Refugees at Work

Not all 68.5 million migrants identified by the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) live in camps. In the US, for example, asylum seekers can receive work permits, if their cases are not resolved in 180 days. In July, 2018, one asylum seeker from Sudan was given a court date in 2021.

     What do refugees do while they are in limbo? Some drive cabs or work in nursing homes. But refugees who fled a civil war in Ethiopia mobilized family members to bring their home town food-associated hospitality to a restaurant they opened in Washington, DC. Creative employers, such as the Palestinian and Yemen business partners, Nas Jab and Jabber Nasser al Bihani, look for asylum seekers who have skills they can employ. That way, they found chefs for their Komeeda restaurants in New York, NY; Austin, Texas; and Washington, DC.

     The UNHCR adopted an idea from a French catering company, Les Cuistots Migrateurs, that organized a festival to attract immigrant chefs for restaurants in Paris, Lyon, Madrid, and Rome. UNHCR-sponsored festivals have led to numerous international dining experiences.

• Women cook native dishes at Mazi Mas in London.
• Home cooking from Syria is on the menu at the New Arrival Super Club in Los Angeles.
• Detroit is opening Baobab Fare, a Burundian restaurant and market.
• The Sushioki chain in Durhan, North Carolina, advertises the cooking of refugee chefs.

Who can resist trying Zimbabwean chicken stew and crisp baklava triangles with vanilla ice cream?

   

What Happens When the World's Children Leave Home?

In the news lately, I've been struck by the growing number of children who are with parents fleeing their home countries, who wish they could escape their home countries, who attend schools in a different country, or who just seek foreign adventures.

     Brazil's super model, Gisele Bundchen, left her country and married the U.S. New England Patriots quarterback, Tom Brady. Nowadays, nearly two-thirds of those in Brazil's 16-34 year old age population also want to leave the country, even if they aren't leaving to marry a foreign celebrity.  Their motivation: escape from a slumping economy, from corruption, and from a lack of police security.

     In the recent migration from Mexico and Central America, parents brought as many as 3000 children to the United States also to escape violence, gangs, and rape and to find economic opportunities.

     Children among the six million refugees fleeing Syria try to escape the bombs, poisoned gas, and starvation inflicted on their families by the dictator, Bashar al-Assad.

     Children also are among the Muslim Rohingya refugees who have fled from Myanmar to Bangladesh to avoid violence in their home country or from Yemen to get away from air attacks.

     In Nigeria, terrorists chase women and children from their villages to rape and attack them with knives.

     Latest numbers show more than 600,000 students left China last year to study in the West. Many were avoiding, not violence, but the gaokao, a test that values memorization and determines who enters China's top universities.

     Was it a youthful quest for adventure that caused 12 Thai boys and their soccer coach to ignore flood warnings and endanger their lives and those of their potential rescuers when they became trapped in a cave between Thailand and Myanmar? One of the boys showed he was a good student when he understood a British rescuer's question about how many were trapped and responded, "13," in English. Two were the first to make it out undertaking a dangerous, submerged two-mile route.

     Displaced populations pose a host of problems.They might indicate destabilization in the countries they are fleeing, and they place a burden on the services provided by host countries. Unless new arrivals are accepted and integrated into the host country's population, rising nationalism leads to protests against the government and the immigrants, especially if  refugees look different, profess a different religion, and have a different ethnic heritage.

     Nuns who work with refugees in the U.S. expect to see victims of violence and those who have suffered the trauma of long journeys, often on foot, who need counseling. Some new arrivals are afraid to go out alone because they are not used to being able to trust anyone. They are amazed when they receive donations of clothing, toys, diapers, and even furniture, such as cribs, from strangers.

     Shelters know they need to provide legal services for asylum seekers and bond for detained refugees navigating foreign court systems, where their next court dates might be three years away. When cases are not settled in 180 days in the U.S., attorneys know immigrants are entitled to work permits that enable them to find jobs to support themselves and their families. Asylum used to be granted in the U.S., if someone were escaping domestic or gang violence, but only persecution because of race, religion, political opinion, nationality, or membership in certain groups applies now.

     Besides legal aid, families need help learning the local language. Nuns in a U.S. shelter try to make a new language fun by letting children write English words with their fingers in shaving cream. Then, there is the help needed to enroll children in schools, to apply for health services, and to become a member of a religious congregation.

     In shelters, nuns see people begin to develop confidence about living among those who speak different languages and have different cultural practices. I remember reading about displaced families from Syria who left where they had been settled in  rural Baltic States that provided creature comforts to slip into Germany, where they could join the others who had been settled there and shared their Muslim Arabic culture.

     Practices that would seem OK in a home country might be objectionable in a host country. Smoking, spitting, stealing, and getting drunk can fall into that category. Players who join teams from other countries often need to be schooled in the ways of their new countries. For example, women in the U.S. object when Latin baseball players yell, "Hey, chickee babie."

   

   

Plain Talk about Nuclear North Korea

If you haven't seen the current TIME magazine article (Feb. 12, 2018), it sheds light on how North Korea's so-called hermit kingdom became a nuclear power while no one was looking. Pakistan helped North Korea understand how to enrich uranium for a nuclear warhead, but TIME didn't say where North Korea obtained its uranium. Pyongyang recruited unemployed missile experts (as well as chemical and biological weapons' experts) from Russia and Ukraine in 1991 after the USSR collapsed and later from Iran and Pakistan. A missile engine stolen from the Yuzhmash factory in Ukraine also could have ended up in North Korea.

Russia is happy to keep the U.S. distracted, the TIME issue reported. No wonder Moscow stands idly by as sanctions on North Korea make selling its nuclear technology to Syria and other would-be nuclear powers an attractive income producing option. Yet, Russia has shown concern about the nuclear fallout that a US nuclear attack on North Korea could send its way. Moscow strategists state the purpose of their nuclear missiles is to inflict enough devastation on enemies to bring them to the negotiating table. Of course, it makes more sense to avoid all devastation by negotiating before inflicting harm. Hope that is what Kim Jong Un and President Trump are about to do.

At nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap, which was mentioned in the earlier post, "Nuclear Straight Talk," it is possible to predict the extent of fallout from a nuclear detonation in any city.

World's Water Glass: Half Full

Around the world, people who have taken to heart United Nations statistics about water, 663,000,000 people don't have access to safe drinking water and 80% of untreated human wastewater discharges into rivers and seas, are coming up with creative methods to reach the U.N.'s goal: universal access to safe, affordable water.

     Members of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR), which includes religious orders, are activist shareholders in key companies. At corporate meetings, they file resolutions requiring corporations to hold suppliers responsible for safe water practices, since, under the U.S. Clean Water Act, companies can be charged with criminal violations in federal courts. Tyson Foods, for example, has paid millions in fines for dumping fish-killing water from its chicken slaughtering and processing facility into a Missouri creek.

     Even if ICCR resolutions don't gain enough support for a vote at a corporate annual meeting, ICCR members meet with corporation executives directly. They successfully pressured the Campbell Soup Corporation to monitor activities in its supply chain. Farmers who fail to meet Campbell's standards for water conservation practices are no longer suppliers. In Africa and Central Asia, ICCR members help villagers who wash in polluted water where mines and tanneries dump harmful chemicals, contact executives in multinational corporations and present their cases for pressuring suppliers to treat water responsibly.

     Lack of access to drinkable water in developing countries is especially hard on the women and children who walk miles to wells each day rather than attend school or work for an income. Children also have drowned when water swept them away, while they were filling buckets in streams. Working in villages in 41 countries, including in disaster areas after earthquakes in Mexico and during the war in Syria, nongovernmental organizations, Mother's Hope and Water with Blessings, identify smart young mothers they call "water women" and educate them to share free information about hygiene and how to purify dirty water using a portable filtration system.

     Unlike India and Bangladesh, countries that worry a Chinese dam will cut off their water supply from a river that flows south from Tibet, conflict between Muslims in northern Cameroon and the Christians in the South does not prevent harmonious cooperation on OK Clean Water projects in over 50 villages. First, villagers locate an accessible source of spring water. Then, the OK Clean Water organization's partnership of unskilled workers and skilled help from a local water engineer go to work using local materials. From the top of a hill, gravity carries spring water through pipes to a large storage tank and then to faucets close to villages.

     In The House of Unexpected Sisters, the latest book in an Alexander McCall Smith series, the protagonist describes a system for watering her vegetable garden in Botswana, Africa.
     From a drain in the house, a hose pipe stretches across the dusty garden to raised vegetable beds in the back of their plot. "There the hose fed the water into an old oil drum that acted as reservoir and from which much smaller pipes led to the individual beds. The final stage in the engineering marvel was the trailing of cotton threads from a bucket suspended above the plants; water would run down this thread drop by drop to the foot of each plant's stem. No water thus fell on ground where nothing grew; every drop reached exactly the tiny patch of ground where it was needed."

     Contributions to both kiva.org and Water.org fund small loans to help villagers gain access to safe water. At kiva, for $25, individuals can choose water and sanitation projects in the regions of the world where they want to invest. Kiva gift cards are wonderful holiday stocking stuffers and birthday gifts that help students get involved in solving world problems.

     UNICEF USA (at PO Box 96964, Washington, DC 20077-7399) collects donations of:
$92     for the personal hygiene and dignity kits 2 families need in emergencies
$234   for 50,000 water tablets that purify deadly, polluted water to make it safe for a child to drink
$415   for a water hand pump that provides clean, safe drinking water for an entire community

     Wells of Life (wellsoflife.org), a nonprofit organization that builds wells in East Africa, gratefully accepts donations from those who would like to build a well dedicated to an individual or group. A member of the organization's advisory board, John Velasquez, recently dedicated his contribution for a bore hole and water well in Uganda to a Benedictine nun on her 104th birthday.

     Finally, major research projects are working on large scale government policy solutions to the world's water crisis. Based on studies, mayflies, stoneflies, and caddisflies have been found to help governments predict the health of streams and rivers all over the world. When these aquatic insects disappear, water is in trouble.

      As urban populations grow throughout the world and pavement covers land that used to absorb water, policies for managing both scarce water and floods become critically important. When Sao Paulo, Brazil, managed a drought by reducing pump pressure at certain times of the day, there were unintended consequences. Homes on higher elevations often had no water, while tanks serving homes in lower elevations never had a shortage. Studies showed a lack of central control over water management in Mumbai, India, gave control to plumbers who knew each area and those who had the political connections to hire them. It is no surprise to find flood conditions require government budgeting for backup energy sources to provide electricity to keep water pumps and drinking water treatment plants working.

     Water is everywhere and so are the people determined to find it, keep it clean, and manage it effectively.

   

   

Babies Helped with Unused Vojta Therapy

Using the Vojta (YOY-tuh) method, developed by the Czech neurologist, Vaclav Vojta, in the early 1950s, pressure applied to nine zones of a baby's body can activate muscles, mental activity, and proper breathing in those born with the motor disabilities associated with cerebral palsy and Down's syndrome.

     One medical book describes Down's syndrome as a birth defect of Mongoloid children who have "stubby fingers and hands, a flat face, slanted eyes and a sweet disposition." The book goes on to say, "Mongolism can usually be detected by sampling the amniotic fluid so that an abortion can be performed if the fetus is affected."

     Why would doctors skip to an abortion, when the development of a baby with a sweet disposition could be helped by the Vojta method, used, not only in the Czech Republic, but also in Germany, Italy, Norway, Poland, Romania, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, India, Mexico, Chile, Colombia, Peru, and Syria?

     A Vojta therapist at the Jubilee Mission Medical College and Research Institute in Thrissur, India,
suggests the therapy is not widely used, because there is no profit payoff. Once parents are trained, they perform the pressure therapy regularly at home with no equipment or drugs. Perhaps, there also is another answer. As in the case of blue light phototherapy found to destroy the superbugs that resist the antibiotics used to kill staph infections, Western doctors discounted research on the Vojta method conducted in a country behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War (See the earlier post, "Medical Profession Suffers from International Conflict.")

     Since the successful reduction of motor problems depends on how early the Vojta treatment begins and how efficiently it is applied, there should be no delay in trying this therapy in every country. After undergoing treatment before a baby turns 1 year old, although there is no cure for the underlying medical defects, speech problems and a delay in crawling and walking can be overcome. Most Vojta-treated children can learn to speak and walk.

   

UN Secretary-General Nominee

Although seven of the 13 candidates for UN Secretary-General were women, Security Council members recommended the General Assembly elect Antonio Guterres, Portugal's former prime minister and a devout Catholic, for the position (See the earlier blog post, "Front-Runners for UN Secretary-General.").

     Guterres served as the UN's High Commissioner of Refugees from June, 2005 to December, 2015. In his campaign-like speech to the General Assembly, he said the UN is "the best place to address the root cause of human suffering." Should he assume the five-year term of Secretary-General on January 1, 2017, he will take on the difficult task of uniting members, including Russia, to end human suffering in Syria.

Humor Paves the Way for Refugees

     Transplanted from Syria to Germany, Firas Alshater is a humorous YouTube sensation who has attracted about 2.5 million views. Standing blindfolded on a Berlin street corner, it took an hour and a half for a German to respond to his sign asking for a hug. No worries. He said integration will work; it just takes a bit more time.

     Actually, Firas explained that you can teach yourself to hate anything, even an adorable kitty.

     He showed a dog and cat who had a language problem. When the dog wagged its tail, the cat thought it wanted to fight. When the cat purred, the dog expected a fight.

     On the other hand, Firas showed how a heavily tattooed, right wing protester couldn't help but shake hands with a cute refugee baby in Dresden.

     In Syria, Firas Alshater made films unless, as he reports, he was in prison for making films. Hounded by the Assad regime and Isis, he moved to Germany to work for the Filmbit production company two and a half years ago and decided to stay where he was welcome.

   

   

   

Nuclear Straight Talk

We talk casually about nuking our lunches until the remains of a bird or cat are found in a microwave oven. However small the amount, until the lingering radiation from the 2011 meltdown of three nuclear reactors at the Fukushima plant in Japan was measured on the West Coast of the United States in 2015, proponents lauded energy from nuclear power plants as clean compared to that from fossil fuels.

     Ever since the first atomic bombs killed over 100,000 almost instantly and another 90,000 to 140,000 from radiation in Japan seventy years ago, world leaders have both worked to eliminate death and destruction from atomic and hydrogen bombs and worked to acquire these weapons. While it is tempting to walk away from exasperating talks with an Iran or North Korea, the need to stave off a nuclear attack or Chernobyl-type accident demands persistence at the negotiating table.

     The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, signed by Iran, five permanent members of the UN's Security Council, and Germany on July 14, 2015, aims to prevent Iran from enriching uranium at Natanz and from developing a bomb at its nuclear facility at Qom. The unanimous UN Security Council approval of sanctions on Kim Jong-un's North Korea on March 2, 2016 were designed to cut off financing for Pyongyang's nuclear and missile program. Yet "artificial seismic waves" detected at North Korea's Punggye-ri atomic test site caused a 5.0 magnitude earthquake on September 9, 2016. , Despite past cyber attacks that have caused North Korea's missile launch software to fail, in March, 2017, the country successfully launched four missiles that threatened Japan and claimed it had the west coast of the United States in its sights. In July, 2017, North Korea launched a long-range missile that made good on its claim. In addition to increasing the range of its weapon-carrying missiles, North Korea is working on mobile and submarine launchers that make it more difficult to detect pending missile tests/attacks.

      It might be wise to monitor travel from Iran to North Korea and back to make sure Iran is not using North Korea as a proxy to get around its agreement to discontinue its nuclear program. After all, Iran financed the transfer of North Korean nuclear technology to al-Kibar, Syria, where an Israeli air strike attacked Syria's nuclear reactor in September, 2007.

     At the website nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap, students can select target cities and see the widespread effect, in terms of casualties and radioactive fallout, of various atomic and nuclear weapons.

     In an article in the Novembver, 2015 issue of the alumni magazine of American University in Washington, DC, Koko Kondo, an atomic bomb survivor known as a hibakusha in Japanese, described the human suffering caused by the first mid-air detonation of an atomic bomb. With nine nuclear states (USA, UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, Russia, North Korea, Israel) and the forty countries that have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and have the capability to develop nuclear weapons, Kondo knows how important it is to abolish all nuclear weapons.

     When President Obama came to Hiroshina on May 27, 2016, he laid a wreath at the Peace Memorial and said, "the voices of hibakusha will no longer be with us to bear witness....But memory...fuels our moral imagination. It allows us to change."

     Kondo's memory of the August, 1945 attack starts with seeing a blueish-white flash and the collapse of a building on top of her. There were fires everywhere. People were staggering around holding fists full of charred skin, and their hair was standing straight up. The eyeballs of those looking at the sky when the bomb detonated melted.

     Speaking at the memorial service in Hiroshima's Peace Park on August 6, 2015, the mayor urged, "People of the world...contemplate the nuclear problem as your own."

All I Want for Christmas Is Seeds

Who knew elves occasionally take a break from making toys to store seeds in Santa's warehouse. Although many put Syria on their naughty lists, in October, 2015 the Svalbard global seed vault half way between the north pole and Norway responded to an urgent request from the International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (Icarda) and sent the 128 crates of wheat, barley lentil, chickpea, fava bean, pea, and legume seeds Syria needed.

     After seeds for another 70,000 crops were added to the Global Seed Vault in 2018, Svalbard now stores 1,059,646 seeds. 

     Svalbard, known as the "Noah's Ark of seeds," is just one of the storehouses for the diversity of seeds needed to grow fruits, vegetables, and grains; the collections of plants, like apples and grapes, that are not cultivated from seeds; and even the genetic material essential to maintain the bees that pollinate many crops.

     Individual farmers also are essential in the process of ensuring a lasting food supply. On one of his "Parts Unknown" TV programs, David Bourdain found restaurant owners in the US South have been searching for the seeds that grew foods popular before the US Civil War. They located seeds that had come down through the families of former slaves, when war wiped out the seeds held by plantation owners. When kids start collecting and drying seeds for diverse crops, they also will be getting involved in the vital task of protecting the world's food supply.

 Why is the world's food supply in danger? There are many reasons:

• Wars destroy farms. Research stations in Lebanon and Morocco are working to produce seeds and saplings to resupply Syria's farmers.
• Globalization of agriculture has concentrated seed production in companies that abandon many plant varieties in order to produce uniform, high-yield varieties. (See the earlier post, "World (Food) Expo. Hybrid Crops & New Farming Practices.")
• Pests and diseases can wipe out crops. (See the earlier post, "The Bees and the Birds.")
• Global warming has reduced the area suitable for farming. (See the earlier post, "Coffee Prices Going Up; Allowances Going Down?")
• Farmers have moved to urban areas to find work.
• Without a market, farmers have stopped growing foods that have gone out of favor when diets shifted to wheat, rice, potatoes, maize, soybeans, and palm oil.
• Deforestation has removed forests where plants thrive and evolve.

Kids used to get oranges and apples in their Christmas stockings. To be sure these fruits continue to exist, the world is counting on Santa to bring these goodies along with toys and candy.

What Moscow Could Learn from History

After college, a friend of mine, who had studied the Russian language, traveled to Moscow. When she visited again fifty years later, she raved about the changes and couldn't wait to show me photos of modern life there. What seems to be happening in Russia today is a grim throwback to yesteryear from which students who wonder why they should study history, as well as world leaders, can learn.

     Russian President, Vladimir Putin, and his oligarchs, who have accumulated great wealth, are a new monarchy that thrives on corruption. Rather than recognize how corruption undermines public support for a government, as China has by prosecuting officials who use their positions for private gain, Moscow has revived a climate of fear and terror to keep its population in check. Dare to confront government lies, as Anna Politkovskaya and Boris Nemtsov did, and you are assassinated. Run Open Russia, an online video operation that informs scattered dissidents of opposition protests, and you suddenly collapse in your office, possibly from poisoning. Blog criticism of the regime and your younger brother, Oleg Navalny, is sentenced to three and a half years in a Russian penal colony. Return from doing Putin's dirty work fighting in Ukraine, and your weapons are confiscated at the border. How long can Moscow keep a lid on a public upheaval? Nicholas II thought, forever.

     By just looking at a map, a young student would expect the vast expanse of Russia to be an economic power house compared to the islands of Japan. Instead, falling oil prices have exposed Russia's less diversified economy which contracted 3.7% in 2015. Oil prices that were expected to improve after an OPEC meeting failed to materialize and remain below $50 a barrel in 2017. When countries, such as Russia and North Korea, focus exclusively on the military, space, and cyber technology, the rest of the economy suffers. Destroy their military and what would they have left to make them a great power? Once Japan and Germany were defeated in World War II, these countries did not make this mistake.

    With nationalism pinned to advanced military weaponry, Moscow has flexed its non-economic strength and expansionary vision in Georgia, Ukraine and now Syria. TIME magazine in October, 2016 recalled the 2013 manifesto of the chief of the Russian general staff, Valery Gerasimov, who wrote, "A perfectly thriving state can, in a matter of months and even days, be transformed into an arena of fierce armed conflict through political, economic, informational, humanitarian and other nonmilitary measures applied in coordination with the protest potential of the population." Apparently Putin assumes such attacks can be directed only from Russia rather than toward Russia as well. In any case, military demonstrations of power and cyber attacks do nothing to correct Moscow's biggest problem, a failing economy. Sanctions imposed on Russia after its Crimea takeover and low oil prices continue.

     Migrants have fled Syria the way Russians abandoned ground when Napoleon's army marched on Moscow in 1812. To the victor will belong a shell of Syria or the realization that two hundred years later a country's power rests, not only on military strength, but on a strong diversified economy and an ability to negotiate a just and lasting peace in the world.

      To this latter end,  U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Putin agreed to meet at the UN on September 28, 2015. Putin expressed a willingness to discuss a joint effort to remove the threat of ISIS in Syria but then sent fighter planes to prop up Syria's regime by bombing rebels attacking a government that has killed, rather than listened to, protesters. However, once Putin determined ISIS had brought down Russian Flight 9268 over the Sinai peninsula in October, 2015, he pivoted to join the US and France to launch a major attack on terrorist forces. However, Moscow again returned to military support for the Syrian government. In August, 2016, Tehran showed its displeasure, when Moscow bragged about using bases in Iran to bomb Syria, by canceling an agreement permitting such raids. After Russia destroyed a convoy carrying supplies to Syrians during a failed ceasefire, the US broke off talks with Moscow regarding Syria.

   

Answers to post about super heroes in certain countries: A-7, B-9, C-1, D-6, E-8, F-2, G-5, H-10, I-3, J-4.

   

Australian Report Links Indonesian Pilots to Islamic Militants

A recent Australian report about Indonesian pilots with ISIS ties raises questions about a possible relationship to the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in March, 2014.
(See earlier post, "Who Needs International Expertise?")

     According to the Australian report, Ridwan Agustin was a proud Indonesian pilot who flew AirAsia flights to Hong Kong and Singapore prior to September, 2014. Thereafter, he changed his name to Ridwan Ahmad Indonesty and began expressing support for ISIS. AirAsia stated the company no longer employed Ridwan Agustin and his wife, Diah Suci Wulandari, a flight attendant, but refused to provide details of the flight routes they flew.

      By March, 2015, the Australian Federal Police reported Ridwan listed his location as Raqqa, Syria. Since 2012, an estimated 500 people have traveled from Indonesia to the Middle East, including Iraq and Syria, to join terrorist groups estimated to now total 800 ISIS radicals in Indonesia. A weekly report for March 3-10, 2015 from the National Counter Terrorism Center mentioned Malaysians and Indonesians had formed a joint weapons training unit, Majmu'ah al'Arkhabiliy, commanded by ISIS in Raqqa, Syria.

     Access to and knowledge of aviation security and safety makes radicalized pilots a serious threat. Some 300 pilots, flight attendants, flight instructors, radar and air traffic controllers, and ground crew from Indonesia, Australia, Malaysia, Switzerland, Germany, France, the Middle East, UK, and USA exchange information on Instagram and Facebook.

     There are five known ISIS recruiting centers in Indonesia, one of which was responsible for killing 202 people in the 2002 Bali bombing. Another attack in Bali occurred in 2005. Reports are pending for a crash by AirAsia Airbus 320 en route to Singapore that killed 155 plus the crew in December, 2014 and for an Indonesian military airplane crash in July, 2015 that killed at least 135.

     An Indonesian military-trained pilot, Tommy Hendratno (also known as Tomi Aby Alfatih), who had known connections to Ridwan Agustin and who expressed concern for the plight of Muslims and support for ISIS, flew private charter and commercial flights to Bali, Malaysia, and Dubai for Premiair before he quit the company on June 1, 2015. He had attended three training sessions (the last one in February, 2015) in the US at Flight Safety International in St. Louis, Missouri.