Grubby kids and tall mud walls...

11 23 11

I was at COP Kandalay for the past 4 days. It felt great to get back to Pasab and have a shower...5 days without bathing was a bit much...on the other hand it is a 'dry heat' and I do not think I smelled any worse than anyone else. I stayed in a tent with my 'bodyguard', three members of the military's CA (Civilian Affairs team), and an Air Force dog handler and his dog. It was an interesting mixture. We went on several patrols through and around the town of Kandalay. Narrow roads with sewage running through the center ditch surrounded by tall mud/straw walls...most of them at least 10' high. We could tell that we were safe because the kids came out in droves and asked for pens or candy ("Chocolat Nishta" means that I am out of stuff to give away, especially candy.) We are kind of the roving 'trick or treat' patrol for them. The outfits were cute and the girls wore much nicer stuff, for the most part, than the boys. Lisa would look great in one of the colorful outfits. "Ma noom James dai' (My name is James) is one of the answers I had for their questions...I do stand out with my beard and digital patterned uniform parts. And I did feel like boiling my hands when I returned to the FOB...the hands asking and grabbing candy and pens weren't the cleanest...Weird stuff, we started to give out candy in one alley and the kids were handing us what we found out were non-functional fuses (detonators)...Yikes, weird kind of stuff to be finding in your backyard. I helped the military by telling them how to kill trees with Roundup, girding and blowing them up. The Taliban uses trees as cover for organizing attacks and denying them cover is an important order of business. I wrote the Stihl company for a really tough chainsaw and got turned down...I think I'll write again...Think of a chainsaw as a 'tool of war'...and the ad with a chainsaw lined up with all of the weapons being used here...a bizarre thought. "Sthil, helping to eliminate the Taliban, one tree at a time". Maybe a second appeal will help.

I am still doing well, but missing the traditional Thanksgiving feast with the Ebeling clan! I'm pretty sure the food at the DFAC will be good, but not the same as home.

Love, -Jim-

11 27 A Variety of Projects

Well, they have certainly started to use me for a variety of projects. I went to the COP at Now Ruzi with Wilson and MJR Reyes to inspect and evaluate the entrance for the Pashmul Canal. Remember that the canal is named for the town at its terminus not its beginning. We were gone for 2 and a half days. The COP was by far the nicest I've been to, the soldiers there were polite and in awesome shape. The food was as good or better than that of Pasab, the cook really tried to make stuff that we would enjoy eating. The beef stew we had last night was as good as I could make. The only complaint that the Major and I had was the lack of fresh fruit. Anyway, I have to step back a bit. I forgot about the visit to the 'peanut factory'. Prior to leaving for the Now Ruzi mission I was asked to accompany the CA (Civil Affairs) team to the location of a peanut processing facility. The facility was situated on about 6 acres of land and consisted of 4 completely empty concrete and steel buildings about 75' x 200'. Our mission was to evaluate the site for potential for future manufacturing businesses. One we are considering is an unfired clay brick factory. MGR Freeburger gathered a soil sample from just outside the compound and tested it (sedimentation test... fill a container about halfway with soil and the rest of the way with water and shake... it will settle into strata that tell you what the solids in the soil are... rocks, sand, clay, silt... etc)… the soil there is around 75% clay and almost too rich for bricks to dry quickly and with that much clay they may shrink too much. There is also the possibility of a sewing factory and a poultry production facility. The buildings were stripped, but serviceable and clean... the site entrance had a small contingent of ANP posted there.

Back to Now Ruzi...We took a long walk...more of a bushwhack through farm fields, orchards and scrubland. Over walls, hopping irrigation ditches, walking under tree branches and all kinds of stuff. It was great. We finally arrived at the Argandab River near to where we were going to meet an Afghan engineer. We'd initially talked to him at the COP and we finally spotted him...unfortunately for us he was on the other side of the canal inlet. The entire patrol (consisting of 15 US Soldiers and 12, or so ANA, plus me waded across to the canal entrance. It was about 15' across and got to just over 2' deep...not bad, but everyone had to walk back with wet feet. Up until now the canal was controlled by the locals, under the direction of the local 'murab' (water control official) would block or unblock the canal inlet with rocks and gravel depending upon the need downstream. The engineer wants to use US funds to put in walls on either side of the canal entrance for 100 meters and some kind of lock system to control the water. Most of the construction would be 'gabions' which are rock filled cages of fence material...you see them in the US as retaining walls along highways and waterways. I wasn't impressed with his knowledge (or lack thereof) about water flow rates, peak water heights, soil shear and stuff like that. What will really tick me off if it is another one of those multi hundreds of thousands of dollars projects that wind up making the rich richer here. I've more than paid for my trip by going over really terrible plans from the local engineering companies and telling the military 'check writers' exactly what they are getting for their money. I mean the plans are so bad that I wouldn't have given a 9th grader in my drafting classes a "70" on them and the budgets are fictitious...$11,500 to empty the dump trucks, and the same to fill them...and the same to drive them.

I spent the afternoon today chasing around the materials and tools to make the holes in the walls of the NGO Vocational Training Center. We think we have it together to start soon. I also got grabbed by another Major who is interested in 'powering up' two of the local villages with solar electricity. This promises to be a big and productive project!

More on these and other projects as they develop. Love, -Jim-

Handing out Birthing Kits

11 16 11 Hi All;

Some of you have asked about getting more pictures of the people
receiving the birthing kits. The following are more pictures of
women in the Dasht Camps receiving medical exams and birthing kit
stuff. There are a mixture of nomads that have been resettled and
displaced persons. Remember these camps have been in place for
around 10 years and had a peak population of around 25,000 people.
The 5,000 that are left are the ones that couldn't 'get out' one
way or another. I compare them to the people in the US that were
still living in the government provided RV's three years after
Hurricane Katrina. The Nomadic people typically have dark
clothing...more likely than not the other people are people that
were displaced during the Soviet Occupation from this region and
then tried to reintegrate and had been gone so long that they were
not accepted anywhere else but the Dasht Camps. The women who are
not nomads typically try to keep their faces covered. The covering
of faces is not an imposed punishment in a male dominated society, but rather
a cultural habit developed over hundreds of years. I
suspect/theorize that it is a result of the many invasions that
have happened over thousands of years. The perspective is
different here...in the US you can look at the result of a 'melting
pot' in the faces of the people that have settled our
country...tongue-in-cheek people that have fled or been chased out
of their countries of origin...here you see the ethnic blending in
physical features that result from the blending of genetic material
from invaders from all over the world.

11 20 11 Hi All;

Pardon the typos...I'm on a computer at an MWR facility on a COP about 10 clicks (Kilometers) away from the FOB. THe keyboard is 'sticky'. This is my second mission to a COP and so far they are kind of like a really nasty boy scout camp with guns and barbed wire added in. The people are great, but the toilets need to be wiped down completely before using them. Only one or two choices of main dish and a couple of sides at any given meal and a folding cot to sleep on. It is much quieter with only the sound of generators and cooling systems running 24/7...compared to idling vehicles, helicopters and drone planes which run constantly at FOB Pasab.
We arrived after dark last night and got the 30 second tour. I did manage to find the MWR Phone CHU and talked to Krista, Lisa and Fred. My job is still mainly doing long term suggested solutions for small and big problems, but my reputation for thinking outside of the box is getting me some really odd problems to work on. Yesterday, before I left I had to design the steel supports for three openings in a double brick wall for an NGO (non-governmental organization) office and teaching area in the bazaar just off of the FOB. I will also be teaching a class on how to build masonry heaters there to 10 locals + military and then a class on manual water pumping. THere is also a power system for the Pasab Clinic and water purification system for the same. The weirdest question came from the leaders at the COP I'm at right now. I have to help remove a forest that the Taliban is using to stage bad stuff against the locals and military. Selective removal of trees...this will involve everything from finding suitable chainsaws with carbide blades (the tree is something like our 'ironwood' or lignum vitae) to devising tree removing shaped charges (explosives for a singular purpose...sounds like fun to me!) to girding the trees to finding a non-pervasive, non-persistent poison to be injected or sprayed onto the trees. I'm also traveling to visit check cams for flood mitigation and inspecting canal inlets. It is a wild ride with a lot fo hurry up and wait...we waited for 3 hours last night for our mission to drive off base for a 45 minute ride to the COP...but that is everything here anyway. My health and spirits are good. I did have a 'loud discussion' with one of my team members about his DILIGAF (Do I Look Like I Give A F@#$) attitude. It keeps getting him into trouble with the higher ups and with his personal life...it was a kind-of 'dad' or 'grandpa' discussion ...he's just 21 and I wanted to let him know, in a gentle (okay , not so gentle) manner that it would chase him for the rest of his life and block roads to success if he practiced it long and hard enough to make it a habit...maybe it made a dent...maybe not...

I will go from this COP back to Pasab for a day (Thanksgiving!) and then on to another COP with an experimental training farm and get to play there for a couple of days...farming information and irrigation/canal/flood inspection and recommendations, but sadly no explosives..

Have a great day! Love, -Jim-

The pictures

Nov 12 Hi All;

I think this is my Blog #15...I lose track and sometimes add
supplements to other entries. My goal was to have an average of 1
entry every two days...more or less. The ZDEC (correction to the
name: it is the Zhari DAIL Extension Center...DAIL stands for
Department of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock)...okay, so I
was close. is undergoing lots of changes. It has been painted, the
gate repaired and reinstalled (it still isn't pretty), roadways
marked out with limed lines, pill boxes on the roof finished and
painted. The area immediately in front of the center has been
graded and we installed around 50 4' x 4" fence posts to mark off
the children's playground. It was a fun trip to get the fence
posts into position. I walked around with SPC David M and got the
measurements for the depth of water in the well and for the
location of the planter boxes and then helped a tiny bit on putting
the posts into place. Each post was put into a hole drilled with
an auger attachment on a bobcat machine. We hired 4 local kids for between $3 and
$7 to dig the 'moon dust' (the soil gets really light and fluffy
because of how it is comprised and how dry it is...you can
literally step into 6" of dust if it has been mixed around enough)
and rocks out of the holes...they were young teenagers similar to
the kids I hire at home with similar varying work ethics...pretty
funny to watch the cultural similarities.

The playground equipment is made in the same facility that I have
been making the rocket stoves, pump parts and heater parts in... It
is a metal fabrication facility attached to one of the motor pools.
One of the guys there is the brother-in-law of one of my former
student teachers and the other is a neighbor from Rodman, NY. It
is, indeed, a small world! The playground is getting two merry go
rounds, two seesaws and two swing sets. The spare paint is going
to be given to the kids for the area to paint the stuff any way
they want to...it should be pretty colorful when they are done.

I designed the power system for the 4 CHU's that are being placed
there for the permanent ANP staff that guards the Ag Center. SPC
David W. and I got all of the pipe and made the connectors to hook
up one of my deep well hand pumps installed on one of the two wells
at the Center. We made the 10" well cap a couple of days ago.
There aren't any pipe connections we could get easily...so...we
found 1" schedule 80 pvc pipe and some 1 1/4" schedule 20 pipe
that the schedule 80 just fit into and made up our own connectors.
This involved going to the SeaBees and several other locations on
base. We've been trading surplus root beer delivered to our office
for the favors...add some 'gorilla glue' and you have a permanent
connection for 60 or 70 feet of well pipe. I will take pictures.

Speaking of pictures...I'm including a few of the women that are
getting the birthing kits.

For those of you that want to see more look up "Operation Spartan Stork"
on its Facebook account. You will see a lot of pictures, including
yours truly
packing some birthing kits.

The attached pictures are as follows:
5. CPT Kim with women giving out birthing kits
4. Cute Afghan kid at birthing kit give away
3. Old (probably 40 years old) woman at birthing kit give away (looking for other stuff...probably)
2. Nomadic pregnant woman getting an exam and birthing kit...nomads do not cover their faces
1. A meeting at the ZDEC that I attended (I only viewed the thumbnail...I could be in the back row of floor cushions)

Have a great day! Love, -Jim-