Previously, on Adam Does Afghanistan . . .

For those of you who are good at improving processes, or coming up with better ideas of how to do stuff, you know that often there’s a continuum of reactions that people can have to your process improvment ideas. From enthusiastic acceptance and throwing you onto their shoulders for a parade down main street, to outright violent resistance. I experienced the best kind of reaction yesterday to the second round of process improvments that I’ve designed here at Camp Gibson.

And yes, there is a main street, but the parade is not exactly the best reaction. The best one is like what happened yesterday – where a Filipino AP Coordinator and two Afghani AP processors asked questions, gave suggestions for improvement, but otherwise wanted to implement all of my suggestions. They really felt that not only would it help them do their jobs better, but they will get to learn new technology that will help them in their careers. One of the Afghans is working on his Bachelor’s in Business Mgmt at the university here in Kabul. I can’t imagine this being the place that you have to work through that sort of education goal in this sort of environment, but whatever I can do to help, I’m going to do it.

So score one for process improvment, and behold, my kung fu is strong.

After that score, it was wonderful to wake up this morning to a thunderous rain storm that pushed all the dust in the air back to the ground where it belongs, and gave us all a gorgeous blue sky with some of the tallest mountains in the world on the western horizon.