Author: billkralovec

This was my second visit to Tanzania; my first visit was in October of 2023. I was there both times for our school’s adventure program with a diving trip to the Indian Ocean coast in the far north of the country and a safari to the Mkonozi National Park, in the north-central part of the country. I spent a total of around three weeks in the country, spending time in the cities of Dar es Salaam, Moshi, Bagomoya, and Tanga, besides the beautiful nature. It is the most spectacular of African countries for landscapes and wildlife, and I am grateful to my friend Robin for introducing me to the country. As I said last time, I would definitely live there and perhaps someday will go back and visit the Serengeti National Park and climb Mount Kilimanjaro.

With elections taking place next week in the country, people were talking about the current president Samia Suluhu Hassan “Mama Samia”. She is the first woman president of Tanzania, moving from vice-president to the top post when the former president, John Mugufuli, died in office. Mugufuli had a preexisting heart condition and probably died from COVID in 2021. He stopped COVID-19 testing, expressed distrust of Western developed vaccines, and called for religious faith to protect the country. Her political party’s colors of green and yellow were on signs and banners all along the roads. Chama Cha Mapinduzi (The Party of the Revolution) has ruled the country since 1977. With the main opposition party Chadema banned from participating and one of their leaders jailed for treason, the consensus is she will continue to the country.

Tanzania is an African success story. They have strong economic growth, low inflation, and more foreign investment, mostly through tourism, coming into the country. The 67 million citizens are young demographically. The 120 or so different tribes that make up Tanzania get along well and the country since independence in 1964 has not had any civil wars. The only time they had a war was when Idi Amin Dada, the Ugandan dictator, tried to take a section of the country. Tanzania successfully repelled the Ugandan army to keep all of its coastline on Lake Victoria. Much of the progress of the country can be attributed to the first president, Julius Nyerere, who ruled for 24 years, brought unity through language, making Swahili the national language. It is spoken in 14 different countries today. He retired peacefully in 1985 and serves as a role model for peaceful transitions of power for today’s elected officials.

Getting to know Tanzania has intrigued my interest in learning more about Africa. Hopefully I will be back again.

We had a nice family weekend in Tashkent. On Friday night, Nadia and I went out to dinner with friends. Ocean and her were looking so beautiful! I snapped this photo of them together before we left for dinner and Ocean went out with her friends. I am blessed to have these gorgeous women in my life!

On Saturday morning, the Detroit Tigers lost to the Seattle Mariners in the MLB playoffs, 2-3 in 15 innings. The best thing about the game was that our sons Owen and Oliver were watching online with us over FaceTime. My parents listened to or watched every Tigers game while I was growing up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, all through the 1960s to the 1980s. They are one of the soundtracks of my childhood. My family and I still follow the Tigers, and they had a remarkable season. They had the best record in professional baseball for much of the summer and the best pitcher, Tarik Skubal. He had 14 strikeouts in the game, but in the end, they couldn’t score enough runs to win the deciding Game 5. It was disappointing and nerve-racking to watch. Even Nadia enjoyed following the game! The Tigers won the World Series 41 years ago (1984) when I was a senior in high school. They made it to the World Series twice in the 2000s (2006 and 2012) but lost both times. I will wait another year and hope they can win the title before I leave this earth.

I went for a hike with my friend Aaron on Sunday morning. One of the nicest things about Tashkent is the easy accessibility to nature. We walked in the dry, dusty rolling hills over the village of Karamazar (Black Cemetery). The silence and cool, overcast skies made for a delightful hike. The dogs loved it!

My daughter Ocean is training for our trip to Tanzania next week. She is an excellent swimmer, and I supported her and her classmates on Saturday afternoon.

I love history and learning about the places I visit. On my travel to and from Budapest, I read the journalistic account of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution against the Soviet Union. This was a contemporary account of the conflict (published in 1957) and the subsequent refugee crisis. My big takeaway was that this was the beginning of the disillusionment with the Soviet socialist/communist style of government.

Most of the twentieth century was tragedy for the Hungarians. World War I marked the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire when they sided with the losing side, the Central Powers. It resulted in Hungary losing 2/3 of its population and territory to neighboring countries. World War II was even worse, with the Nazis invading Hungary when they tried to negotiate a separate peace with the Allies late in the war. Over half a million Hungarian Jews were murdered/deported in a two-month period. The war ended with the incredibly destructive Battle of Budapest between the Soviet Red Army and the Axis Army (Germans and the remaining Hungarian Axis army) that destroyed the city, killed tens of thousands of civilians and ended with the Soviets “liberating” the country. “Liberating” is in quotes because the Soviets dropped an “Iron Curtain” (Churchill’s famous description) over the country and took control of the lives of the Hungrians.

The Soviets promised a “workers’ paradise and a better life for all. Initially, they did help the city recover, rebuilding the infrastructure and establishing the routines of normal life. It must have been a traumatized population that just appreciated a return to normalcy. Michener’s account picks up a few years after this and the dawning realization that the Soviet regime was corrupt and oppresive. It was thrilling to read about the bravery of Hungarian soliders and civilians in their uprising and guerilla warfare in 1956. They actually drove the Soviet army out of the city that resulted in 5 days of glorious “freedom”. The Red Army during the five days recovered from the surprise defeat and brought a much bigger force to retake control of the city, crushing the Hungarian resistance.

The title of the book refers to a small wooden bridge in a farmer’s field across a canal on the Austrian-Hungarian border. Hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing Soviet control came over this bridge and other crossings in the aftermath of the revolution. Michener was at the border interviewing Hungarians. The bridge was destroyed but became a symbol of courageous Hungarians seeking freedom. Because of their long partnership during the Hapsburg Empire, the Austrians helped Hungarians fleeing Soviet control.

I haven’t read James Michener since the early 1990s when I was travelling through the Caribbean with friends. This was the start of my love of travel and history as a young man. I forgot how good of writer he is and this account reads like a thriller novel. He wrote over 40 books and died in 1997.

The Bridge at Andau gave me an appreciation of the impact of horrible tragedies of the 20th century had on Budapest. I have a greater appreciation of the spirit of the Hungarians walking through the city 70 years after the Revolution of 1956.

I never heard of Chris Hayes, an MSNBC and podcast host, before reading The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource”. He gives an excellent overview of the impact that social media tech companies have on our ability to focus and pay attention to any one topic or each other. Engineers at these companies have turned mobile phones into slot machines, with a swipe of a thumb, which keeps feeding our brains infinite bits of information and entertainment. His premise is that our attention has been commodified, with businesses finding ways to get their share of our attention. Hayes asks the question in chapter 1, “Is the development of a global, ubiquitous, chronically connected social media world more like comic books (harmless) or cigarettes (harmful)?”

One of my takeaways is the idea that getting people’s attention is the foundation of most modern human endeavors. Examples range from promoting oneself on LinkedIn to find a job to finding a girlfriend. Since the advent of the internet, “information is infinite and attention is limited”. No wonder students and many adults are so distracted and struggle to focus their minds on a single topic or task.

Personally, I find that I need to make a conscious effort to clear my mind of distractions and focus on what I want to accomplish during the day. Before mobile phones and the internet, I never had to do this. I do this through yoga and meditation every morning, and by ignoring my mobile phone with its podcasts, Google Chat messages, YouTube reels, etc. If this is a distraction for a middle-aged man, imagine what it must be for adolescents and young adults who grew up in this era. I am glad that our school and now most others are banning mobile phones, but we also need to teach specific techniques on how to avoid distractions and train our minds to block out the noise and focus on what is essential.

• “cocktail party effect” – The human brain suppresses a lot of background noise, when your name comes up in a conversation.
• “Boredom’s alter ego is Distraction”
• Tik Tok scrolling is the source of “Infinite Jest”
• “…as a society gets richer, it creates the conditions for far greater amounts of solitude, and with solitude comes the modern phenonmenon of loneliness”
• “for most of history, living alone was a fate usually reserved for outcasts, penitents, or holy men.” 1/4 of US households contain just a single person. The numbers are much higher in Europe. …a relationship between the rise of solitude in modern life and this process of ever more specific individuation of our attention.”
• “Alexander the Great deserves to be called the first famous person.”
• This is the Age of Attention and we need to grapple with the experience of alienation. Human attention has always existed but “clicks” “content” “engagement” and “eyeballs” are creations of attention capitalism. When attention capitalists want to increase the supply, they have no means of creating it:; they must instead find new ways to take it from us.”
• One way of defining culture is simply what everyone pays attention to, and what they pay attention to together.
• So much of modern self-help is geared towards closing the gap between what we say we want and value and how we act.

We watched Owen’s Peace Corps Swearing-In Ceremony on a grainy live stream feed on Friday night. It was difficult to hear the speeches but we appreciated seeing the ceremony. Our oldest son completed the three-month orientation and training and headed out to his site. We love his improved Spanish, and the Peace Corps did a good job of preparing him to accomplish his goals of rural economic development. Owen made good friends in his cohort and enjoyed the introduction to the country and living in Costa Rica’s capital city of San Jose.

He was assigned to Zacero, Costa Rica, a small town on the northern edge of the Central Valley, about 90 minutes from San Jose by bus. The town is famous for its cheese and cool climate. I am interested in seeing how he finds ways to help the locals.

Here in Tashkent, we enjoyed the festivities of our school’s United Nations Day. Ocean participated in the United States’ Delegation in the Parade of Nations. Nadia and I ate too much in the global village. It was nice to connect with community members. Society needs more opportunities like this to break down the isolation of today’s lifestyle.

I read another book by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Lawrence Wright, this time his latest, a thriller novel. The book is about a Palestinian-American FBI agent who partners with an Israeli detective to solve the murder of an Israeli police chief in Gaza. Wright drew from his many years of living and working in the Middle East. 

The main character, Tony Malik, specializes in tracking money from drug and arms deals for the FBI. He barely survives an explosion of a bomb he was trying to disarm. His relationship and work fall apart while he recovers from brain injuries and the loss of an eye. Malik goes to Gaza to find his roots. His father immigrated to the USA and married an American woman. His father divorced his mother, and he wanted to know more about where he came from after his father’s death. 

He teams up with Israeli cop Yossi Ben-Gal because Malik’s cousin is accused of the murder. While following the action and the course of the investigation, I got to know the lives of both Palestinians living in Gaza and Israelis. I can tell Wright interviewed a lot of people in his career. The story brings to life what it is like to live there. He is sympathetic to both sides in the conflict, and I appreciated his insight into the toll living in such a tense and violent environment has on people. Many people die in the course of the action, both innocent and guilty, which I guess shows the amount of violence that occurs there. The book has a lot of deeply described characters that show a different facet of the conflict. He also weaves in the actual Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. 

One of the Palestinian characters reflects on why Arab societies are often behind Western societies in terms of quality of life. “…look at the example of Israel to see what our own societies could be if we were liberated from these tyrannies and religious dogma that imprisons our minds.” 

Wright believes that peace is possible between Israel and Palestine, but until “extremists and ideologues are pushed out of power, the conversation about moving on from the conflict will always be stillborn.” 

I enjoy books that combine history with human stories. It gave me a deeper and more nuanced view of the tragedy of Israel and Palestine. 

I always enjoyed kayaking and canoeing, and would love to find the time to do more. Last spring I earned a level 2 kayaking certification from the American Canoe Association. This weekend, I taught my first group of students the fundamentals of kayaking and, more importantly, instilled in them the joy and freedom of quietly exploring a body of water. I love doing silent sports (Nordic skiing, cycling, kayaking) through wilderness and nature. I think it is the best way to get to know an aquatic landscape. I see the appeal of motorboats and jet skis, but for me, quiet exertion gives me immense satisfaction in experiencing nature.

This weekend, we camped at the Uzbekistan Federation of Rowing and Water Sports on the shores of the Tuyabuguz Reservoir, or as the locals call it, the “Tashkent Sea”. The weather was perfect, and it was so pleasant to teach an eager group of grade 11 students the basics of kayaking. We explored three islands just offshore. We also got front row seats to the national rowing competition that took place while we were there. The cool water was refreshing, and all of the students spent a lot of time swimming besides kayaking. The weather was absolutely perfect! My friend Victor made a cozy campfire as the temperatures cooled in the evening.

A lot of people use the reservoir as it is only 30 kilometers south of the city. Besides being popular for swimming and fishing, it also serves irrigation for nearby fields. Several fishermen were there all day and night with between 10 and 20 poles in the water. It makes for a relaxing day to be next to the water and watch the birds, boats, and fishermen come and go.

It is a nice day trip, especially if you have children. You would need to do some research about the best places to swim. We camped on the grounds of the rowing association and I am sure paying the guard a small tip, you could drive in an spend the day. We were not far from the reservoir and at night you could hear some of the truck traffic from the highway. I might head back later in the fall to do some bird watching.

Uzbekistan was in a prime location to watch the entire sequence of a full lunar eclipse on the night of September 7, 2025. The TIS science teachers had their telescopes out on Sunday night for the students. I took my daughter Ocean, who enjoyed watching the eclipse and seeing the rings of Saturn. It is amazing to see the Earth’s shadow move across the Moon. The full eclipse and “blood red” moon peaked around 11:15 PM. Above are some photos from my iPhone that show the full moon, then the partial eclipse, and finally, about 15 minutes after the total lunar eclipse. I admire the astronomers who can predict these events with such accuracy.

I ran a full 10 kilometers along the Ankhor Canal on Sunday morning. My body felt it as this summer I did more cycling than running. It was a slow 10km, over 1 hour. I aim to run more often and get a time in the 50-minute range. The cool waters of the canal were refreshing! I was swimming with the usual Russian senior citizens who frequent the canal in the early mornings. The pathway along the canal is one of my favorite places in the city.

A huge perk of being an international educator is occasionally encountering your children while at work. What a privilege it is for Nadia and me to go to school with our children throughout our careers. This week, while walking through classrooms to observe and visit with students and teachers, and happened to come upon the grade 12 English A class. Ocean and her friend Nigora were sharing their analysis of a poem with their classmates. She was a good sport for putting up with a proud and embarrassing father. I also saw her at the Co-Curricular Activities Fair. She leads the AquaPonics Club at our school. I am happy she shares my passion for ecology and conservation.

It was a short week with Monday a holiday for Uzbek Independence Day. The weather has been perfect so far in September without the usual suppressing heat of late summer/early autumn. Nadia is teaching kindergarten this year and enjoys her students. We ended the week by hosting the school leadership team. I was delighted to have the sounds of younger children running around the house. We sometimes miss the days of caring for our kids. Ocean ate with us and then went to the movies with her friends.

I am happy for Tashkent’s growing economy to lift many people’s living standards. However, one of the downsides is the growing traffic in the city. The number of cars on the streets has increased many times. City officials are trying to keep up with improved intersection traffic flows, more roads, etc., but it is tough to handle just such a huge increase in volume. I was caught in a traffic jam for 5-10 minutes the other day, coming home from school. One of the challenges in our district of Mirabad is the limited roads going over/under the railway that bisects the district. I hope they find more paths over this obstacle.

McIntyre’s obsession with wolves has resulted in a fascinating book that shares his observations of the Yellowstone Wolf Project. He worked for the National Park Service for many years, spending winters in Big Bend National Park (Texas) and Yellowstone Park (Wyoming/Montana) during the rest of the year. Officially, his job was to educate the public about wolves in Yellowstone. He went way beyond this and spent almost every waking hour outside of his work, going out and observing the wolves at dawn and dusk. He has over 100,000 observations of wolves with over 12,000 pages of notes in his journals. From June 2000 to August 2015, he went out for 6,175 consecutive days! 15 years of daily trips in search of wolves! The Rise of Wolf 8 describes the activities of the wolf packs of Yellowstone. His stories track the development from 31 wolves being introduced from Canada in 1995 until the early 2000s. I kept thinking about my dog Obi and how I can still see glimpses of his genetic ancestry of wolves.

Yellowstone now has a stable population of around 100 wolves. The park is huge; half the size of Massachusetts, but there is only enough prey for 10-12 good-quality wolf territories. In the Western Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where I am from, there are over 400 wolves. My neighbor spotted one trotting down the alley behind my house in my village of Caspian. There is much more prey with white-tailed deer ubiquitous throughout the area. I have only seen a wolf one time. In the late 1980s, I was riding home with my parents from cutting the lawn. My dad and my brothers cut lawns, fixed docks, and tidied up brush when we were in college during the summer. A wolf was walking down a forest service road in northern Iron County and came right past us.

Facts About Wolves

• Wolves are most active during the twilight hours, just before and after dusk and dawn.
• Wolves form long-term pair bonds, something only 3-5% of the 5,000 mammal species in the world do.
• Adult wolves love playing with wolf pups and protect them. This can be seen today with dogs and children.
• Wolf youngsters lick the face of other wolves to beg for food. Wolves regurgitate meat for their young.
• The average rate of wolf pup survival was 73% from 1995 to 2017.
• Wolves can recognize individual from their howls.
• Wolves reach sexual maturity at around 22 months.
• The average life span of a Yellowstone Wolf is between 5 and 6 years.
• The wolves generate $35.5 million annually from tourists.
• Wolves can sniff the air for scents of infections, disease, and injuries while hunting.
• They are successful only around 5% of the time when approaching prey.
• I was also amazed that they can bring down adult elk and juvenile bison.