Gangane's Blog

If you call UNICEF in Iceland and ask for the Executive Director you are very likely to get this answer. I have been working as the Executive Director of UNICEF in Iceland, or the National Committee for UNICEF since it was founded in March 2004. It has been a great privilege and honor to take part in this work and it is hard to think of a nicer job to have.

We have gotten a lot of support and have been able to raise funds for many great projects for children (you can find our annual reports for 2004 and 2005 here http://www.unicef.is/um/index_535.htm). But what I am most grateful for is the fact that my co-workers and my board of directors have been very understanding and supportive of my spiritual practice. This means that I am able to get unpaid leave for two months to practice my meditation and spend time with me teacher Sri Chinmoy. For this I am very, VERY grateful.

Now, who can ask for a better setup? For ten moths of the year I work for the world’s greatest children’s organization, UNICEF and for two months of the year I retreat whit my spiritual teachers Sri Chinmoy and my friends from the meditation group. Life is good.

PS: I’ll be back at my desk in the last week of February if anyone asks.

Last night the New Year was celebrated with a smile (and some shivering). A group of boys traveling with us took a dip into the Black Sea yesterday and filmed the whole thing. The water is quite cold so for most of them it was literally a dip, while others did swim a little. It was good fun to see a group of 10 or 15 boys splash in and out and I salute their braveness. This was a part of their New Years skit shown last night. After the video they gave everyone delicious ice-cream served with choreographed singing and dancing. I was impressed – I wonder where Sahadevea got his jazz voice from.  Thanks for a great show!

There have been some other people taking on the icy-water in the past few days and we have been trying to get some accurate figures about the temperature of the sea, but that is hard to find as most of the data available here in Varna is for the summer. It looks like you are not supposed to swim during the winter. But I think the water is between 8° and 9° C and that would qualify as very cold.
The great Karteek has been going in almost very day now and I had the good fortune of going with him once. It was great. Cold, but great. Getting yourself into the water is so hard. I have been in water as cold as this many times in Iceland but still it took a serious effort to get in. I have to admit that my swimming session was dramatically shorter than Karteek’s but then in my defense I remind myself that he has crossed the English Channel eight times while I mostly stay in the hot tub when I visit swimming pools.

I promised myself to go again for a swim before we leave Varna and now I publish this promise here on my blog so you can hold me accountable. If this is the only entry about swimming in the Black Sea then that means that I have broken my promise.