The Mad Cow Disease and an Albanian

Why one, all the cows here have gone mad, exclaimed Shpend. His friends never gave s**&% in spite of Shpend’s potentially dung beetle attracting, sticky armpits. But Shpend was a gem. A human being, who would risk his life for an aimlessly wandering goat that has strayed into the butcher’s courtyard. An Albanian national (if that helps you to picture him), Shpend will be fifty this January or November or was fifty two years back or may be he’s eighteen, how does it matter? After being separated from his wife, he now lives near the prairies of Kazakhstan bordering the Gobi desert – alone – no one else lives there, even in the far vicinity.

Till a couple of years ago, Shpend worked with a Natural Gas Exploration Company, a semi-government organization in France. He was a driller, the one responsible for making the first contact with mother earth, after which the machines would eventually take over. He was proud of it. It’s human. To be the first one in a chain of globally consequential events. His work took him places. Once even to the Falkland Islands.

cont.