Wow, there is a lot to write about: school, students, nervous students, moose, wild boars, music, flying contraptions, colleagues, great food…

We are four weeks in Lithuania today, Klaipeda to be exact. Klaipeda is a beautiful port city of 200,000 people that sits at the mouth of a 55 km long inlet that empties into the Baltic Sea. It is the northernmost ice free harbor in Eastern Europe. It thusly has always been a very strategic port for the Russian empire and the near eastern courtiers. All manner of goods are transported in and out of Eastern Europe from this port. One of the great attributes of Eastern Europe is the old-towns that exist in the center of the cities. Many of them were spared much damage in WW2 so they retain their old world feel. We live in the middle of old town in Klaipeda which is a cobblestoned beauty located right on the harbor.

Our apartment building is a former mental institution which has quite a history. Almost daily we see groups of gawking cruise ship tourists listening to a guide explain in German, Spanish or French what the history of our building is. It must be quite interesting… We will have to take an English tour one of these days. In the meantime we will just content ourselves by listening to the thumping and running on the ceiling at night. Just kidding.

Lithuania gained its freedom for the Soviet Union in August 1991 after a few tense months of independent actions by Lithuania and an attempt by the faltering USSR to regain control of the nation. Independent elections were held in 1993 and Lithuania has been a democracy since.

I am teaching entrepreneurship at LCC International University, a Christian university in Klaipeda. www.lcc.lt The University is actually younger than the democracy as it was started by a Canadian entrepreneur in 1996 with the express mission of helping to bring a market economy to the post soviet countries. Half of the students come from Lithuania and the balance from 20 other countries including primarily Ukraine, Latvia, Moldova and Russia.

Life under Soviet domination was extremely hard on the Lithuanians. People describe forced moves to distant lands, the disappearance of colleagues and dark dreary times. Everywhere you look in Klaipeda are the remnants of the Soviet times.

Most of the populace lives in bland multistory brick apartment buildings with very high density and limited or no recreational amenities. The apartments are now owned by their occupants and the interiors can be fixed up to the extent one can afford. There are the leftover youth camps that served as summer military camps for the young Lithuanian Soviets.

The transition to democracy has been hard on the citizens of Lithuania. I spoke with a Professor at LCC who has a Masters degree and is working on her PhD from an English university. She told me her family had a hard time with the transition. Her father, under soviet times- as they call it- was the general manager of a large textile factory. The factory was old and obsolete so when the soviets pulled out it closed. There was no capital or really any will to build it anew. In addition with no access to the soviet market most of its market had gone away. So this man of 50 years old was unemployed. He only knew the soviet way of management which was also quite antiquated so he was unable to get any job other then working in a shop. Her mother actually did better as she was a beautician with her own business under the soviets and has continued that business today.

This missing generation was also evident at a business conference I attended in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. I was struck by the relatively young ages of the “business leaders’. The average business manager was in their twenties or thirties. I asked my host about this and he said that the “older” generation did not get the western education necessary to manage today’s business so they got left out of the leadership. They have had to settle for menial jobs while the younger, educated populace run the businesses.

The resulting disruption in lives has helped propel Lithuania to the highest alcoholism and suicide rates in Europe.

As they come up LCC celebrates as a community the independence days of each country. Most of them are post soviet and therefore occurred about the same time in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed. We celebrated the independence of Kyrgyzstan. A student described how in Kyrgyzstan- look it up in an atlas- family is a very important component of daily life, her best friends are her cousins and the family is very supportive. With that comes a history and responsibility. Many young women do not get educated and get married at a very young age- 15 to 16. They are expected to spend their energies supporting the older generations. They are not encouraged to get educated. Many of the young Kyrgyzstan girls try to escape this by marrying a foreigner and getting out of the country. She has chosen a different route. She wants to complete her education at LCC- business major- and return to her country and be there to encourage girls to further their education in other countries.

Lithuania is crazy for basketball. This might be because the people are so tall. It is not unusual to see several men over 6′ 5″ when going to the mall. The women are also quite tall but they can be deceiving because most wear high heels that boost their height a minimum of 3″ it seems. We arrived in Lithuania as the national team was making its impressive run in the Olympics. They went into the medal round with a top seed ultimately settling for fourth just out of the medals. Pretty impressive for a country of 3.4 million that is one third the size of Washington State! LCC has a beautiful gymnasium and athletic facility. It is the basketball center for the Klaipeda region. One morning I was in the middle of my workout in the gym when three basketball players walked in to lift weights. They were obviously basketball players as two of them were at least 6′ 10″ tall. The third was a more normal height of 6′ 1″. I introduced myself and found out he was Willie Deane. He was from Schenectady, NY and was a math and English graduate from Purdue. He has played European professional basketball for 6 years in places such as Greece, Spain and now Lithuania. He wants to be an attorney but for the time being he is going to ride the basketball wave as long as he can. In words “I’m well paid to do something I love so why not.”

The Klaipeda region is a bicycle rider’s paradise! It is the centre of 250 kilometers of paved bike trails. They stretch from Latvia in the North to Russia in the South. Most of them follow the white sand beaches along the Baltic Sea. It feels much like Cape Cod- except no people! The only hazard along these white beaches is the wild boars and moose. Of course, we have been known to have moose on the riverfront trail so no big surprise there. The wild boars are a bit more of a surprise although they are much more interested in the truffles they find along the path than a wide-eyed cyclist. 

The economy in Lithuania has been growing rapidly. It has been somewhat sheltered from the melt down that seems to be going on every where else in the world. The Russian action in Georgia has caused a lot of nervousness. Lithuania has the advantage of being a member of NATO so it has NATO protection. The Lithuanians realize that this defense has never been tested and worry that if Russia got aggressive with them the US may be stretched too thin to be able to help and NATO may have to shrink its borders. Russia has threatened to arm its ships on the Baltic- off Lithuania with nuclear weapons in response to some NATO arms buildup. It is hard to believe we could be slipping into a new cold war but it is starting to feel like it from here! Russia with its new found wealth from oil and natural resources sales is rolling in money and feels like flexing its muscles. It is scaring the wits out of its neighbors!

We spent the weekend in Oslo- beautiful as always. The economy there is on a tear. It is driven by oil. Oil was discovered about thirty years ago in the North Sea and they have been developing the fields ever since. Norway is number 7 in oil production in the world and number three in exports. You talk about a money maker.

They spent the first of the largesse from the oil boon on a new opera house. It opened this month. We got to attend a children’s opera presentation there. It is an $ 800 million facility that sits in the harbor and will probably rival Sidney Australia’s opera house in terms of stature and prominence. The really cool thing is the roof is slanted several direction so anyone is able to climb up it and get a great view of the harbor and city. What a concept- a living breathing building with people all over it.