Fiberglass Issues

The rudder before ripping it apart. Note the dry fiberglass that was never saturated when the repair was made. The rotted plywood and empty space I discovered as I ground down the area around the steel plate weren't too reassuring either. 

After grinding. The areas I'm worried about are the yellowish patches at the edges of the rudder holes and particularly the spot next to the stringer on the left.

Close up of the stringer.

Cracks on the bottom, directly underneath the third picture. The series of cracks are about eight or ten inches long. 

March!

I know I said my next post was going to be the evolution of a school - and I'm going to get to it, don't worry - but the beginning of my last month in Afghanistan inspired me towards a different topic.

For as ready as I am to leave this place and move on to something new, it has been strange how bittersweet it's starting to feel around here. There are more than enough frustrations to go around, but at the same time, I've felt a growing appreciation over the past week for how fortunate I was to spend a year here. I've spent a fair amount of time talking about how safe it is and how we don't wear body armor, but a realization yesterday made it clear just how different this place really is.

There is a group of support bases that are scattered around the perimeter of the Middle East, in places like Qatar, the UAE, Kuwait, and Kyrgyzstan. None of those bases face any significant threats, and life there, by some standards, is quite good. A few of them serve rationed amounts of alcohol. Many have pools, theaters, and dormitories. However, I don't know of any cases where people are free to go out and spend time in the local communities. I've heard of guided trips into Dubai and Kuwait City and Bishkek, but to the best of my knowledge, nobody has the freedom to leave after work and go shopping, or to leave the office for lunch and eat at a restaurant off base.

And yet somehow, in the middle of Afghanistan, that is exactly what I have been able to do for the past year, at least during the time I have spent in the Valley rather than down at Bagram. We drive beat up Toyota Land Cruisers to and from the office each day, and we wander through fields and villages to check on project sites. For places off the beaten path, we take contracted Afghan guards and Afghan National Police officers with us, more for community relations than security. This astounds me as much now as it did a year and a half ago when I first talked to the guy who I eventually replaced in this job. I have my own room, a bathroom shared with one other person, wireless internet, and the ability to call home for less than two cents a minute, essentially whenever I want. And they call this a deployment!

Again, that's not to say I'm not ready to go home. Locals can be ungrateful, political officials can be incompetent and corrupt, and my patience for most contractors is pretty much gone. Don't even get me started on the Army. I don't know what's going to happen to this country over the long term, and honestly, it could probably go either way. In the short term though, this team has made a significant difference in this province over the past year. In that spirit, I wanted to show some highlights that I may not have covered in previous posts.

This is more of a "Holy shit!" kind of highlight. The flood did a tremendous amount of damage and killed at least 25 people, and it was like nothing I've ever seen before. For a lot of people on the team, myself included, I suspect the flood was the defining event of the entire year. About fifteen seconds after I took this picture, the footbridge washed away. Ten minutes earlier, the river was about ten feet lower.



This is the Bazarak Girls' School, which was built mostly by the previous team. We completed the building and had the grand-opening in May, and to the best of our knowledge kids have been going to school there ever since. Most likely, boys and girls both go to school there at different times of the day, but still, hundreds of local girls now have a nice school building. Six more identical schools should be done in May of this year. 

There is one caveat for this one, which is that over the summer an irate mullah threw a small bomb into the yard in the middle of the night and blew out half of the windows. Nobody was hurt, we fixed it, and he's in jail in Kabul, so it all worked out in the end.

This is the Paryan District Center, a brand new administrative building for the most remote district in the province. The district center is located about 62 miles into the mountains, and about 12 miles from Anjuman Pass, a 14,000 foot pass that leads to Badakhshan, the northeastern-most province in Afghanistan. I saw the vast majority of Panjshir but never quite made it to the pass. We got within about eight miles, and although we probably could have made it, the road where we were forced to stop was almost exactly as wide as our Land Cruisers. There was already one old bulldozer that had rolled into the river at that point, and we didn't feel like adding any of our vehicles.



This is one of my favorite pictures from the whole year. It was probably the best hike I've ever been on. It's hard to imagine anything that's going to compare to it.

More Thoughts

Yesterday I covered the big-picture issues that make it hard to judge how much we've really accomplished, and whether the rather substantial achievements of this PRT in particular are sustainable and significant in the long-term view of this country.

This post is the short-term, day-to-day view, and it's probably going to seem pessimistic (again). The last two days have been especially frustrating, and have highlighted the three primary reasons I'm counting down the days until I get on a plane and go home. Here they are:

1.) "You promised."

2.) "That's not good enough."

3.) Massive, staggering, incomprehensible ingratitude.

Everywhere we go, we're told that we have promised things to people. At first I thought this might have been a translation issue, and that "you promised..." was a convenient way of expressing a possibility. However, after a year of hearing it, and several conversations with interpreters to clarify the fact that yes, they do mean to say that we have supposedly made promises, it has become clear that it is more than a figure of speech.

I have some degree of sympathy for this one, because I understand that we're Americans, and Americans are supposed to have money and resources. There's no way for most of the local population to have any grasp of the long, slow, restrictive, and inefficient process required for us to get projects funded, so I can easily understand excessively high expectations about what we can actually accomplish. Still, being told that we have promised to build projects, provide money, or give out food (to name a few) has gotten quite old. Without exaggerating, I can comfortably say that we hear about the promises we have supposedly made during at least 75% of the meetings we have with local villagers or government officials.

We make a point of never promising anything, to avoid exactly this type of problem. Unfortunately, we have discovered that simply showing up on a site or having a discussion with a villager constitutes a promise. The most extreme example of this that I have encountered occurred yesterday. At a site with a significant amount of flood damage, several villagers were demanding assistance in building new walls and digging out a riverbed. At one point, the village elder leading the discussion pulled out a sheet of paper, signed by all the locals, the district manager, and the governor. It also had two notes written in English, both from the PRT commander. The first said, in essence, "Please come back after November, when we will find out if any funding is available". The second, dated November 28th, 2007, said that no money was available, and that the PRT could not support the requested projects. You may have guessed already where this is going. The man pointed at these notes from the commander and emphatically told our interpreter, "You promised to build this for us!"

Obviously the man doesn't read or speak English, but I know that those notes were explained when they were written, signed, and handed to him. The fact of the matter is that our presence on a site is seen as a promise by many people around here, even if we specifically and clearly explain or document the fact that we cannot and do not promise to be able to help. It's understandable (to a certain extent) given the high expectations people have about our ability to help. Still, it gets old after a while.

"That's not good enough" is a harder issue for me to rationalize. Token Crazy Guy was an example, since the basic idea is that if we can't do everything they ask for, we might as well not do anything at all. I ran into this again today. We have a small project getting ready to start that will repair a health clinic. The doctor in charge of the clinic changed his mind about what he wanted done, but he never told us that, so we signed a contract for a bunch of work that he no longer claims to need. We got his new priorities, negotiated with the contractor to complete as much as possible with the fixed amount of money in the contract, and thought we were ready to start work. Instead, the doctor told us that if we can't build everything he wants, we shouldn't do any of it. I find this absolutely incomprehensible, but it's a common enough attitude around here that I'm writing a blog post about it. To me, it's a simple equation: Something is better than nothing, even if it doesn't amount to perfection.

Massive ingratitude is the third issue, and the hardest for me to deal with. It's a more extreme version of "That's not good enough", but tends to be more malicious. Completing the trifecta, I also ran into this today. During the summer we completed a building that serves as a printing press. We renovated the building, furnished it with a printing press and computers, and provided maintenance and training for the equipment operators. The Director of Communications has not shown a great deal of competence or motivation, but he occasionally produces decent newspapers for distribution around the province.

Yesterday, a beam came loose in the roof of the building and knocked a piece of suspended ceiling down inside the building. Nobody was hurt, and even if somebody had been standing underneath it when it happened, nobody would have been hurt. It was an unfortunate accident that caused minor damage, which will probably be fixed in a few hours by the contractor, since the building is still under warranty.

Rather than finding the PRT and telling us about it, the Director of Communications decided to take a picture, publish it in the most recent newspaper (possibly the fastest issue ever to roll off the presses, by the way), and include a story highlighting the fact that the PRT was responsible for this catastrophe. Apparently for lack of other subject matter, he also decided to include a half-page picture of himself in another section of this particular issue.

Let me rephrase this situation in the terms that I see it in: The PRT (and more generally, the United States) provided all of the tools necessary for this man to do his job, including the building, the printing equipment, and the training to operate the equipment. When one minor event occurred, this man then used the tools we provided for him, and proceeded to publicize a story about our supposed failures and shortcomings. I have seen villagers reject offers for help, I have seen them accuse us of not doing anything for them, and I have been told regularly that what we are doing is not nearly enough. Today though, the Director of Communications won the prize.

He is not representative of most of the local government or most of the local population. Most people want more, but they also appreciate whatever help we can provide. A lack of gratitude goes hand-in-hand with aid work, but it is an issue that has worn on me the longer I have stayed here. The past two days have been unique; I don't generally encounter so many negative issues all at once. It's also possible at this point that my threshold for these sorts of things is critically low. I do know that a year is definitely enough; many people on the team feel the same way, and we saw the same issues with the previous team as they got ready to leave last year. The new team will arrive soon with a fresh perspective, and hopefully they will continue the progress we have been able to make this year.

My next post will be more upbeat, don't worry. It may take another week, but I'm going to try to document the progression of a new school building, as a sort of construction success story. Keep nagging me about it, because if it takes any more than a week to write the next post, it may never get done, since at that point our replacements should be almost here. That, by the way, is the best news I've heard all year.

Nearing The End

I'm getting closer to the end of my tour here, and at this point I wanted to provide a little feedback and a few of my thoughts about what I've seen and what I feel like we accomplished. There seems to be a common misconception out there - fed largely by what I admit is growing and often vocal cynicism on my part - that I'm bitter and upset about being here, and that I don't feel like we've accomplished anything. For the record, that is not true. Yes, I tend to be cynical, and yes, there are days that make you wonder what the point of it all actually is, but overall I do feel like this PRT has been successful, and has contributed to making a difference around here. I say contributed because the reality is that reconstruction and development are long-term goals (as in multi-decade), so seeing the process in a year-long slice doesn't do justice to what still needs to happen for long-term success.

Just from a numbers standpoint, the Panjshir PRT has more than tripled the amount of funded projects that have been approved for 2008. For 2006 and 2007, it was pretty much a linear progression in the amount of funding for new projects. So far in 2008, we have three times as much as last year, which includes two major roads, plus several million more in projects that haven't been approved yet. Numbers don't tell the whole story, but it's a start.

We have six large schools nearing completion that will be done shortly after spring starts, when the weather warms up. We have public health projects all around the valley, including both new construction and renovations or additions to existing clinics. Two new roads will probably start this summer, which will extend the main road (finished last year by USAID) by a total of about forty kilometers. The list goes on, but you get the idea. The next team of engineers will have plenty of work to do.

As an engineer, I've been busy all year. It's extremely satisfying to see a school go from an empty field to a completed building, but it does not necessarily indicate progress. This is what I think frustrates many people, myself included, about the type of work that this team does. Aid work comes in all kinds of different forms, but I suspect that the types that require the longest range of vision are also the types that require the most patience and perspective from the aid workers. At a homeless shelter, you can work one-on-one with those in need, and with luck, you can see improvement: overcoming an addiction or holding a job, for example.

On the level of a PRT, it's extremely difficult to see that sort of impact. We can build and open a girls' school, but it's only a nice looking building until it has qualified teachers to fill it. We can open health clinics in every district in the province, but again, without qualified doctors and nurses, infant mortality isn't going to change. In a sense, we have the easy part. Supervising a contractor and getting a good quality building requires persistence, but it's certainly achievable. Mentoring a national ministry like Public Health or Education requires years of persistence and training. Afghanistan lost a generation to the Russians and the Taliban; it's going to take the better part of a generation to fill that gap.

In the meantime, what happens to the schools and clinics we built? They get used, but there's no structured curriculum, and there may not be teachers with more than a high school education. That's not exactly a foundation for success for the thousands of children whose only hope of doing more than just survive is to get some sort of decent education. The Governor can afford for his children to go to school in Kabul, but it will be years or decades before the central government is able to bring quality educational opportunities to children who don't have the good fortune to be born to the tiny fraction of the population with the means to circumvent the local problems.

What happens when Pakistan disintegrates and the infection of extremists in Afghanistan goes from simmering to boiling? Panjshir is in many ways a model PRT because of the security situation here, and the fact that the local government is capable enough to maintain a safe, poppy-free province. That security is the essential factor in enabling the PRT to successfully complete projects and interact in a positive way with the population. Panjshir may be a model province, but small pockets of security and development don't necessarily represent the direction of the country as a whole.

These types of issues are the reason that I've come to the conclusion that I don't possess the patience to work on an enduring basis in the developing world. Some people do; I would call them saints. Maybe it comes with age, but my ability to deal with the long-term, strategic-level timescales required is just not adequate for me to stay sane around here. Fortunately, in about two weeks, the next team will start to arrive and I will start the process of going home.

Compounding the big-picture type of patience that I don't entirely possess is the fact that I have to deal daily with the Army, an organization that is not designed for the type of work it is currently managing by handling the PRTs. I could go all day on this subject (and someday I probably will), but for now I'll just leave it at the fact that this type of aid work requires a flexible organization capable of adapting to unique and dynamic circumstances. Despite a recent emphasis on "Civil Affairs", the Army is a kinetic organization, fundamentally designed to hunt down and kill people. Most of the time, this doesn't breed the troop mentality, institutional patience, or leadership required for nation-building. In all fairness to the Army, they have been thrust into a role they don't really belong in, which is not a recipe for success.

This probably sounds like exactly like the type of pessimism I've been accused of all year. The fact of the matter is that on a provincial level, this team has been successful. Projects have gotten done, children have been able to go to nicer schools, roads have opened up economic avenues that never existed before. We have made a difference, and I am proud to have been a part of it. On a national level, I don't know what is going to happen. The political environment in the United States and around the world will determine the outcome, and the best I can hope for is that smarter and more patient people than myself will be able to spend the years and decades required to make substantial and lasting improvements to this country.

Run Barefoot!

Yes, you heard me. I haven't posted anything in over a month, and I figured that since one of my more popular posts advocated the merits of abnormally high fecal consumption, I would dive right back into this with another ludicrous idea that will probably make many of you continue to shake your heads and wonder what this country has done to me. After all, who goes to Afghanistan for a year and comes home a barefoot-running organic-food devotee? Me, apparently.

Barefoot is actually a bit of a misnomer, since I haven't gone all out and stripped down to entirely naked soles. The shoes I've been using are called Vibram FiveFingers, which are basically rubber-soled toe socks. Yes, they look goofy, and no, I don't care. If you want more on the shoes, take a look at the Vibram website.

Let me call for a few minutes of patience at this point. Converting people is far too lofty a goal for something like this, so my intention here is to answer the "Why in the hell..." types of questions that generally circulate when I either talk to people about this or when people see me running. I am going to try to keep this brief, though, because among the many things that I am not, both podiatrist and orthopedist rank high on that list. Rather than rehashing the internet research you can do on your own, I'll try to give a brief summary of the aspects of going barefoot that make the most sense to me.

To start with an example: Take off you shoes, jump off the ground, and force yourself to land on your heels. Your inclination is going to be to land on the balls of your feet, because of the vision-blurring jolt you get when you hit the ground on your heels. Now add forward motion. Every running step you take directly onto your heels transfers that jolt through your legs, although you might not notice it because of the big pile of foam Nike has been kind enough to place under your foot. Fortunately, your genes have been kind enough to counter-offer a more sensible (and cheaper) solution: Your arches.

Your arches are big shock absorbers, and running barefoot takes full advantage of that. It took me some getting used to, but after a couple of days of running without conventional shoes, I had adjusted to landing each step on the balls of my feet. The research I found - all online, so not necessarily unbiased, I should add - basically agrees with the fact that you dramatically reduce impact by running on the balls of your feet, even compared to shoes with padded heels (whose reduction of impact force is surprisingly low).

Running barefoot also engages all of the minor muscles throughout your feet and ankles that for most people are probably significantly weakened by the excessive motion control offered by normal shoes. I don't have anything to back this up other than some anecdotal evidence from around here, but I suspect that people who routinely walk or run without shoes, or with shoes that offer minimal support, roll and break their ankles much less frequently than conventionally shod individuals. Seeing the local population here has convinced me of that, because so many people wear sandals or flip-flops all the time (winter included), and yet they can bound up and down loose, rocky hillsides that would snap American ankles like toothpicks.

I could keep going, but I'll spare you all more theorizing on my part and just respond the incredulous questions and comments instead. I've hesitated to write this post for a while, because 99% of the barefoot running I've done has been on a treadmill, and I'd like to withhold judgment until I can get out on some normal roads and trails and up the mileage a little bit. Since that won't happen for a few more months, and since I needed a good catchy post topic, I figured I would jump right into it now.

If my little bit of personal experience isn't enough to convince you of the merits of going barefoot, here's what I consider the most persuasive argument of all: Seven million years of shoeless bipedal evolution, resulting in possibly the most capable endurance-running animal on the planet. I'll take that over Nike any day.

A Christmas Story: Use the Correct Voltage

Sometimes you just have to learn the hard way. Last week I received several packages in the mail, the combined contents of which included enough Christmas decorations to actually put me into the Christmas spirit. I got all excited and put the ornaments on the miniature tree, then took out the strand of lights and wrapped all six feet of it around the eighteen-inch tree.

Then I plugged it in and marveled at how festive my room looked, especially with the small-scale supernova glowing in the corner. It did occur to me that the tree was especially bright, and the bulbs noticeably hot, but I figured that's why you're not supposed to leave Christmas lights plugged in if you're not at home. Even ten minutes after lighting the tree, when the whole strand started to surge in intensity, I figured it was probably the generators putting out a little bit of uneven power. It took about two seconds of flickering for me to get a clue, that perhaps 220 was not the correct voltage.

I suspect the strand burned up about half a second before I managed to unplug it, although by that point it may have been in the terminal phases of burnout and disconnecting the power may have just put it out of its misery.

There are two lessons to learn from this. First, your average 50-bulb strand of colored Christmas lights will last about ten minutes running on a double-dose of voltage. This, in my opinion, is an impressively long time, especially since my other run-ins with the wrong voltage burned out a set of computer speakers and a printer in a combined total of about six seconds. Lesson number two: It is possible to burn out every bulb in a string of lights simultaneously. I wouldn't have suspected this, but then again, I'm not smart enough to avoid making exactly the same mistake three different times. There's also a third lesson here, which is that if you ask an Afghan Dari-English interpreter to buy you a replacement strand of Christmas lights from Kabul, you will get a blank look. I should have expected this too, but it gets back to the whole not smart thing.

The good news is that I was generously given a replacement set of lights before the interpreter could even get back from his weekend in Kabul, so I now have a 100-bulb strand wrapped around the same eighteen inch tree. I had hoped that a good twelve feet of Christmas lights on such a small object would have made up for the overwhelming intensity of doubling the recommended voltage, but no such luck. Still, it's pretty impressive, and my room is once again festive and merry.

Adding to the Christmas spirit is snow. The weather changed a few weeks ago, and we've now had several snow storms. There hasn't really been any significant accumulation by the camp or the office, but the peaks are coated for the winter and the camp has picked up the mentality of a bunch of elementary school kids staring at the clouds praying for snow. Driving around here is bad enough in good weather; if it's actively snowing, we do our best not to leave the camp.



I'll try to be more consistent about writing posts. If you have any suggestions, questions, or just pictures you'd like to see, let me know. Inspiration has been somewhat lacking on my end, so input is definitely welcome.

Keep in touch, and if I don't get back to this in the next eleven days, have a merry Christmas!

God Bless Mexico

No, I am not engaged.

Just thought I would throw that out there, since it seems to have been a popular question since I returned to Seattle from Mexico and since I returned to Afghanistan from Seattle. Mexico was absolutely perfect, Seattle was uncharacteristically sunny, and I had a great time with both Joanna and my family, but alas, no rings.

Mexico was everything I expected and a fair amount more. Most of our time was occupied with either sitting by the pool or sitting on the beach, and my only regret is that we didn't have more time available to sit around and actively do nothing. Believe it or not, after almost exactly two years of being together, the fifteen and a half days of my mid-tour was the longest continuous stretch of time Joanna and I have been able to spend together, and it increased the days we've actually spent in the same time zone by almost a third.

And now here I am, back in my room in Afghanistan, trying to fight the impression that the whole trip was a fleeting daydream that feels like it ended before it even had the chance to start. The good news is that I only have four months to go - maybe slightly less, depending on when our replacements get here - and after eight months (ten, including the two months that Fort Bragg stole from my life), another four really doesn't feel like that long.

Back to the mid-tour...

Among the many differences between the Army and the Air Force, the most recent to strike me is a vastly different approach to safety briefings. Before I was allowed to get on a plane and fly home, I had to attend a "reintegration" briefing, part of which dealt with safety and good decision making. The Air Force is big into safety, but they tend to be kind of diplomatic and even head-in-the-sand about it. Everybody knows people under 21 tend to drink, but I've only ever seen one Air Force safety briefing where a renegade senior airman got on stage and said "I know you're going to drink, so please be careful and don't do anything stupid". Usually it's more of a Don't Drink and Drive speech followed by And If You're Under 21, Just Don't Drink. It's like abstinence-only sex education...everyone knows most everybody is doing it, but they won't really deal with the problem.

Anyway, the Army is different. My alcohol awareness briefing consisted of the caution that when I get home, a six-pack of beer will treat me like a case would have before I deployed. Honest, concise, and true. Well, true for some people. They should have said that two beers with dinner would treat me like four beers would have before I left. Which is to say, I had two beers and a big bloody steak the first night I got home and, as Joanna can attest to, I was feeling pretty good.

Everybody says that you're supposed to come back from R&R motivated and ready to finish out your deployment. Trouble is, everybody is full of crap. I'm back, but I still find myself spending an inordinate amount of time here,



which is in the pool at the hotel in Zihuatanejo.

I've also discovered that a two week vacation apparently won't mellow me out and take the edge off of all the little annoyances that were irritating the hell out of me before I left. I had two blissful weeks without having to think about how obnoxious it is to be stared at by everybody, everywhere you go, all the time, or to have to swerve around people who knowingly refuse to get out of the middle of the road, so they can prove they know you won't run them over, even though it might be really really tempting sometimes. I spent my first seven months trying to rationalize the terrible driving habits and senseless pedestrian habits of the people around here - to include analyzing it from the perspective of exposure to defined traffic laws during early childhood development - and now that I'm back I'm starting to realize that no rationalization is necessary. Some people simply have no sense, and if that means they get clocked in the forehead with a side-view mirror, I'm not going to lose any sleep over it.

Since I've started plunging into cynical ruminations on the nuisances of chaotic Afghan traffic, I'll leave you with this last picture of Joanna and I on the beach. I attribute the smirk on my face to Franco, our charming but somewhat overzealous waiter who was a little too fond of cheesy questions like "How is it, peachy keen or okey dokey?" It was a great afternoon, regardless of the expression on my face, and if anybody needs a vacation, I can't recommend Zihuatanejo highly enough.