Here are a few of the news stories that have been done since the team got here. They've all been produced by Air Force media sources, so there's a definite institutional bias involved, but there are some good pictures attached to the article and a few short video segments.
http://www.af.mil/news/story.asp?storyID=123064705
http://www.dvidshub.net/?script=video/video_show.php&id=27281
http://www.dvidshub.net/?script=video/video_show.php&id=24767
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Paryan
These pictures are all from our trip to Paryan two weeks ago. It's the most remote district in the province, about eighty kilometers northwest through the valley, and it's a long, bumpy, four-and-a-half-hour ride in a Land Cruiser. This first picture is what I think is one of the most dramatic areas I've seen around here, where the road climbs up the mountain from the river and the valley narrows out and gets extremely steep. They're hard to see, but if you look closely enough at the small plain on the right side of the picture there's a Russian artillery piece laying down and the front end of a truck poking out from behind the hill. The truck has a rack of rocket launchers in the back, although they're not visible in the picture. The road home climbs up the mountain behind the plain with the Russian equipment.
Looking down from nearly the highest stretch of road. I'm not sure exactly how far it is to the river, but I think it's a couple thousand feet.
Donkey traffic jam way the hell up on the mountain. We let them take the outside of the road and passed them against the mountain, since I trust a donkey's footing up there more than a several thousand pound Land Cruiser perched on the edge of a questionable road. We also passed a group of camels, which was somewhat more nerve-racking, since camels are surprisingly huge, and the nomads around here can pack a lot of stuff on top of them - their children included - which makes for a lumbering, unweildy, and kind of unpredictable obstacle. I'll dig up and post a picture of a camel all loaded up; they have to be the goofiest looking animals I've ever seen, but they're kind of stately in a bizarre sort of way. Moving on...
One of our sixteen-room school houses. They're simple, but they're very nice buildings when they're done. The tent in the top right corner of the picture is one of several the locals are using for a classroom until the new building is done.
In a move described by Joanna as a "stupid American thing to do" - I'm not going to lie, she's a little bit right - we paid a guy a dollar to ride his horse around the field. It only had one eye, which I think contributed to it's desire to only turn one direction, but the biggest problem was just getting it to move at all. It was kind of fun, and I'm pretty sure the guy who owned it got a kick out of watching us ride around.
Looking down from nearly the highest stretch of road. I'm not sure exactly how far it is to the river, but I think it's a couple thousand feet.
Donkey traffic jam way the hell up on the mountain. We let them take the outside of the road and passed them against the mountain, since I trust a donkey's footing up there more than a several thousand pound Land Cruiser perched on the edge of a questionable road. We also passed a group of camels, which was somewhat more nerve-racking, since camels are surprisingly huge, and the nomads around here can pack a lot of stuff on top of them - their children included - which makes for a lumbering, unweildy, and kind of unpredictable obstacle. I'll dig up and post a picture of a camel all loaded up; they have to be the goofiest looking animals I've ever seen, but they're kind of stately in a bizarre sort of way. Moving on...
One of our sixteen-room school houses. They're simple, but they're very nice buildings when they're done. The tent in the top right corner of the picture is one of several the locals are using for a classroom until the new building is done.
In a move described by Joanna as a "stupid American thing to do" - I'm not going to lie, she's a little bit right - we paid a guy a dollar to ride his horse around the field. It only had one eye, which I think contributed to it's desire to only turn one direction, but the biggest problem was just getting it to move at all. It was kind of fun, and I'm pretty sure the guy who owned it got a kick out of watching us ride around.
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Answers to Common Questions
I may have described some of the same things in previous e-mails, but I wanted to try to answer some fairly common questions that people occasionally ask, and that I don't think I've ever explained very well.
For the first question, I'll start with the women. In the valley, almost all the women wear burkas when they're out on in public. I don't know how common that is across the entire country - I've heard that Kabul is more progressive and that a lot of women there walk around dressed conservatively (but not in burkas) and that some even drive. That certainly isn't the case here. It's hard to judge age, but I think pretty much every girl beyond the age of about fourteen wears the burka. Every now and then you'll see an old lady without one, but it's fairly uncommon, and they're all elderly enough that they can get away with it.
For the most part, if a group of women is walking down the side of the road and nobody is around, they'll pull the front of the burka back over their head and wear it almost like a cape, so that they can see. If pedestrians or a car are coming, they pull the burka back down and cover up. I can only think of one occasion when I saw someone who apparently just didn't care and stood openly watching us as we drove by. She looked relatively young, and since she was waiting at a bus stop, I got the impression that she wasn't from around here and that she was more curious to see us than she was interested in covering up.
There are a lot of cultural differences that I can accept without a problem, but the treatment of women around here is the one that I think I have the hardest time with. When the women on our team have had the chance to meet with the local women, the reaction from the women about the burka is typically that it's not really an important issue, and that they have bigger things to worry about, particularly health care. I understand that, but as an outsider, the burka is a ubiquitous presence that seems oppressive and degrading. If you can't even go out in public openly without being persecuted for not covering up, something seems seriously wrong.
To go right along with that, the male-dominated nature of this place is apparent every day. Obviously you never see women, and even in people's homes the women are always separated. In five months here I have never spent any time in the company of a local Afghan woman. If they have a role larger than raising children (lots of children), I'm not sure what it is.
One of the most troubling sights I've seen happened a few weeks ago. We had a general who came to visit, so we drove him off the end of the paved road to try to show him why we need funding for new road projects around here. At our turn-around point I ended up standing by the vehicles while the general walked around the village. There was a group of girls standing on the other side of the road, all of whom were probably six or seven years old. They were just standing there quietly watching us - watching the Americans being a common spectator sport around here - when a boy about the same age walked over by himself and started harassing them. He said something that I didn't need an interpreter to understand as "go away", then he hit one of the girls twice. It wasn't a gentle tap. He hit her twice on the back, hard enough to make the hollow thumping sound you hear sometimes when somebody gets hit in the torso. Then he kicked her shoe down the road, which I guess was enough to convince them to leave.
You see kids fight around here occasionally. There are thousands of kids in each village; you're bound to see a scuffle now and then. This was different, and I think the reason why was that the girls just walked away. They didn't cry (including the girl who got hit) and they didn't protest, they just turned around and left. These girls were six years old, and they had already come to terms with the way they were being treated. And the boy seemed to think nothing of it. It's hard to be optimistic that older girls and women are any better off; kids learn about what's acceptable and how to act by watching what goes on around them.
That probably sounds harsh. I'm not accusing Afghan men of being wife-beating mysoginists. It's a different culture, and I'm sure that women are respected in ways that I just don't have way of seeing. I guess it's only an observation, one that I've had a harder time figuring out.
Okay, this has been a lot more serious than I expected, and it's probably kind of a downer. Hopefully the picture will help. We were on our way back from a five hour trip up north and the guy in the car in front of us was handing out stuffed animals and backpacks to pretty much every kid we passed. These girls were adorable, and it was one of the first times I've seen where no other kids were around, since usually if we give things out to girls a group of boys runs up as soon as they realize what's going on. A teddy bear may be pretty inconsequential in the big scheme of things, but its makes ten hours of driving worthwhile to see a group of kids so happy.
For the first question, I'll start with the women. In the valley, almost all the women wear burkas when they're out on in public. I don't know how common that is across the entire country - I've heard that Kabul is more progressive and that a lot of women there walk around dressed conservatively (but not in burkas) and that some even drive. That certainly isn't the case here. It's hard to judge age, but I think pretty much every girl beyond the age of about fourteen wears the burka. Every now and then you'll see an old lady without one, but it's fairly uncommon, and they're all elderly enough that they can get away with it.
For the most part, if a group of women is walking down the side of the road and nobody is around, they'll pull the front of the burka back over their head and wear it almost like a cape, so that they can see. If pedestrians or a car are coming, they pull the burka back down and cover up. I can only think of one occasion when I saw someone who apparently just didn't care and stood openly watching us as we drove by. She looked relatively young, and since she was waiting at a bus stop, I got the impression that she wasn't from around here and that she was more curious to see us than she was interested in covering up.
There are a lot of cultural differences that I can accept without a problem, but the treatment of women around here is the one that I think I have the hardest time with. When the women on our team have had the chance to meet with the local women, the reaction from the women about the burka is typically that it's not really an important issue, and that they have bigger things to worry about, particularly health care. I understand that, but as an outsider, the burka is a ubiquitous presence that seems oppressive and degrading. If you can't even go out in public openly without being persecuted for not covering up, something seems seriously wrong.
To go right along with that, the male-dominated nature of this place is apparent every day. Obviously you never see women, and even in people's homes the women are always separated. In five months here I have never spent any time in the company of a local Afghan woman. If they have a role larger than raising children (lots of children), I'm not sure what it is.
One of the most troubling sights I've seen happened a few weeks ago. We had a general who came to visit, so we drove him off the end of the paved road to try to show him why we need funding for new road projects around here. At our turn-around point I ended up standing by the vehicles while the general walked around the village. There was a group of girls standing on the other side of the road, all of whom were probably six or seven years old. They were just standing there quietly watching us - watching the Americans being a common spectator sport around here - when a boy about the same age walked over by himself and started harassing them. He said something that I didn't need an interpreter to understand as "go away", then he hit one of the girls twice. It wasn't a gentle tap. He hit her twice on the back, hard enough to make the hollow thumping sound you hear sometimes when somebody gets hit in the torso. Then he kicked her shoe down the road, which I guess was enough to convince them to leave.
You see kids fight around here occasionally. There are thousands of kids in each village; you're bound to see a scuffle now and then. This was different, and I think the reason why was that the girls just walked away. They didn't cry (including the girl who got hit) and they didn't protest, they just turned around and left. These girls were six years old, and they had already come to terms with the way they were being treated. And the boy seemed to think nothing of it. It's hard to be optimistic that older girls and women are any better off; kids learn about what's acceptable and how to act by watching what goes on around them.
That probably sounds harsh. I'm not accusing Afghan men of being wife-beating mysoginists. It's a different culture, and I'm sure that women are respected in ways that I just don't have way of seeing. I guess it's only an observation, one that I've had a harder time figuring out.
Okay, this has been a lot more serious than I expected, and it's probably kind of a downer. Hopefully the picture will help. We were on our way back from a five hour trip up north and the guy in the car in front of us was handing out stuffed animals and backpacks to pretty much every kid we passed. These girls were adorable, and it was one of the first times I've seen where no other kids were around, since usually if we give things out to girls a group of boys runs up as soon as they realize what's going on. A teddy bear may be pretty inconsequential in the big scheme of things, but its makes ten hours of driving worthwhile to see a group of kids so happy.
Monday, August 27, 2007
Shutol Flood Assessment
Every few weeks I have the opportunity to go on some sort of hike, either to tag along with our Civil Affairs team as they assess villages or to assist with humanitarian supply drops at schools or clinics. They vary in length and difficulty; some are relatively short and relatively flat, and some, like the one the attached pictures came from, are long and steep.
This particular hike into Shutol was the best that I've been on since I got here, and quite possibly ever in my life. It was the type of experience where I had the profound feeling of being in the middle of something that I would probably never get to do again. I get that feeling on a semi-regular basis around here, but it was particularly strong on this hike.
The intention of the hike was to do a flood damage assessment, since our previous hike into the same area had concluded with the biggest flood anybody had ever seen. We went in along the floor of the valley, traveling through several villages before arriving in Roydara, which is tucked back into a side valley that feels quite remote, even though as the pictures will show, it's only one ridgeline over from one of the most populated areas in the entire Panjshir Valley.
Once we got to Roydara, we stopped and had lunch with the locals, who suggested that we hike out along the ridgeline, since it would be "about an hour" faster than going out the same way we came in. This turned out to be standard Afghan time-telling. An accurate sense of time - accurate for a watch-carrying American - is not something you're likely to find around here. On most of our hikes, when the fat, slow, and lazy American asks how much farther it is, the lean, quick, 70-year-old Afghan answer is generally "ten or fifteen minutes", which usually works out to about an hour. The estimate that the hike out would save an hour wasn't entirely wrong, since the trip out might have been slightly faster, but what he neglected to tell us was that we would have to climb 2400 vertical feet in just under a mile and basically go straight up the mountain outside of his house.
That's when the hike got really interesting, because we just kept going up, and up, and up, and then all the sudden we got to this view, and all the pain went away:
Then a little farther down the ridge we got here.
It's not quite as edge-of-the-world as it might appear, but it was still an incredible view. The haze obscures the plains in the distance a little bit, but what you're looking at is the outside of the valley, towards Parwan and Kapisa, two neighboring provinces. Here's another one, only with us facing the camera this time. From left to right, it's the senior NCO for our civil affairs team, my boss (the chief engineer), me, and our Physician's Assistant, who goes by Doc.
This next one is looking back down into the valley that we hiked into. The village is called Sange Lakhshan, and it has obviously experienced some flooding in the past, because everything is built up high enough to have prevented any homes from being washed away during the most recent flood. They lost a significant amount of farmland, but that goes for nearly the entire valley.
This one looks north through the main valley, similar to the first picture, only with a broader perspective.
Finally, I'll wrap this up with what I suspect was an Afghan message to the Russians. This tank is in the single most unlikely location I can possibly imagine, although I don't have a good picture of it from a distance. If you can't tell from this one, it's perched on top of one of the highest peaks in the area. I have no idea how they got it there, but it couldn't have been uplifting to retreat from a region as the enemy was dragging (or driving) your heaviest piece of equipment onto the tallest mountain in the area. It's not the greatest picture of me, but it should give you some idea of the location.
This particular hike into Shutol was the best that I've been on since I got here, and quite possibly ever in my life. It was the type of experience where I had the profound feeling of being in the middle of something that I would probably never get to do again. I get that feeling on a semi-regular basis around here, but it was particularly strong on this hike.
The intention of the hike was to do a flood damage assessment, since our previous hike into the same area had concluded with the biggest flood anybody had ever seen. We went in along the floor of the valley, traveling through several villages before arriving in Roydara, which is tucked back into a side valley that feels quite remote, even though as the pictures will show, it's only one ridgeline over from one of the most populated areas in the entire Panjshir Valley.
Once we got to Roydara, we stopped and had lunch with the locals, who suggested that we hike out along the ridgeline, since it would be "about an hour" faster than going out the same way we came in. This turned out to be standard Afghan time-telling. An accurate sense of time - accurate for a watch-carrying American - is not something you're likely to find around here. On most of our hikes, when the fat, slow, and lazy American asks how much farther it is, the lean, quick, 70-year-old Afghan answer is generally "ten or fifteen minutes", which usually works out to about an hour. The estimate that the hike out would save an hour wasn't entirely wrong, since the trip out might have been slightly faster, but what he neglected to tell us was that we would have to climb 2400 vertical feet in just under a mile and basically go straight up the mountain outside of his house.
That's when the hike got really interesting, because we just kept going up, and up, and up, and then all the sudden we got to this view, and all the pain went away:
Then a little farther down the ridge we got here.
It's not quite as edge-of-the-world as it might appear, but it was still an incredible view. The haze obscures the plains in the distance a little bit, but what you're looking at is the outside of the valley, towards Parwan and Kapisa, two neighboring provinces. Here's another one, only with us facing the camera this time. From left to right, it's the senior NCO for our civil affairs team, my boss (the chief engineer), me, and our Physician's Assistant, who goes by Doc.
This next one is looking back down into the valley that we hiked into. The village is called Sange Lakhshan, and it has obviously experienced some flooding in the past, because everything is built up high enough to have prevented any homes from being washed away during the most recent flood. They lost a significant amount of farmland, but that goes for nearly the entire valley.
This one looks north through the main valley, similar to the first picture, only with a broader perspective.
Finally, I'll wrap this up with what I suspect was an Afghan message to the Russians. This tank is in the single most unlikely location I can possibly imagine, although I don't have a good picture of it from a distance. If you can't tell from this one, it's perched on top of one of the highest peaks in the area. I have no idea how they got it there, but it couldn't have been uplifting to retreat from a region as the enemy was dragging (or driving) your heaviest piece of equipment onto the tallest mountain in the area. It's not the greatest picture of me, but it should give you some idea of the location.
Keeping up with the Turachiondos
Although I've been sending so-called "manifestos" on a semi-regular basis, I was inspired yesterday by my brother's fledgling blog, and I decided that I might as well start my own. Hopefully it will turn out to be an easier way to keep everyone informed, and although I'm a little wary of the power of the internet to distribute to the world every passing thought I may not have the good judgment to keep to myself, I'm going to give it a shot anyway.
More than anything, I find it hard to believe that I've been here for five months already. It's actually seven months that I've been gone, if you count my time at Fort Bragg, although I generally do my best not to think of that place. We're still in the thick of the summer construction season, so work has been quite busy, and since the fiscal year ends in a month we're also under the gun to produce paperwork for a bunch of new projects so that some of them might get funded if there's extra money at the end of September.
Despite being busy right now, it's likely that within about two weeks the pace of work is going to change substantially. Ramadan starts in mid-September, and it sounds like people generally work from around eight AM to one or two PM during Ramadan. On construction sites I don't imagine that even those limited work hours are going to be as productive as usual, since I can't imagine being too motivated to overtax myself if I couldn't eat or even drink water during the day. Point being, I think we're in for a change of pace in September and October, which is probably a good thing. Around the time Ramadan ends is when I suspect it will start getting cold, wet, and maybe snowy around here, so there are some definite changes on the horizon.
I think what I'm going to do with this - and I'm wide open for suggestions if anyone has any - is to try to gather my old e-mails and post them, in case anyone is getting nostalgic for some Iraq '06 cynicism. I'll probably use this as something of a journal, to keep track of what's going on here and keep everyone informed if anything interesting happens, or to answer any burning questions people might have. I still have several long e-mails about specific topics I'm working on, but as everyone knows by now, those are kind of slow in coming. They're not all manifestos - I'm trying to distance myself from the raving insanity implied by that term - perhaps screed would be more appropriate. Sometimes they're tirades, I can admit it. And occasionally even cynical rants. But manifesto? C'mon, that seems harsh. Whatever they are, people seem to enjoy them, so hopefully I'll have more coming soon.
More than anything, I find it hard to believe that I've been here for five months already. It's actually seven months that I've been gone, if you count my time at Fort Bragg, although I generally do my best not to think of that place. We're still in the thick of the summer construction season, so work has been quite busy, and since the fiscal year ends in a month we're also under the gun to produce paperwork for a bunch of new projects so that some of them might get funded if there's extra money at the end of September.
Despite being busy right now, it's likely that within about two weeks the pace of work is going to change substantially. Ramadan starts in mid-September, and it sounds like people generally work from around eight AM to one or two PM during Ramadan. On construction sites I don't imagine that even those limited work hours are going to be as productive as usual, since I can't imagine being too motivated to overtax myself if I couldn't eat or even drink water during the day. Point being, I think we're in for a change of pace in September and October, which is probably a good thing. Around the time Ramadan ends is when I suspect it will start getting cold, wet, and maybe snowy around here, so there are some definite changes on the horizon.
I think what I'm going to do with this - and I'm wide open for suggestions if anyone has any - is to try to gather my old e-mails and post them, in case anyone is getting nostalgic for some Iraq '06 cynicism. I'll probably use this as something of a journal, to keep track of what's going on here and keep everyone informed if anything interesting happens, or to answer any burning questions people might have. I still have several long e-mails about specific topics I'm working on, but as everyone knows by now, those are kind of slow in coming. They're not all manifestos - I'm trying to distance myself from the raving insanity implied by that term - perhaps screed would be more appropriate. Sometimes they're tirades, I can admit it. And occasionally even cynical rants. But manifesto? C'mon, that seems harsh. Whatever they are, people seem to enjoy them, so hopefully I'll have more coming soon.
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