trip to an old monastery on an island in the Katun River.  En route we had a nice walk through a village of cottages-- actually the regional center of government.  This cottage is on "Soviet Street."









More tomorrow...

I am astounded to find that the tally of mailing lists the Russia Team at work use is upward of 30 lists.  This is the sort of thing I imagine corporate US America doesn't have to deal with.

Some of these lists have thirty posts a day.

What I don't understand is why there was no mail today.  With the Russia Team out of the office having a retreat to deal with work division (of reading thirty mailing lists) nobody seemed to be doing any e-mailing.

I'm betting that the pile up of unread mail in the day we were all out crashed the server.