Posting #16

Crowds back in Niagara-on-the-Lake; Cash for the Russian Project; Carrying Cash to Russia and Keeping it Safe; Wrinkle Remover;
Short Stuff (Mini-Stories about Kids and Pets)

Crowds back in Niagara-on-the-Lake

The Shaw Festival opened its 2009 season on Saturday, April 11.

Suddenly the town that had been snoozing since last fall came alive.

Parking spaces are scarce again. The sidewalks are crowded with ambling visitors.

And the restaurants are busy. For the last few months, we have been able to gossip leisurely with the servers but no longer. We went to one of our favourite places on April 11th and the server took our order and was off. When she brought our food, I said, “The people are back.”

Looking around the room, she smiled broadly, “Isn’t it great!”

Everyone has been wondering about the impact of the financial and economic problems on the Festival and the town.

Of course, one robin doesn’t a spring make, but we hope that all this activity is a good omen.


Cash for the Russian Project

I knew that there would be many challenges in setting up 22 model employment offices across 8 time zones in Russia but I didn’t expect one of them to be finding the cash to pay the bills.

The problem wasn’t ‘money’, money. The project was generously funded, with more than enough money in the budget to pay all our costs. The challenge was in getting ‘cash’ money.

The basic problem was that Russia did not have a trustworthy banking system in the 1990s.

There WERE banks. In fact, each month, a brand new bank would spring up in Moscow with a respectable facade outside and lots of reassuring marble inside. They looked as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar.

But, in two months or so, the bankers and the deposits would be sunning themselves in Dubai.

Because there were no reliable banks, all transactions in Russia in the 1990s had to be in cash---no cheques, credit cards, bank drafts, wired transfers or lines of credit.

And the cash had to be in US dollars.

Furthermore, the US bills had to be totally pristine, with absolutely no identifying marks. I had never paid any attention to markings on bills until I had to sort through stacks of bills to find some that would be acceptable in Russia. I was astonished at how many bills had been ‘defaced’---bills with scribbled numbers on them, staple holes, tears and even badly dog-eared corners.

Exactly why Russians insist on pristine bills is---as President Obama would say---beyond my pay grade. I suspect they are worried that someone may try to track financial transactions by using marked bills, perhaps the police (secret or otherwise), tax inspectors or even criminals. Whatever the reason, Russians wanted clean bills.

And that was that!

I found it was hard to convey the need for clean bills to Canadian bankers. When I tried to get the US$25,000 needed to open the project, I went to the foreign exchange department of a large charter bank in Ottawa.

The clerk listened to me and then said that there would be no problem. Any worn or torn bills were returned to Washington to be destroyed. To demonstrate, she pulled out a stack of US 100 bills. “\See, these bills are fine”.

I leafed through the bills. Pulling out several with handwritten numbers and small tears, I explained that they would not be accepted by the Russians.

“What’s wrong with those Russians? These are perfectly fine bills!”

I sighed and went to the Civil Service Co-op (now called the Alterna Bank). I knew that the Co-op didn’t usually handle large amounts of US dollars---just enough to provide members with a few hundred dollars for trips to the US---but the clerks were generally more helpful than their counterparts at the ‘real’ banks.

I found a wonderful clerk who actually listened to my plea, and understood.

“So, you want me to launder some money for you”, Deidre chuckled.

She told me she would request brand new bills, which would arrive in about a week.

When the money arrived, she and I went into a back room where she ran the bills through an automatic counter---twice. Worrying about me walking on the street with all that money, she found an anonymous looking envelope. “People will think it’s just mortgage documents”, she said.

Whenever we needed more money, Pat or I would call Deidre at the Co-op.

“How much laundered cash do you want this time?”, she would ask.

It is wonderful to find someone who knows what she is doing, and does it with a sense of humour!

Carrying Cash to Russia and Keeping it Safe

Once we had clean bills, Pat or I had to carry them to Russia. On my first trip to Russia, I carried US$25,000 (made up of 100s, 50s and 20s), in two bulging money belts.

Pat brought over US$10,000-15,000 each time she visited me.

(She once startled a friend who was seeing her off at the Ottawa Airport by asking her to keep an eye on her (Pat’s) carry-on case while she went for a magazine. “It has $15,000 in it.” Pat says the friend gasped, and then kept the bag squeezed between her legs until Pat came back.)

Once the cash was in Russia, I had to find a way to keep it safe.

My office manager said that Russians have a saying that locks keep out only honest people. He argued that small safes and filing cabinets with locks were useless---that would be the first place thieves would look. The secret was to find a place to hide the money where no one would think of looking.

Where could that be?

After mulling things over for a while, I came up with a solution. My furnished apartment had a small room with shelves of hundreds of double-banked Russian books. I hollowed out a large old book, stored the cash in it and placed the book on the third shelf behind a red book.

After I did this, I was worried that if anything happened to me, the money might never be found.

I couldn’t figure out how to tell Pat---who was back in Ottawa---what I had done with the money (I assumed---not unreasonably as things turned out---that emails and phone calls would be monitored and that the apartment would be bugged).

I decided that I just had to live with that worry, but one of the first things we did when Pat came to visit was to go for a walk in a nearby park so I could tell her where the money was stored.

Later on, whenever we needed some cash, we would write notes to each other and one of us would go to the stash.

All in all, the systems we developed to deal with cash worked well---no money was ever stolen. But there was a cost in worry and inconvenience. We kept reminding ourselves that this was a cost that all Russians had to bear, day in and day out.

They couldn’t get on a plane and in a few hours be back in a place where banks worked.

Wrinkle Remover

My first trip from Moscow to a proposed model employment office was on an overnight train. When we checked in, my interpreter and I found that we would be sharing a four-berth compartment with another Russian and a fellow from the newly-independent nation of Georgia.

As soon as we heard the fourth person was a Georgian, the interpreter dragged me into the corridor, outside our compartment. He hissed that we had to be very careful with the Georgian.

“They are all thugs”, my interpreter said, “Don’t tell him anything, and above all don’t show him any money”. (I had US$2000 as backup funds in a money belt plus more money in my billfold.)

I learned that there were centuries of bad feelings between the Russians and the Georgians (bad feelings that continue to today, witness the recent border fighting).

As we got ready for bed, I found that the clasp on my suitcase had jammed. The interpreter and I took turns trying to free the clasp but with no luck.

The Georgian, who had been watching us, pulled a 9 inch hunting knife from his suitcase and offered to use it to pry the clasp open. Just then, the clasp came free.

Looking at me, the interpreter nodded almost imperceptibly toward the Georgian, as much as to say, “Didn’t I tell you?”

When I went to the washroom at the end of the corridor to brush my teeth, I put my passport in my money belt with the $2000. Usually, I took the money belt off at night but not that night!

I didn’t sleep much. I felt I had to keep an eye on the Georgian and his knife. And the lumpy money belt prodded me every time I rolled over.

To make matters worse, the train was too hot. Now, the heating in Russian trains is something like the jibe about the army having two sizes: too small and too big. The train that night was definitely too hot. On top of that, I am a ‘hot’ sleeper, in other words, I perspire a lot at night.

In the morning the money belt was damp, very damp.

We had breakfast with the Georgian fellow and he seemed fine, after all---a businessman trying to sell Georgian wines. (I have no idea what he was doing with the hunting knife---perhaps it was protection against Russian thugs.)

We were met at the train station by local employment officials and our visit went well.

The return trip was uneventful.

When I got back to the Moscow apartment, I pulled out the $2000. The bills had dried by that time but were badly wrinkled. No Russian would have accepted them.

That evening, I sent the family an SOS email telling them about the wrinkled bills and asking for suggestions. Daughter Jennifer replied immediately saying that when she was studying fashion design the students often had a problem with wrinkled patterns. A professor taught them how to iron the patterns, using paper above and below and a low-medium setting (no steam!).

I spent a few hours ironing bills on the kitchen table. It was amazing---the wrinkles just disappeared.

The next day, on my way to work, I used one of the ironed bills and it survived the usual thorough screening by a shop keeper.

The next time Pat saw Deidre at the Co-op, she told her that we were no longer just laundering money, we were also ironing it.

Deidre laughed and shook her head as though to say, ‘What will these crazy people be up to next?’

Short Stuff (Mini-Stories about Kids and Pets)


Cassidy in Quebec

This is still another story about Cassidy, our golden cocker spaniel (I am afraid of boring people with stories about Cass----I promise I will give the old fellow a rest for a few postings).

In 1976, the whole family, Cass included, moved to Quebec City for a year.

One of our neighbours, Pierre, (not his real name) fell in love with Cass and his tricks.

One of the tricks was the old standard, ‘shake hands’. Pierre decided to try the trick in French. He said to Cass, “Donne-moi ta patte”. Cass paused for a moment, then seeing Pierre’s outstretched hand, reached out his paw. Pierre was ecstatic. “He speaks French!”

Now a cynic could say that the outstretched hand was a pretty big hint---that it wasn’t much of a stretch for Cass to figure out that he was expected to hold out his paw.

But after Pierre had played the game several times for his family and friends, Cassidy did indeed learn that “Donne-moi ta patte” meant ‘shake hands’. He would lift his paw even without an outstretched hand.

Pierre had less luck with another trick. Cass hated baths and we would tease him by saying “Have a bath Cass”. He would growl and shake his floppy ears.

When Pierre tried the French for that, Cass just stared at him. There were no cues, no signals and Cass was stumped.

Pierre tried a different tack. He tried to repeat what we said but with his strong accent it came out something like, “Hab a bat Cass”

We wondered what Cass would do.

Cass stared at him for a couple of seconds and then the light came on. Cass growled in the most satisfying way.

Pierre was delighted.



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See you next Sunday for more stories from our family’s universe! Posting #17 will include some stories about a summer I spent in a mining camp at Tulsequah, British Columbia. If you have comments or suggestions, please leave a comment at the bottom of this posting, or you can email me at johnpathunter@cs.com.