What's a little Taliban between friends?

A fool's errand

2009-12-06T16:25:00.000-08:00

Well sports fans after 14 months it’s time for me to leave Wonderland and move on to sunnier climes. Being here has been the toughest thing that I’ve ever done. I wish that I could say that I was leaving with a sense of renewed hope for Afghanistan and a stronger bond with my fellow man. Unfortunately, I just feel exhausted and happy to get out this place alive and with a few shreds of sanity. While I was here, the program that I managed distributed 3,000 metric tons of food, 70 metric tons of seeds and fertilizer, trained 400 community health volunteers, and pumped about a $1.5 million into the Afghan economy. It all sounds good on paper, trust me I know I write the reports, but after being here and seeing the desperate state of this country, the conflict, the poverty, and the corruption, doing development projects here kinda feels like trying to put out a California wildfire with a garden hose. If there is a way forward for Afghanistan then it is clearly beyond my four years of state college to discern.

Thanks for reading and taking this journey with me.

mercy

2009-10-18T03:27:00.000-07:00

Ï was in the airport in Kabul on my way to Herat. It was a pretty uneventful morning, the waiting room was full but not crazy. I was reading my book and waiting for my flight. After a a while there was a bit of a commotion. I looked up and saw a crowd starting to gather around an old man who was seated and talking to an airport official. The man started to get very excited and seemed to be pleading with the official. I took a better look and that's when I saw it, the body of a dead child wrapped in a blanket. The old man was pleading with the official to be allowed to transport the child's body on the plane. No casket, no anything, just the body wrapped in a blanket. It was the most horrific and heartbreaking thing that I have ever seen. Somebody started to take up a collection to bury the child. I gave a few dollars worth of Afghanis. All I could think was I have to get out of this place.

your money or your life

2009-07-08T04:30:00.000-07:00

We recently had two staff members robbed at gunpoint as they were leaving one of our program villages. They were traveling by motorcycle and about five kilometers from the village they were intercepted by two men, one with an AK47. The thieves took their mobile phones, the motorcycle, and about $200 in cash. Luckily, they weren’t injured. The incident didn’t appear to be ideologically motivated so no Taliban just bad guys with guns. Kinda makes me nostalgic for Baltimore!

We reported the incident to the police, the governor, the deputy governor, the UN mission, the NATO base, and my mom. They all promised that the perpetrators would be brought to justice, my mom was especially fired up! Unfortunately, it's like the wild, wild west out here, too many places to hide and not enough people interested to look.

Him Good Him Bad

2009-06-14T05:16:00.000-07:00

I had the unique pleasure of recently being at the Kabul airport waiting on a flight. Inside the terminal is a small, simple dining area where you can get a pot of tea or a plate of a traditional Afghan dish of stewed goat, potatoes, rice, and bread. I was sitting and having a pot of tea when an older Afghan man in traditional dress sat down next to me. The dining area is communal style so you just sit wherever there’s an empty seat. I turned and greeted the man saying “Ruz ba kheer” good day, slightly nodding my head in respect as I’ve seen my Afghan colleagues do when they greet someone older than themselves. The man smiled and responded by saying “Salam” hello and touching his right hand to his heart as is the custom here. I went back to my book and the man went on to order a plate of food. As soon as his food arrived he turned to me and offered me part of his lunch. It was a gesture that moved me quite a bit (no, I didn’t eat the poor man’s lunch). I am ashamed to say that I have allowed my concern for the “security situation” here to cause me to start to generalize people in a fairly vulgar way. “These guys look ok, these guys look like they could be Taliban”. It is the type of prejudice and bigotry that is borne out of fear and it’s something that I thought that I was above. Sure there are bad guys of all stripes and persuasions but it took this old man to remind me that nine times out of ten when you reach out your hand with courtesy, general goodwill, and respect the sentiment will be returned and we are all better for it.

say what

2009-05-29T07:51:00.000-07:00

I’ve finally found a tutor to start teaching me the local language which is Dari - a dialect of Persian. Over the years in this line of work, I have come across a number of brilliant people that speak four or five languages, they move from English to Arabic to Kiswahili without missing a beat. These people are a blessed and talented group, unfortunately, I ain’t one of them! Learning languages has always been extremely difficult for me so I have always quietly supported that “English first” initiative.

But seriously, I think that it is an important sign of respect to at least be able to say a few sentences in the local language. People usually really appreciate that you have gone to the effort to learn their language and are very willing to help you. Plus it provides important moments of comic relief that endear you to your hosts, for example when I think that I have just said “you have a beautiful home” when I have actually just said “your house green tomorrow”.

So whenever learning a new language I keep it as practical as possible and focus on the words and phrases that are important to my everyday life. As a rule I usually start with the following two phrases that have served me well all over the world:

1. Where is the bathroom?
2. I would like another cocktail.

Nami man ast Frederick.

moving the food

2009-05-18T03:48:00.000-07:00

Despite the best efforts of disaffected government bureaucrats, armed gunmen, and that saucy minx Mother Nature herself, we are finally distributing our food commodities. Let the church say Amen!

a soldier, an aid worker, and a one eyed Mullah walk into a bar…..

2009-04-23T02:16:00.000-07:00

Things are feeling a little weird as of late, kind of like the calm before the storm. It’s been pretty quiet by Afghanistan standards meaning that there haven’t been any recent acid attacks on young girls walking to school or armed gunmen attacking any of the ministries in Kabul with AK 47s and suicide explosive vests. But everybody is a little on edge.

Last month the Taliban leadership made a formal declaration that the Taliban would now actively target foreign aid workers on the premise that we are all actually spies. If only this was the case, I would look fabulous driving an Aston Martin and drinking martinis. Miss Moneypenny where are you when I need you. The idea of aid workers, especially American aid workers, being spies is an old one. The idea caught new life when U.S. Special Ambassador Richard Holbrooke stated that 90% of American intelligence coming from inside Afghanistan comes from international aid organizations. There was a nuance to his comments that was lost in the mainstream press and basically the story became “Aid workers in Afghanistan are spies for the CIA!” When it rains it pours.

Across the border in Pakistan, the government signed a truce with the Taliban and essentially ceded the Swat Valley to them. This gives the Taliban a safe staging ground to plan and prepare for attacks. Now that the snow is gone and the roads are clear things should get interesting on this side of border sometime soon. President Obama has now deployed an additional 21,000 troops here and I’m guessing that they’ll have their hands full.

I figured that it was a good time to go visit the boys down the road at the Lithuanian army base. I met with their civilian military attaché officer to discuss formalizing an emergency evacuation plan for my team should the shit hit the Shinola. Until now it’s just been a general understanding that if things go bad in a hurry then all of us would just run like hell to the base and bang on the gate until they let us in. I’m trying to get them to agree to a protocol where they would actually send a couple humvees and come get us! These guys are awesome and want to help so I’m sure we’ll figure it out. The sooner the better.

Hey brother can you spare 6.7 metric tons of rice

2009-02-15T01:26:00.000-08:00

We are getting ready to distribute food as part of the health component of the program. This food distribution is the most tangible part of the entire effort. Between the meetings, planning, coordinating, synergizing, negotiating, and signings, there is a lot that has to be done before anything actually gets done. These distributions are the first real thing that we can hang our hat on and say that we’ve done.

We will distribute a basket of commodities to children under five years of age, and pregnant and lactating women. The commodity basket includes rice, wheat flour, yellow peas, and vegetable oil. After making the long trip from America’s heartland, the first of our commodities is starting to arrive. After much haggling, pleading, cursing and cajoling of the Afghanistan Ministry of Finance we finally received 500 metric tons of rice into our warehouse in Herat. The rice was then to be trucked from Herat to our warehouse here in Chaghcaran where it will be distributed to beneficiaries, this is where it gets interesting. On the road from Herat to Chaghcaran our trucks were stopped by armed men who belong to one of the local militias. The gunmen actually didn’t take all of the rice which I thought was quite sporting of them, but they did lighten our load a bit before letting the trucks pass. We are now in discussions with the national police to see if we can get an armed escort for future convoys – at our expense of course. The old idealistic aid worker in me was briefly full of moral outrage about how every ounce of rice that was stolen was taken out of the mouth of a vulnerable woman or child, the realistic aid worker that has lived through people getting gunned down and shit getting blown up on a nearly daily basis thinks that losing 6.7 metric tons of rice out of a 23 truck convoy carrying 500 metric tons is a pretty good day at the office.

safe as houses

2009-01-21T00:31:00.000-08:00

Since I’ve been in Afghanistan friends on many occasion have asked me “are you safe?” The simple answer to that question is…..no. But I look at it like this; growing up in northwest Baltimore wasn’t all that safe so I’ll be OK. Over the past few months, I’ve come to understand that security in Afghanistan is a complicated thing and it is largely dependant on where you are, what you’re doing, and who you’re doing it with.

In Kabul, there is no security period, you just have to trust in the numbers. That is to say, that on any given day there are roughly two and a half million people in Kabul and the odds are that YOU in particular aren’t going to get blown the fuck up. It’s kind of like playing Taliban roulette where you’re standing at the table as the wheel goes round hoping that the little white ball doesn’t fall on random person # 835,642 – YOU. “come on baby, daddy wants to keep all his limbs!”

In Herat, the calculus changes a bit. The population is much smaller than Kabul so technically your odds get worse since there are fewer people to get blown up meaning that your number is more likely to come up. However, there are apparently fewer things of interest to blow up in Herat and thus fewer bombings. Generally speaking, in Herat if you stay away from the airport, Governor’s house, U.N. compound, hotels, bazaars, bike shops, ice cream parlors, hospitals, restaurants, private homes, electronic shops, mosques, schools, parks, tailors, office buildings, garages, fruit stands, police stations, DVD shops, dry cleaners, and public buildings of any sort then you should be OK.

Out in the provinces like where I live it gets even more interesting. A little background, after the NATO led invasion of Afghanistan that toppled the Taliban, the country was essentially divided into security zones with different NATO member states responsible for the security of a particular region of the country. The area where I live is under the military protection of a contingent led by the Lithuanian army. That’s right the Lithuanians. Now I don’t want to malign these boys too much for two reasons; firstly, they recently invited me to their base for dinner which was much appreciated because there’s only so much stewed goat a man can eat, and the Lithuanian army cafeteria comes complete with fried chicken, lasagna, and an ice cream station, secondly, should the proverbial shit hit the fan I’ll be counting on these boys to save my ass and get me out of here. But since there is absolutely nothing out here worth going to the effort or expense of blowing up, paired with the fact that I live about ¼ mile from the Lithuanian army base so unless the Taliban actually decide to attack the base itself I should be OK.

So while the 82nd Airborne they may not be, let’s give it up for the Lithuanians – keepers of the peace and givers of the double scoop of chocolate!

Kabul - a thousand words

2009-01-19T03:14:00.000-08:00

Help Wanted

2009-01-12T04:31:00.000-08:00

I’m back in Afghanistan after going home for a too short Christmas break. Yes, I am part of that noble core of do-gooding souls ready to stand arm in arm with our less fortunate brothers and sisters, living as they live, eating what they eat, forgoing creature comforts and risking life and limb - just not on major holidays or during our children’s school breaks.

The snow has started to fall and that is both good and bad. Good because insurgent related violence goes down during the winter since apparently the Taliban haven’t figured out where to buy good snow tires. Bad because access to the people that we are trying to reach with services becomes severely restricted. We are planning to distribute food as part of the health intervention but we are having trouble getting it into the country. It was the same way when I worked in Indonesia. Bringing in free food ain’t as easy as one might imagine!

I recently met with the provincial Governor and members of the Provincial Council and they all pledged the support of their respective good offices. These meetings are mostly ceremonial but occasionally the phrase “when I was speaking to the Governor about……” does come in handy when dealing with a less than helpful civil servant as you’re trying to get a copy of this or that government regulation / policy statement / strategic planning document.

We’re still having trouble recruiting staff, both Afghan and expatriate but for some reason I'm hopeful that things will turn around. I’m thinking that in this shall we say challenging economic environment that maybe people will give old Afghanistan a second look, she ain’t so bad!

Kabul Kaboom!

2008-11-27T22:43:00.000-08:00

Tuesday, Fred goes to the U.S. embassy for meetings.
Wednesday, Fred goes to the U.S. embassy for meetings.
Thursday, suicide bomber detonates massive car bomb at the entrance of U.S. Embassy.

This job is definitely worth another 5 grand a year.

Whose house

2008-11-18T10:21:00.000-08:00

His Excellency President Hamid Karzai has just recently told his supporters from the international community to back up because when it comes to negotiating with the Taliban, Hamid makes the rules, cause Afghanistan is his house and he lives here!

A little background; President Karzai has offered guaranteed safe passage to Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar to anywhere in Afghanistan, if Omar is willing to negotiate for a peace deal. What makes this tidbit of international politics so juicy is that the U.S., the primary financial and military backer of the fragile Karzai government, has a $10 million dollar bounty on Omar’s head and wants to offer him guaranteed safe passage straight to Guantanamo - do not pass go, do not collect $200 thank you very much. Karzai went so far as to say that the international community had two choices, either accept his offer to Omar or remove him from power. That statement highlights two important points. Firstly, it underscores the desperate situation that Karzai finds himself in. The Taliban is gaining strength by the day, attacks are on the rise and becoming more brazen. Just a couple of weeks ago gunmen attacked the Ministry of Information in Kabul in broad daylight in a coordinated gunfire and suicide bombing maneuver. Members of the Afghanistan National Police (ANP) are taking off their uniforms, picking up their guns, and switching sides to join the Taliban and fight against the government. The latter point underscores just how dependant Karzai is on his international backers to hold the country together at all. It is this charge, that Karzai is beholden to western masters that has been the clarion call of insurgents here, Taliban and otherwise, that seek to topple his government. Karzai is dancing on the edge of a knife and he knows it. He is a truly charismatic figure but it will take more than the strength of his own personal gifts to bring this situation under control. President elect Obama has promised to send anywhere from 7,000 – 20,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan. Let’s hope they get here in a hurry.

I have to think that when President Karzai is having an especially bad day, when Kabul is going kaboom! as it does so often these days, and tough decisions of national importance need to made, he closes the door to the President’s office turns on his iPOD and let’s Run-DMC remind him what’s what.

Whose House – It’s Hamid’s House – you better recognize.

but baby it's cold outside

2008-10-30T22:32:00.000-07:00

If what they say is true and a picture is worth a thousand words, then I’ll keep it short this time. This picture was taken from a vehicle while we were driving, quickly, through Kabul.

After weeks in Herat doing program start up planning, and meeting with local partner organizations, I’ve finally made it out to where I’ll be living and working. It’s a place called Chaghcaran, it’s in the central highlands of Afghanistan. It’s dry, dusty, and freakishly cold, like sleep in all your clothes cold, like maybe it’s time to finally apply to law school cold. It’s also hypnotically beautiful. Most of the homes are made of mud brick and built into the hillsides. At night the sky is ablaze with stars. It makes you feel alive, I don’t know maybe you feel so alive because you’re acutely aware that you could freaking freeze to death at any moment. If I’ve learned nothing else about Afghans, I’ve learned that these people are tough and I don’t just mean tough, I mean TUFF! You have to be to survive in a place like this. When the water can kill you, the weather can kill you, having babies can kill you, you’ve gotta be made of stronger stuff to make it through.

The team met with the head of the provincial hospital here this week. He seems like a decent enough guy. A guy that runs an under funded, under equipped government hospital that doesn’t have enough doctors and nurses because nobody is willing to come and work out here. Now that made me wonder, if the average Afghan is thinking to herself “what me go work in Chaghcaran, oh heck no!” Let’s just say that this is a not a good place to get sick. So our meeting went as they usually do, we asked deep probing questions about public health problems that he can’t solve, he then asked us for financial support that we can’t provide. We all take notes, sip tea, and shiver from the cold.

“But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came to where the man was, and when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring oil and wine. Then he put the man own his own donkey, took him to an inn and took care of him.”

Rest in Peace Gayle Williams - your efforts were not in vain

Just the facts ma'am

2008-10-23T07:12:00.000-07:00

From the little that I have seen during my few weeks in-country, the Afghan people are a very proud lot with a rich history and culture that they rightly celebrate. Unfortunately, Afghanistan the country is pretty screwed up, especially for newborn infants and their mothers. The only imaginable scenario that could be worst than giving birth in rural Afghanistan would be if you were having a baby in a car that was actually on fire!

Here are the facts: Less than 40% of children in Afghanistan are immunized and 85,000 children die every year from diarrhea. Mother and child mortality rates in Afghanistan are among the highest in the world; a woman dies from pregnancy related complications every 30 minutes with an under-five mortality rate of 257 per 1000 live births – meaning that for every 1000 babies lucky enough to survive child birth 257 of them, on average, will die before their 5th birthday. Assuming that you are tough enough and lucky enough to live past the ripe old age of 5 - average life expectancy in Afghanistan is only 44.5 years, which is 15 to 25 years lower than all surrounding countries. Makes one think that maybe the best humanitarian aid project would be to distribute free plane tickets out of this joint! But alas, that’s not an option so we dig in and try to fix what’s broken.

The program that I’m managing has a large maternal and child health and nutrition component in addition to the agriculture side – it’s actually much larger than I realized before I arrived in-country.

The agriculture side is easier to manage in the sense that you are working directly with the community. It’s fairly easy to get a group of farmers together to discuss new strategies for growing things. Now, I say it’s easy to get farmers together to discuss new strategies, it’s hard as hell to get them to actually adopt those strategies, and understandably so. Farmers, especially the poor small scale farmers that these programs target, are extremely risk adverse because their very survival and that of their families depends on how much they grow each season. So needless to say, they are reluctant to turn over their fields to growing a new varietal of say Tasmanian sweet potatoes just cause Fred said that it was a bitchin’ idea. So you work to establish demonstration plots where you grow whatever you’re pitching and this allows farmers to learn risk free whether or not it actually works in their farming environment. Ideally it works, the farmers grow Tasmanian sweet potatoes that they sell at an unbelievable profit, they take that money - enroll their children in school for the first time, they now have money to access basic health services that they couldn’t afford before. The entire community is thriving by project end and as the project team is packing up the office big burly men are standing at our door offering up their fairest daughters for marriage as a gesture of goodwill and thanks for all of the good work that we’ve done in their community. This has never actually happened but……

Working on the health side is a little more challenging. On the health side it’s all about working through the government health care system – supporting the system! Now like most developing countries Afghanistan has a brilliantly crafted community level health care strategy that works wonderfully – on paper. The government’s foundation document is the aptly titled “A Basic Package of Health Services for Afghanistan, 2005 / 1384” brought to you by the highly educated and extremely well intentioned people that sit in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan Ministry of Public Health. Jokes aside it is a well crafted strategy that outlines multiple levels of public health care throughout the country. At the lowest level where my program operates, you have a community Health Post which is supposed to be manned by a male and female Community Health Worker (CHW). These people are drawn from their home communities and receive training to provide basic health services to their community ranging from; growth monitoring of children under five years of age, immunizations, vitamin A supplementation, antibiotics, treatment for malaria, ante-natal care for pregnant women, delivery services for uncomplicated pregnancies, follow up treatment for tuberculosis, and referral of patients to higher level health care facilities when appropriate. So, obviously these Community Health Workers do a lot of things. Unfortunately, they don’t get paid for doing them and that’s where the system all falls apart. These people are well meaning and I’m sure want to help their neighbors as much as possible but often times they are just as poor as everybody else meaning that they need to spend their time scratching out a living just like everybody else and not providing free health services to everybody. This is where we come in – right.

A different game entirely

2008-10-11T02:51:00.000-07:00

After a day and a half in Dubai waiting to get my visa processed I was finally on my way to Afghanistan. I don’t know what I expected but I was surprised at the people that were boarding the flight. For one it was packed (who the hell is going to Afghanistan these days?) and there were lots of westerners. Among them were: your standard looking missionary types, complete with children in tow, God help them; then there were some gruff looking dudes in their 20s or 30s that looked to be either military or ex-military now working as ‘security contractors’ - less politely called mercenaries; and there was a smattering of well dressed men in their 50s and 60s that I took to be either diplomatic types or executives in contracting firms that are working on the big infrastructure projects in the country.

The flight from Dubai to Kabul was 2 ½ hours and uneventful. As the plane dropped below the clouds on the approach to Kabul I got a good view of the landscape below. I couldn’t believe how mountainous this place is, I’ve heard about it, I’ve read about it but to see it is something totally different. We landed and I collected my bags without incident. I didn’t know it before but there were two colleagues from my agency’s headquarters with me on the flight. We all met as the agency driver collected us all from the arrival lobby.

The drive from the airport into Kabul was a bit surreal and I kind of wished that I had Christiane Armanpour sitting next to me to give a run down of what I was seeing. Kabul is an extremely dry and dusty place, and the part of the city that I was in didn’t have any paved roads or silly traffic lights that I noticed. What I did see were lots of guys with AK 47s – standing, sitting, just hanging out on a Friday afternoon with their automatic rifles. The driver pulled up to the guesthouse where we would be spending the night. The place had its own unique charm including a twelve foot security wall around the whole place, a solid metal gate that we knocked on as we stood on the non existent sidewalk. A guard pulled back a little slit in the gate, speakeasy style, and took a look at us before deciding whether or not to open the door on the gate. Once the door opened we were greeted by three other “rugged gentlemen of adventure” with AK47s slung over their shoulders. Once inside the place was actually pretty quaint in a war ravaged developing country kind of way.

All of the security briefings that I’ve read along with the people that I spoke to before getting here all said the same drill in terms of personal safety; always be aware of your surroundings, stay away from large crowds, avoid places where Westerners gather, vary your times and routes to places that you frequent. This was all stuff that I had heard and lived by while I lived in Indonesia for almost 5 years. It was that Indonesia experience that I used to convince myself that I was ready for the security situation in Afghanistan. You see Indonesia is the home of the militant islamist group Jemayah Islamiyah (JI) and those wacky boys from JI liked to occasionally blow shit up throughout the country – one to obviously promote their campaign to establish an Islamic Caliphate throughout southeast Asia, and secondly I just have to think was just to prove that they could do it despite the best efforts of the Indonesian security services to stop them. JI was responsible for the devastating Bali bombing in 2002, which occurred shortly before I moved to Indonesia, and killed over 200 innocent people. While I lived in Indonesia JI was responsible for bombing the following; the Marriot hotel in Jakarta, a KFC at the airport, an office of the World Food Programme, and the Australian Embassy – on this last point I have to think that anybody who has ever been stuck in a bar with a bunch of Australians would understand why somebody might be tempted to blow up their embassy.

So I thought about being able to live through all of this and come out fine and convinced myself that I was ready to make the step up to the big time and work in Afghanistan. When you strip away all of that “gee I just want to make a difference in the world” sentiment, being an aid worker is just like any other job in the sense that it’s all about “making your bones”. For lawyers it’s about winning that first big case, for investment bankers it’s working on that killer merger, for high school teachers it’s about having Fred McCray in your social studies class and yet somehow still remaining committed to teaching at year’s end. For aid workers it’s about managing ever larger projects with increasingly larger budgets, and reaching increasing levels of beneficiaries. The twist for aid workers that sets them apart from rational people in other professions that naturally seek increasing levels of responsibility in their careers is that aid workers want to do it / need to do it, at least for a while, in some of the most remote, underdeveloped, dangerous, and just generally fucked up places on earth. I imagine that only international news correspondents share this same perverse and macabre worldview that causes you to look at large scale natural disasters and armed conflicts as job opportunities. “Damn, I wonder if I can get in on that Burma flood emergency?” So here I am trying to firstly do some good and apply some hard earned expertise to this program, afterall this what I do and I think, maybe foolishly so, that I’m pretty good at it. But I’m also here to prove that I can do what I do in one of the toughest place on earth.

The security situation here is in the back of my mind, I’d be a liar to say otherwise. Historically, aid workers of all stripes were lumped in with members of the International Red Cross in the sense that they were considered neutral actors in countries and conflicts. That blanket of neutrality if you will allowed aid workers to move about in some seriously dangerous places around the world with only random and unorganized harassment to worry about. That was then, nowadays aid workers especially those working in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Sudan are seen as legitimate combat targets just like Marines. Aid workers are being picked off by armed factions around the world at increasing rates. While I remind myself that every Afghan man with a long beard isn’t out to kidnap and kill me, God I wish that the ones that were wore buttons or t-shirts that said “I’m down with the jihad” or something to that effect, I'm already on guard and weary of people walking up to me starting conversations, much more so than I have ever been anywhere else in the world. While the rational side of me says that I need to be smart about being safe because jokes aside I really don’t want to get my head blown off. There is a part of me that is disappointed to have to look at every stranger through the lens of suspicion. Disappointed because I have been lucky enough to travel all over the world, and all over the world people have in one way or another gone out of their way to help me when they didn’t have to.

So I’ll work hard to keep my wits about me, and if some really nefarious looking dudes ever walk up to me and ask if I’m American, I’ll look ‘em straight in the eye and say “ Noooooo mahn, me from Jamaica!”

Next stop Afghanistan

2008-10-04T05:41:00.000-07:00

"You won't be happy 'til you get your damn fool head blown off!" these were the words of my loving mother when she heard that I had taken a post in Afghanistan. Now my mom is without a doubt one of the smartest people that I know, and I know a lot of smart people, but on this point she is very wrong. I'm actually quite fond of my head. Now admittedly it started out a little disproportionately big for my body as any of my childhood friends will attest to. But after years of eating all of my vegetables and drinking appropriate amounts of milk the rest of me eventually caught up and now my head suits me quite nicely, swimmingly you might say - if you were British - and a little light in the boots. The point being that I like my head and I would hate to see it get dislodged by something as cliche as say an IED, or a car bomb, or even an uncharacteristically fast moving softball.

I like to think that my decision to work in Afghanistan stems from my sense of personal mission to work to make the world a better place coupled with a strong desire to live a life less ordinary, and lots of other poetic sounding crap like that. So here I am with less than 36 hours before I get on a plane to a place affectionately called "The graveyard of the super powers". I go armed with a one year contract, renewable up to three assuming that I don't screw the pooch too badly, to work with Afghan farmers to help them grow just about any and everything other than those crazy poppies that they have grown so fond of. Game on brohiem!

That's right I said it!

2008-10-03T07:35:00.000-07:00

The comments and opinions herein are soley those of the author and in no way reflect the policies or positions of the following; the United States government, any International Non Governmental Organization, the global military industrial complex, Big Oil, Big Pharma, or the East Side Bandits little league baseball team.