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-