Understanding the Working Environment

In 1999, Kosovo had a very bleak winter. I had arrived around the end of September while the weather was still mild and sunny, pleasant even. What I was not prepared for was the extreme cold that was to settle on the place during that winter. At its most extreme I was told the weather in the city had reached -29 degrees below freezing. All our fleet of diesel powered vehicle had frozen fuel lines and would not start without setting a fire beneath them for a short period.

Compounding this, the provinces power station was working at 30% of its capacity so electricity other than by home and office generator was almost non existent. Generated power was also insufficient to drive a heater of any sort.

We had paraffin heaters that left you with a headache if the room was closed up for any length of time. Cold was an understatement. I stayed in one house where the temperature in my bedroom of a morning was 3 degrees. That is colder than it is inside a refrigerator.

Coming from Melbourne, a temperate city in Australia I was totally unprepared for the dramatic drop in temperature much to my dismay. The local clothing was of general poor quality and rather contemporary Russian in style.

Lesson learned: I should have prepared myself and learned more about the climate I was going to much better than I did.