Traveling and Working in Russia

The Church of the Spilled Blood, Sankt-Peterburg

I have been there a number of times, mainly to Sankt-Peterburg.

Why was I there? USAID, a US government foreign-aid agency, gave money to AIHA, the American International Health Alliance, a non-profit organization based on I Street in Washington DC, to set up partnerships between hospitals in the US and hospitals and medical schools throughout the former Soviet Union.

Jewish Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky, was partnered with a hospital and post-graduate nursing school in Sankt-Peterburg.

I didn't work for the Louisville hospital, but I knew the project coordinator there and she found me useful. I like to travel, especially off the beaten path, and so I could handle being in Russia just fine; I had taken enough Russian at Purdue that I could get around on my own; and I could figure things out and fix stuff with next to no support.

It was a long project split over several short trips of a few weeks each.

I have split this into multiple pages — look at them in order, or jump around. It's wordy in places, especially toward the beginning, but there are pictures. Really! Lots of them in later sections.

• My general travel page

© Bob Cromwell Oct 2008. Created with /bin/vi and ImageMagick, hosted on OpenBSD with Apache.    Root password available here