Hannah
is an amazing woman. She first started coming to Russia when she was a young
girl, drawn here by the romance we all feel with this forbidden land. She
continued her studies with a Russian tint, finally graduating from the Monterrey
Institute (the old CIA training school) with an MBA. Unlike the rest of the
MBA/Russian language crowd, she did not come back to Russia to make a killing in
business; she came back as a Peace Corps Volunteer.
Hannah, chilling with chi in my kitchen.
I have never figured out exactly why she did that. As one of the few ex-PCV’s
to land a job here, I always felt very humble and quite lucky when I chatted with
her. Of all of us in the Peace Corps, she was the one who could have found a job
the easiest, and made the most in the private sector.
Hannah is not one to jump ship though, and she did the full Peace Corps,
doing the unimaginable: surviving in Moscow on a Peace Corps salary ($250/month
+ housing). Granted, she does live like a Russian, and with a Russian, so she
knows all the cheap ways to do things. Still, I knew that I could never live in
Moscow on that kind of money when I was in the Peace Corps. I wanted to be sent
as far away form there as possible, so I could actually live above the poverty
line, in the lifestyle I was accustomed to.
When I was still there, with my crazy-hours job, and her living and working outside the
ring, we didn’t get together as often as we should. She was one of the few links I
had left with the Peace Corps, and my main gossip source. Now that I am gone & she is still there, her info is more important than ever, So, Hannah, drop me a line, inquiring minds want to know, and will send gifts!
I happen to know internal work of Monterrey school in Cold War time. It never was CIA school. It’s run by Air Force for all uniform services as regular military base plus FBI. CIA types come from college campuses. They are not uniformed and have nonuniform cover.