A few days ago we saw some more grim statistics of the war in Iraq: entering its sixth year, the U.S. death toll has passed the mark of 4,000. This number seems very high and very sad and definitely news that gets our attention. I keep referring to CBC since it's my number one go-to source for news... that is, besides Russia Today, our English news channel which we love - we get great news about Russia and the world... but the point that I want to make is that the fact that between 80,000 and 90,000 Iraqis have been killed is mentioned only in passing, at the end of the news reports and articles. Why? Why this focus on American military death and not the toll the war has taken on Iraqi civilians? I came across the grimly named Iraq Body Count website, that has some good (sad) articles about the loss of civilian life in Iraq - I had no idea that the U.S. army compensated families with condolence payments for "accidental" deaths or incidents. I feel like this is a very depressing thing to blog about so I'll stop. You can follow the links if you're interested...
ANYWAYS! Yesterday I had an interesting afternoon.... I went to the volleyball office to scan some ahem, documents, and on my way out I ran into the president, who invited me into his office for five minutes. Well, the five minutes turned out to be 60 minutes.... wow. At first he wanted to talk about Steve and the team and contracts and sponsors and blah blah blah, and then he started going on about the league, and the sneaky back-handedness of Russian volleyball was revealed. He told me about conversations he's had with the confederation regarding whether or not the refs would be fair, and of the six teams in the league that are, as he put it, "confederation teams, mafia teams." Now I don't really know what that's supposed to mean, but he implied that these teams, with their connections with the federation and the help of their healthy bank accounts, will avoid relegation, even if it means fixing games and paying off officials. I just smiled and nodded and put in two cents every now and then smiled and nodded some more... until someone came in and he abruptly ended our impromptu meeting by stopping almost mid-sentence and saying "Okay bye thank you." So that was it then! Very interesting. When I talked to Steve about our (one-sided) conversation... he wasn't really sure if the league was as corrupt as the president made it out to be.. and just laughed at me for being stuck in there listening to him for an hour. So yup. I had a great swim this morning and feel drained of energy... it's slush-city to the max today, and very very foggy... it is one grey day. But at least it's not snowing!!
1 comment:
very interesting meeting you had...why were you told all this...are you supposed to pass this on to someone else????
your weather is not the greatest ,but we are having a snow storm now..Mar.25 and SNOW??????
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