Harmless email can be deceiving

The email arrived back in May of last year and seemed harmless enough.
An outfit called Internews was putting together a proposal for a project in Moldova and wanted to know if I would be interested. If so, they’d go ahead and include my name in the proposal.
There seemed like nothing to lose in saying yes.
My odd, quirky, completely accidental second career doing free press development work internationally has never made much sense. No reason it should start now.
Actually, from the standpoint of the folks at Internews, it did make sense. I’d been a Fulbright Scholar to Moldova for about six months in 1998, returned a couple of times at the request of the State Department in 1999, then went back for a couple of training projects, one in 2006 and one in 2008.
From my standpoint, it probably made less sense. But I said yes anyway.
And then I pretty much forgot about it.
It was always something along the lines of, “Oh and I might be going back to Moldova in 2015, but then again I might not.”
It’s been awhile since Moldova — a little, landlocked country divided between ethnic Romanians and ethnic Russians and with a unique ethnic group known as the Gagauz thrown in — has caught the attention of anyone in the West. No, correct that, the country has never really caught the attention of policy makers in the West.
And then Ukraine happened. That country erupted in turmoil over whether to look toward the European Union or to Mother Russia. The Russians invaded, and efforts to talk a way out of the mess have stalled.
Moldova’s right next door to Ukraine and has its own breakaway region of Russian-speakers known as Transnistria.
Suddenly, that often forgotten nation was relevant.
May moved into the summer, then summer into the fall. About October, I contacted the folks who had contacted me and asked: Is this a go or no go?
It was not as if I had such a full calendar in 2015 that I needed to fuss about it (blizzards, basketball, primary election, Glass Days, high school graduation, Legion-Lions Fair, Fourth of July, Jay County Fair, Band Day, Engine Show, Loblolly Days, municipal elections, the usual) but I wanted to know.
The answer came back: We don’t know.
It seems Moldova had elections of its own, and there was no point in planning anything until those were wrapped up. Then there were the holidays, with Christmas coming in January on the Orthodox calendar.
Finally, in response to yet another email on my part, I received a message earlier this month.
How about, it said, if you come in a couple of weeks?
A couple of weeks?
That seemed a bit abrupt to say the least.
Also, there were a few little matters like the fact that I didn’t know what I was being asked to do, when exactly I was going to be doing it, who was in charge, who was handling the travel arrangements, what the end product was supposed to be, who — if anyone — I would be working with, what I was to be paid, where I was supposed to be staying, what sort of support I would have on the ground in terms of translation and transportation, how much of a time commitment on my part was involved and what the heck was going on.
Other than that, everything was fine.
Fortunately, with a few more emails and some renewed contacts with old friends, it has all been sorted out.
It looks as if the project is taking place the first two weeks of April. I have a pretty clear idea of what I’ll be doing. I know I’ll be working with a Russian guy name Oleg who is an expert on news websites. And I know the person in charge is someone I worked with way back in 1998.
The lesson learned? Be careful about those harmless-looking emails.