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.
