Memorial Day

In honor of Memorial Day, I’ve decided to share a little bit of my life in Afghanistan. I live in a trailer. It is about 8 feet wide by 20 feet long.

I share with a roommate. She has the front half of the room and I have the back half of the room. The picture below is from when I had the room to myself. My belongings have multiplied since then, and my area condensed. It’s not quite this spartan now.

I live a little under a half mile from where I work. My office is in an improved tent. It started out as a tent, but was sprayed with foam and painted pink. The foam helps to insulate it and keep it cooler during the hot summers. Inside the tent, at some point it was divided up into offices with plywood. It has a concrete floor. My desk is homemade plywood, and scattered across my desk are all of my documents and multiple computers for the varying levels of classification that our work is done on.

 

Everything we need is here. We eat in the DFAC, or dining facility, which looks very similar to the tent above. There is a wide variety of food available. It’s not quite as good as homemade, but considering it is Afghanistan, it is completely acceptable. We have a laundry service that does laundry with a 48 hour turn-around. It doesn’t come out quite as nice as home laundry, but it is nice to be able to drop it off and pick it up considering we don’t have weekends to do the laundry on. We also have a gym, small store, post office and internet provider. The internet is at slower than dial-up speed, but it is nice to be able to check email and use skype in the rooms.

Overall, my area looks a lot like the Barstow, California area or the area around Las Vegas. It is a desert with mountains in the distance. Below are a few photos of the area.

 

This is my little corner of Afghanistan. Have a wonderful Memorial Day Weekend!

Bacci

Metti il cuore in tutto ciò che fai.  It translates to “Put your heart in everything you do”.  I think that is a great message for today. 

I received my friendly reminder in a Bacci candy.  Now, if you’ve never heard of this, they are an amazing chocolate hazelnut candy from Italy.  I made the somewhat unfortunate decision to buy them in the Milan airport on my way back from Italy.  I had left when it was starting to get warm in Afghanistan, and if I had thought about it, I would have realized that meant that two plus weeks later, it was going to be hot. 

I protected those chocolates, but there were still some too melted to even salvage.  Luckily, there were still some that I am now enjoying.  And in one of those candies, was the message above.  So, the decision to buy chocolate and bring it to the middle east in May was not a complete failure like it very easily could have been.  I think I may have another Bacci right now.  Yum.