Bill's Blog

It finally feels like winter is here after an unusually warm autumn. Temperatures are dipping down to 4C (39F) at night. Temperatures in the afternoon peak between 10-18 (50F-64F). The months of October and November in 2023 were fantastic and probably some of the warmest months experienced here. Below you can see temperatures were well above average for both highs and lows for the month of November in Tashkent. Tashkent has a Mediterranean climate with rain/snow falling mostly November to March. I am turning into my father, very interested in the weather…

Nadia and I attended a Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony hosted by the German Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Tilo Klinner. He has a beautiful residence and upon arrival, a full choir was singing in the atrium. His wife lit candle lights on the tree and he treated everyone to a delicious, Christmas dinner. I devoured the ham and scalloped potatoes. That is one of the perks of being a director of an international school is invitations to social events of the diplomatic community. Thank you Ambassador Klinner!

We had dinner at a colleaugue’s home last night which is the second of the New Year’s parties we attended. There are many more to come. Now all we need is snow. I hope to decorate our home this weekend.

We annually host a big Thanksgiving dinner for people in the school community. We invite people new to the Thanksgiving traditions and single people who don’t have a family to celebrate with. Thanksgiving is not a holiday in Uzbekistan and at school, we only got a half day in the afternoon. Nadia is the star here with her arrangements, cooking and co-hosting responsibilities. She is a natural when it comes to social events and interacting with people.

Of course I had to jinx the Detroit Lions with my Thanksgiving dinner speech. I was telling everyone how thankful I was that the Lions started the season 8-2, their best start since 1962, and how finally, after all these years, we have a championship-caliber team. The Green Bay Packers defeated the Lions later that evening (time difference)!

It is nice to have a big house and domestic help to host a large dinner party (39 people). I am thankful for the opportunity to live and work in Uzbekistan. Ocean and Oliver ate a lot, and this is Ocean’s favorite meal.

Watch Us Dance is the middle novel of a trilogy based on the author’s family roots in revolutionary Morocco. Slimani had a French grandmother and a Morrocan grandfather. Her parents lived in Morroco and Leila herself, was born in Rabat and her family was progressive and French-speaking. She left for Paris for university and married a French banker. As a journalist and writer, she splits her time between France and Portugal today. The trilogy is based on her family and their mix of French and Morrocan culture.

I love it when books take me away to a time and place I am not familiar with. I did not read the first novel that details how the patriarch, Amine Belhaj, an interpreter in the French army, meets Mathilde immediately after World War II in France. They settled on a farm in interior Morocco and he became rich by exporting mandarins and other fruits to France. This second installment of the trilogy focuses on their daughter Aïcha Belhaj who becomes an OB-GYN doctor and son Selim, who runs away to the USA. It is a family saga so there big sections of the book devoted to Amine’s brother and sister and their families as well.

Families of mixed cultures and expatriate stories always interest me. My family is not a straightforward mix of cultures like Slimani’s story of Morroco and France, but I can relate to the tensions and benefits this mix can bring to family life. My family has a mix of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Australia, and Bolivia. You can also throw in our mix of ancestry (Spanish, Polish, German, indigenous South American) and our global nomad lifestyle (Venezuela, Serbia, Japan, Uzbekistan) that complicates things. I learned a lot about the history of Morroco from the book. The novel is set in 1950 – 1970 in Morrocco and the dictator/King Hassan II is an influential figure in the book. The book also features the hippie movement. North Africa became part of the “hippie trail” and Jimi Hendrix makes a cameo in the story. It is interesting that the free love and drug use of the hippie movement chose an Islamic country to visit.

The book was thoroughly readable as I finished it in a week. I didn’t need to have read the first novel to enjoy it. I don’t think I will read the third novel, although I am curious to see how the lives of Aïcha and Selim’s children turn out. I guess part of it as I have now lived through a couple of generations as a child and now parent, is the succession of generations, and what they do and where they live fascinates me. I don’t think my grandparents would have imagined their grandson living in Uzbekistan.

Leila Slimani came to international fame through her French language novel, Lullaby. It was published in English as “The Perfect Nanny” and is based on the real-life story of the Krim family’s nanny in New York.

We are often so busy that we don’t take time to recognize the simple moments in life that give us great pleasure. On Tuesday during my daily work leading the school, I ran into my son Oliver four times. He is in his final year of high school and I am savoring time with him. It is such a treat to get these glimpses into his school day that parents in most professions never get to see. I love knowing that my wife and children are always with me at school.

Yesterday I received a phone call from Nadia saying that Ocean injured her eye in design class. My first thought was she was cutting something with a power tool and was not wearing safety goggles which really injured her eye. Thankfully, it was only that she got a piece of sawdust caught in her eye while carrying wood planks. As a precautionary measure, I took her to an eye doctor downtown, accompanied by a nurse from our clinic. It was wonderful to comfort her and spend time with her for a couple of hours. The doctor turned her eyelid up and removed the debris and she is fine with 100% vision.

Last night Nadia, Oliver and I attended the United States Marine Corps Ball. The Marine Corps was founded on November 10, 1775 by order of the Second Continental Congress at the Tun Tavern in Philadelphia. 248 years later, the US Marine Corps is an elite military fighting force that has literally seen action all over the world. Battalions of Marines are assigned by the State Department to protect US embassies and the associated diplomatic mission.

The event was at the new InterContinental Hotel in Tashkent. I didn’t know from the history of the company that Franklin D. Roosevelt asked Pan Am President Juan Trippe to start a luxury hotel chain to help boost Latin America’s economy after World War II. With loans from the US government, InterContinental became a successful chain and today they have 208 hotels worldwide.

US Ambassador Hennick gave a good speech, reflecting on his father who served in Vietnam with the Marines Corp. I like that in America, civil servants ultimately control our military forces. The close relationship between the federal government and the military was on full display last night. The marines were in full uniform and performed the traditional cake-cutting ceremony. The night was special for Nadia and me because we could share it with Oliver who attended with his girlfriend. I loved watching Nadia dance with Oliver and his friends.

Nadia and I loved supporting the kids at the annual Tashkent International School Cross Country Running meet yesterday. Over 400 students ran in races for elementary students up to grade 12 and there was even an adults/parents race. Both Oliver and Ocean played varsity soccer this year and didn’t participate in the cross-country running teams during their regular season. However, this meet was open to all students and the varsity teams needed more runners.

I am improving my Adobe Premier Pro video editing skills and put together the video below of the Under-19 Race.

We were delighted and surprised when Oliver came in third place. After the first 1-kilometer inside loop, he was in 11th place but steadily he passed runners on the 2 longer outer loops. He does not have a distance runner’s build, but he does have a lot of strength and stamina and ground out a medal.

Ocean was a bit nervous before the race and we had to bribe her with Chinese takeout for her to run. She takes after her mother with her athleticism and is naturally strong and coordinated. Girls are smart and all competitors were pacing themselves. Ocean stayed in second place for about half the race, but then a girl from the French school overtook her with the second of two long loops to go. Ocean easily finished in third place. Both the boys and girls varsity teams won the meet! There were many competitors from other international schools in the city (French School, Diplomat School, Canadian International School, British School, etc.) and it was a lively atmosphere.

I ran the adult 3.3-kilometer race and finished in 6th place overall. My Strava time was 15:30 with a pace of 4:48 per kilometer. My fastest split was probably the first kilometer which I ran in 4:30. There were no age categories and the medalists were much younger than me. I felt good but really exerted myself and needed some time to recover my composure. My lungs were burning and it was probably good for my heart to do this once in a while. I am stronger in the longer races, but am enjoying the shorter runs because it is less damage to my knees. I think the longest I would run is 10 kilometers. I am just happy to be able to run at age 56 and give a decent performance!

I am always amazed with digital books that they track how much time one spends reading a book. I borrowed this book from the Great Lakes Digital Library after listening to Sam Harris interview Graeme Wood about recent events in Gaza and Israel. I often read in the evenings to put my mind at ease and despite the heavy content of this particular book, it did do the trick. I didn’t realize that I spent over 8 hours reading the book over the past two weeks.

I liked Graeme Wood’s book because it focused on the theology of the Islamic State instead of the politics or violence that other journalists focus on when writing about them. The Islamic State formed a caliphate or an independent, Islamic-based government in Syria and Iraq from 2014 to 2019. They were known by several names, ISIS, ISIL, etc. but Wood calls them the Islamic State. They are basically messianic zealots. Wood, a staff writer for the Atlantic and political science professor at George Washington University, interviewed many members of IS to understand their beliefs and interpretation of the Koran and Islam.

IS is a slim minority of the religion of Islam that focuses on literal interpretations of the Koran and the life of the Prophet Mohammed. They ignore the thousands of scholars and writers who have refined the faith and go back to the Koran. They bring the values, beliefs, and cultural mores of the Arabian Peninsula of 700 AD (when Islam was founded) into today’s world. Wood interviewed IS supporters and believers from England, Australia, Egypt, etc., and studied the publications of IS and the speeches of its leaders. He gives the reader a detailed worldview from the perspective of the Islamic State.

I am more familiar with Christian fundamentalists, who talk about the apocalypse and the second coming of Jesus like it is going to happen any day now. IS believes that by establishing a caliphate with a leader from the specific Arabian tribe mentioned in the Koran, they are starting the events that will lead to the end of the world. Their goal was to conquer as much of the world as possible by expanding their caliphate through violent means. I learned a lot about the establishment of Islam and their beliefs by reading this book. I didn’t know that in an Islamic version of the apocalypse, the Christian Jesus also comes back to earth to lead a small fighting force of Muslims against the anti-Christ (Al-Masih ad-Dajjal). Another aspect of IS that I didn’t realize is that they believed that most other sects within Islam were also apostates, besides non-Muslims. They took pride in being “strange” and a minority of the faith, believing they were right and everyone else was wrong.

The Islamic State has a harsh justice system and the author shared a table of offenses and corresponding punishments in the book. The Koran mentions drinking wine but not murder and advises punishments to be public, hence the internet executions shared by IS.

drinking wine/slander	Death
homosexuality	push off building
non-Muslim get stoning; Muslim -100 lashes, banished 1 year	80 lashes
fornication	non-Muslim get stoned; Muslim -100 lashes, banished for 1 year

Other things I learned from the book.

• Islam, unlike Christianity or Hinduism, encourages its followers to seek a reflection of their faith in the authority of the state. In contrast, America was founded on the principle of the separation of church and state.
• I wondered why having a dog for a pet is not popular with Uzbeks and Muslims in general. One of the interviewees quoted a hadith (collected sayings and actions of Muhammad) “If a dog drinks from your bowl, then you must wash it seven times.” Many Muslims interpret this to mean dogs are unclean.
• solipsism definition – the self is the only reality
• Like in Christianity, there are different interpretations of religious doctrine; Wood pointed out that a literalist, conservative reading of Islamic texts can yield to nonviolence as well as violence.
• Osama Bin Laden considered the Americans to be the modern Mongols.
• Wood’s opinion is that Islam is not Christianity on a five-hundred-year time delay. The Reformation that took place with Christianity is not necessarily the path Islam will take.

Oliver and Ocean completed their soccer seasons last week at the Central Asian Federation of Athletics (CAFA) championship in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Nadia and I flew up on Friday evening to watch the semifinals and finals on Saturday, November 4. It was quite emotional for us, especially as this was Oliver’s last high school soccer games. The varsity boys went undefeated on their way to winning the championship. Ocean’s team tied their consolation game to finish third.

Oliver’s team, the Tashkent International School Owls defeated the Tien Shan International School of Almaty, 4-1 in the semifinals. We were fortunate to see Oliver score a goal in the game. (video above)

In his final game against Haileybury Astana International School, his team won 3-2 and took home the trophy. Oliver played in the second half and it was the culmination of his scholastic sports career. Nadia was crying and I was proud of his accomplishments as a player. Oliver developed a passion for the game and it is one of the things we share.

Ocean’s team lost the semifinal game to the host school, QSI Almaty International School. This is Ocean’s first season of soccer and as a grade 10 student, surprisingly, she is one of the best players. She is learning the game but her athleticism(thanks, Nadia!) allows her to stand out. As she plays more, she will be a better player and I see her eventually playing striker and scoring a lot of goals.

In the consolation match, the girls scored a late goal to tie the game, 1-1. Ocean made her penalty kick (above). Because of a technical error by a referee, allowing a player to kick before blowing the whistle, officials called it a tie, and the TIS Owls finished third place.

Over the Fall Break, Ocean and I visited Tanzania as part of the TIS Adventure Program. Ocean became a PADI Certified Diver at the Fish Eagle Point Resort and Nature Center. We also went on a safari in the Mkomazi National Park. It was my first time on the continent of Africa and Tanzania is country #69 on my life list of countries visited. We had a trip of a lifetime! We flew from Tashkent to Zanzibar, with a connection in Dubai. From Zanzibar we took a short flight to the mainland capital of Dar Es Salaam. From there, we drove north to the city of Tanga and out to the peninsula owned by Fish Eagle Point Resort. It was nice to stop in Dubai. Ocean and I had McDonald’s and Starbucks and I was able to buy a power cord for my camera.

I spent 13 years in South America and I was curious how it compared to Africa. I was excited to be back in the tropics as the north of Tanzania is less than 5 degrees south of the equator. I love the tropics and it brought back memories of my time in Latin America. Africa is poorer than South America, although there are many similarities. The road leaving the airport heading out of Dar Es Salaam was under construction and traffic was chaotic and busy. The first two things I noticed were women carrying things on the top of their heads and many of the villages and towns lacked street lights. That is a lower tier of infrastructure in South America.

We are exhausted when we arrived in the middle of the night at the resort. I was so happy to fall asleep in my tent and was excited to see the beauty of the Tanzanian coast in the morning sunlight.

This is my second visit to Kazakhstan’s largest city, Almaty. Nadia and I came here to watch Oliver and Ocean participate in the Central Asian Federation of Athletics (CAFA) Soccer Tournament. International schools in the five Central Asian countries participate in the conference. This is Oliver’s last soccer tournament as he is a senior this year and will be graduating in June so we wanted to watch him. We also were excited to see Ocean play as well. This is her first time playing soccer. Oliver’s team won the varsity boys championship and Ocean’s team tied for third. Nadia and I loved coming up here and taking in watching our children play soccer. It was a beautiful, sunny day, and had a lot of fun with the kids and their classmates. Quality Schools International (QSI) Almaty International School hosted the tournament in their beautiful sports facilities.

Kazakhstan is around 4-5 five times richer than Uzbekistan and you can see it in the infrastructure. Almaty was an important federal capital for the Soviets and it shows. The Russians called it “Alma Ata” and I remember reading maps in school with that name. The trans-Siberian railroad came through here which brought more industry and business. Pre-Soviet times, the Russians built a fort here to protect the empire and they named the town Verny. Later, many dissident intellectuals were exiled here from Moscow and the city developed a sophisticated culture. It feels very European and feels much more civilized and established than Uzbekistan. The metropolitan area of 2 million people makes for a refreshing, elegant break from Tashkent. Shortly after independence, the Kazakhs changed the name to Almaty, the original Kazakh name of the area. A former president moved the capital to Astana in 1998, but Almaty still is the financial and cultural center of the country.

I enjoy the restaurants. We ate at Honey-Honey Restaurant which is located in the financial district, near the Esentai Mall. Our friend Tracey said it felt like Helsinki with the birch trees and a beautiful outdoor plaza between the restaurant and mall. It had an Asian menu, an excellent drink menu, and gourmet ingredients and taste. I highly recommend it when you come here.

We also made the mandatory stops at American franchises that have not made it to Uzbekistan yet. Starbucks (gifts), Krispy Kreme, ate a Papa John’s pizza and a quick meal at the restaurant formerly known as McDonald’s. I say “formerly known as” because McDonald’s pulled out of Kazakhstan when they had supply chain issues due to sanctions on Russia. The restaurants are still here in Almaty, but the Golden Arches are taken down, and all references to McDonald’s are wiped from menus, drive-thrus, etc. It is now known as “Food Solutions KZ” with a new branding campaign coming soon. The double cheeseburger, fries, and strawberry shake tasted similar to the McDonald’s all Americans know. We also went to a supermarket to buy nacho chips and a few things Nadia could not get in Uzbekistan. We spent the rest of the day in the hotel room. I exercised in the gym and later went for a run along the Esentai River (весновка) in Russian as there was a running/biking trail.

The first time we came, we didn’t go to the central business district. There is a lot of new construction and there is a modern skyline. I noticed signs for the BI Group and Halyk Bank, to huge businesses that have changed the landscape of the city.