I called my brother and it was the best thing I did in a long time. We talked over an hour and I had a chance to catch up on all the good and bad news I missed out on. One of the bad news was that another person I knew from my growing up had killed himself by hanging. It is a growing problem for men of my age in Central and Eastern Europe. I remember, I beat the shit out this guy one day after school, I must've been in 9th grade. I don't know anymore what the squabble was about, but for years after that we would cautiously avoid each other. He managed to open up a pharmacy with his father, but it was losing money and the financial pressures and debt was just too much to handle. There are now at least 8 people I grew up with that took their own life, two of them women. This is becoming a problem of epidemic proportions.