3-12-07

Happy Monday to you! So not much new to report here except the plans for the week, which lead into a couple prayer requests. It's been raining and snowing a bit more here in Kabul over the weekend so the roads around our neighborhood are back to being mud pits. I joke with our folks here that America just needs to send a few good ol' Georgia Rednecks over here with a slew of Rebel flags and their 4x4's and rest assured, the Taliban would stop any and all activity!

So I promised in my last posting that I'd send you some pictures from the new room on the upper deck of the Villa. So I've included a couple below. Take note that I did not manipulate the color on these at all. I just set my little Fujifilm FinePix A600 to the night setting and snapped away. These pictures were taken this evening, Monday, at about 6:00pm local time.

Alright, moving onto important matters. As I'm sure you've all heard, action is picking up here and much of the rebel activities are in the Southern areas of the country (must be something about the South regions of countries that fuels disdain for government...but I digress...that's another entry for another day). One of the hottest areas of the country is the Kandahar Province. Well, on Tuesday we have two of our team heading to K-har for site visits with our military counterparts. They'll be gone until Friday. I may be heading to Kunduz, which is North of our location in Kabul, on Wednesday or Thursday of this week before heading to K-har for the weekend. Since our team here is working on two different areas, our military counterparts represent the same split in focus thus, it's incredibly difficult to try and coordinate that many people for one trip to go see different things. Hence the reason why I will not be traveling with Marv and Jamison on Tuesday's trip to K-har. Oh, I should add that we will be traveling with military forces so we'll be very well guarded!

Here's a map so you can follow along at home!

Furthermore, I have a new friend that is currently on a trip outside of Kabul, where she is based. She's a Marine who calls Lafeyette, IN home and she works with public relations for the Corps. She wrote the other day that she got to spend some time as the turret gunner on a HumVee for a couple convoys this week and she was pretty stoked about that! To fully understand the danger of this, I've included a picture -- not of any operations currently in Afghanistan -- so you can see how exposed the turret gunner is. This person must be on their toes and have their eyes open no matter what. Watching these guys suit up for transport makes you truly proud to be an American! Jamison, my coworker, is a former Tanker for the US Army and fought in Desert Storm and when he saw the armor these gunners were sporting, he was impressed.

Oh, and I know there've been talks back home about ramping up troop sizes here and Iraq. Well, I may not know much, but I do know that we're seeing a lot of new faces around, many of whom look to be only 19 or 20 yrs old.

Do us a favor and keep all these people in your prayers this week. Not that I'm seasoned here or anything, but it doesn't take long to figure out a thing or two. You can tell the new folks in country by the wide-eyed stares and freshly pressed BDU's. Some of these men and women left children at home to come here. They get no time to let jet lag catch up to 'em - they're put to work straight away in their armor, no matter the time of day.

I'm confident that we'll all be just fine because I know our God will protect us. I've not heard from the Marine in a few days but that was expected. I'm sure she's just fine because I know she spends a good amount of time in prayer before our God as well. Now, that doesn't make planning for the trip to K-har any less stressful. We'll go and do our jobs. If something happens to me while I'm gone, then hopefully I've accomplished whatever it was that God had set out for me to do.