Will another door open?

I have often wondered how this accidental second career of mine was going to end up.

Working with colleagues and students in the former Soviet Union to advance the cause of press independence and professionalism was never something I consciously sought out.

Instead, it sought me.

Even back in 1997, when I first explored the idea of applying for a Fulbright, I was just poking around. I'm not sure I ever would have applied - it's a complicated, time-consuming procedure - if I hadn't been asked to.

But someone at our embassy in Moldova thought I would be a good fit there, so I completed the paperwork and tracked down the necessary references.

Even after the Fulbright experience, I assumed that the whole thing was a one-off. But then there were phone calls and another project. Or an e-mail would come out of the blue on a gray day in February with another proposal. And with each project, most of them a few weeks long, the whole thing took on a life of its own.

Still, I knew it wouldn't last forever.

Several different scenarios played themselves out in my head, some involving the hazards of travel in out of the way places and others with the phone calls and e-mails simply disappearing and my services no longer needed.

Being blacklisted never occurred to me.

For the record, here's what happened a couple of weeks back.

I had agreed to go to Kyrgyzstan as a Fulbright Senior Specialist working on behalf of the International Center for Journalists to assess journalism education programs at the American University of Central Asia to determine how ICFJ might be able to help. ICFJ, in turn, was working on behalf of the State Department.

The project had been a little iffy from the start, originally scheduled for early August, then late August, then September, and finally spilling over into October. Arrangements were goofy enough that I didn't even have my flight itinerary until the day before I left.

Departure day was Friday, Sept. 18, when Connie took me to Dayton for the first leg of the trip, a flight to Detroit. From the beginning, the travel time started adding up: An hour and a half to Dayton, a two-hour wait for the first flight, an hour to Detroit, another two hour wait for the second flight.

From Detroit, I flew to London's Heathrow Airport, a trip of about eight hours, followed by a four-hour layover, then a nine-hour flight to Bishkek by way of a one-hour stop at Almaty, Kazakhstan.

The flights were uneventful from my standpoint, but then again this was my sixteenth trip to the former Soviet Union since 1998.

The plane arrived in Kyrgyzstan about 3 a.m., and the first stop was the airport visa office. When I made my first trip to Central Asia in 2002, it was necessary to get a visa in advance through embassies in the U.S. Today, they assured us, the situation is much more open and it's easy to get a visa at the airport.

There was no line at the visa office. It was more like a rugby scrum. But I was near the front, since I'd gone through the process before.

Paying the $70 fee and getting a visa stamp put in my passport, I crossed the room to passport control. That's where things started getting interesting.

When the attendant entered my passport number in his computer, my name popped up in a database of unwanted persons, persona non grata, put together by the countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States, a loose-knit organization of former Soviet republics.

The attendant called his supervisor. The supervisor called his own supervisor. Everyone peered at the computer screen, and I was asked to stand over to the side.

More phone calls were made, though I have no idea who they were talking to. Someone, perhaps the duty officer, said my name was on a list.

He didn't say whether it was a good list or a bad list.

A few minutes later, he asked me to claim the rest of my baggage and follow him. By then, I knew it wasn't a good list.

The duty officer was under no obligation to tell me anything, but he did when he asked me two questions: When was I in Belarus and what was I doing there?

When I told him I'd been training journalists and working with independent editors there in 2005, he nodded. The nod spoke volumes, saying, "Well, there you go then."

He directed me to a bench outside security where I could cool my heels. A guard sat beside me, dozing I think. Other passengers sensed I was someone to avoid and looked the other way.

Finally, an airline official came over and showed me paperwork ordering the airline to ship me back to London on the next flight. Efforts to sway the decision by U.S. embassy staff were ineffectual. It was, after all, now about 4:30 a.m. on a Sunday. Monday was a holiday, the last day of Ramadan. The embassy wouldn't even be open until Tuesday.

Roughly two hours after my arrival, I was on a plane bound for London, exhausted by the prospect of nine more hours of flying.

And as the plane took off, I realized that the blacklist hadn't just complicated my day, it also meant I could not travel to Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Armenia, Belarus, or Russia, all countries where I have worked in the past decade.

So, is this crazy, accidental, richly-rewarding, second career now over? I'm not sure. It may be. The phone calls and e-mails may be a thing of the past. Or it may just take a turn in another direction.

One door has closed. Another may yet open.[[In-content Ad]]