Adam Does Afghanistan

Here are some more pictures from my outing to the shooting range:

These next three pictures are a pan from left to right, over the top of the ANP camp and looking at “downtown” Kabul. Those apartments are visible from the top of the hill in Gibson and there is some other new construction going on. It’s very hazy and a little tough to see. I snapped these quickly because the ANP patrols near the range had huge signs that said “No Pictures Allowed,” and I wasn’t keen on having my camera taken.

Part two

Part three. There really isn’t a lot to see, I know, but this is what the place is like from up on the hill.

This is the end of that pan, but framing what people call “TV Hill.” That ridge is obviously a broadcast point and it’s one of the most remarkable landmarks in the city. It isn’t on the far side of the city – actually in the middle of the city, so the way there are ridges and hills dividing the town, it reminds me of Phoenix a little bit. Not a lot, but a little.

This is a Master Electrician named Flor. He’s from the Philippines and was a dang good shooter despite having never touched a gun before. I like this shot for the casing flying out of the breach.

This is one of the locals walking near the intersection of the road that we turned up to get to the range. The intersection was a huge, deep mud puddle, about 50 feet across and as other cars were driving through it, you could see that it was about two feet deep. This guy was walking at his own risk. I would never have turned my back on traffic like that.

There are a lot of motorcycles on the road down south of camp. We’ve named the road “Wings” which is funny because it is almost undriveable with huge pot holes and piles of rubble.

This is a compound near Gibson. ANP uniforms and several guns! This guy’s gun was really nice and clean.

This is my breakfast every morning.

Since everything over here is a Three Letter Acronym (TLA) I refer to this meal as the BOC – the Breakfast of Champions.

Fat, fat champions.

There are people in this camp from all kinds of places on the earth. There’s a lot from the US that are the police mentors, a bunch from Nepal that make up the majority of the security forces that guard us day and night. Also in the police trainers, there are quite a few South Africans. The majority of the mid-level staff in the offices and service and support roles are from the Philippines. The IT pros are also from the Philippines and from America. And of course, half the camp is Local Nationals from the Kabul area.

So I’m thinking that there are quite a few conversations in Filipino that go something like this:

Did you hear what he just said?

He said “cool!”

Why does he say “cool?” That’s the craziest expression I’ve ever heard!

I’m pretty sure this happens because the Americans laugh a little at some of the expressions that the different nationalities use when they are speaking the required English that we do all our business in. Here are my favorites:

Why like this?

-or-

Why like that?

This one is pretty entertaining, and it is to say, “Why would you do what you are doing?” or, “Why would do that?” It’s tough to take it seriously, but the Filipinos who use it are pretty serious when they ask why you’re doing what you’re doing.

Basically

This is the word that comes before almost everything that some of my Filipino co-workers say. They pronounce it “base – eh – cull – ee” and it is a long word when they say it, so it ends up sounding like three or four words. The way they say it is not what’s funny; what’s funny is that usually, it means that whatever follows is not a “basic” type of explanation. It’s a verbal crutch, and you guessed it, I say it now too. Basically, it’s going to be a hard habit to break.

It’s-okay-no-problem.

Ghafoor, the Afghani who sits next to me, says this all the time in his thickly accented English. The dashes indicate that he says this like one word as a response to many requests. It sometimes takes the place of the more eloquent English expression, “mmmhmmm.” One of these days, I want to hear one of my American co-workers snap and just shout, “IT IS NOT OKAY AND IT IS A PROBLEM! IT’S A BIG, BIG PROBLEM!” But I don’t think it’s going to happen. Ghafoor always says it with a smile on his face, so how could you go crazy when he says it like that?

I am sending the email, and then I’m taking the numbers and I’m typing them into the spreadsheet and then I am doing the reporting on the PO Log.

While training, you’ll get some explanations like this instead of the more standard, “I  send an email, then take the numbers and type them into a spreadsheet. After that, I make some reports from the PO Log.” To me, this turn of the phrase, and the liberal use of participles is the foreign nationals’ way of indicating that they are not just engaging in activities – they ARE the activities. I am sending. I am typing. I am doing. It’s like they are all French. Anyway, the next time you are asked what you do for a living, you should respond in this abstraction, “I am doing the accounting.” People will take you tons more seriously.

It’s a name, but shorter

This is a funny story that will make me look like an idiot, so here we go. There is a woman who works in my office, but you might miss her on the first glance because she’s a very small person. Weighing in at a max of 90 lbs, Christianne is a very smart lady from the Philippines who travels to different sites all over Afghanistan to help in the DynCorp offices. She’s leaving soon, but when I first got here, my boss was talking about the staff, and he called her “TinTin” which is what everyone calls her.

He said “TinTin” was a Filipino word or phrase that meant, “short,” or something like that. She’s very short, so I didn’t think twice about it. Until I was sitting with the Filipinos at dinner and I was curious about the name “TinTin.” So instead of just coming out and asking about it, I started out telling the self-effacing story of how Layne’s band doesn’t know my real name because one time, she called me a nickname and now, all they know is the nickname. I asked if my nickname “BuBu” meant anything in Filipino, and they said no, but that “BoBo” means “stupid,” or something like that.

This story is getting long, but I really enjoy it, so I’m going to finish it up.

So then, satisfied that I had thrown out something personal and a bit embarrassing of my own, I asked what “TinTin” meant, and they said that it was Christianne’s nickname. To which I replied, yes, but what does it mean? And they proceeded to tell me that a nickname is a name, but shorter.

She’s called “TinTin” because her name Christianne, sounds more like Christian, with a hard “Tin” sound at the end when they say it. So everyone started calling her “TinTin” for short.

And yes, you guessed it, the real misunderstanding award goes to . . . my boss for not getting that when they were talking about the name “TinTin,” they weren’t saying it MEANT “short,” but that it WAS short.

Short for her name.

Like nicknames are.

I hope I’m not the only one who thinks that’s funny, and in the end can see that no matter what broken English phrases I find funny, my misunderstandings of what people actually mean, in any language, can be just as broken.

But that doesn’t mean that when I get back and you tell me that you really enjoyed the new Sufjan Stevens album, I won’t respond, “Why like that?”

Though the US won’t celebrate the ressurection of Christ for another six hours at least, in Kabul, He has been risen for a few hours already. My boss asked me if it was Easter this morning when we sat down to breakfast – as I’ve mentioned before, it’s difficult to keep track of the days here, and there are no holidays per se – so I wasn’t surprised when he asked. I think that If I hadn’t received an Easter care package from my wonderful girlfriend, that I wouldn’t have remembered either. And this is tough to admit because as most of you know, my two favorite holidays are Easter and the Fourth of July.

But I’m taking some time this morning to reflect on why I like the holiday so much. I think it is because that the ressurection is a pure display of power and plan that I value very highly. And though the celebration may not be held exactly when the event happened, I still get a strong message of hope. I feel hope for myself – hope that I can keep walking forward and leave behind the past and all the poor decisions that have nearly brought me down and kept me down. I feel a lot of hope for the future, and God knows that I’m not even close to being perfect, but there’s a day where we celebrate a power that’s greater than death and destruction; a power stronger than despair and fear. This power is out there, and I’m praying that the people I see every day will feel it somehow, feel as if there is a hand that might not lift them completely out of their circumstance, but at least hold to them and bring some measure of goodness in a world gone mad.

So I guess whether you believe in it or not, when I say Happy Easter, I’m not trying to indoctrinate you with some belief system, I’m just hoping that everyone will take a moment and try to accept that there is a great love out there, reaching out to every person. How ever you see that taking shape, I hope you take hold of it. Today.

Here are some shots that I got when I was out of the camp on the way to the shooting range.

This is the right turn off the road that the base is located on. We went right, but this colorful pink building is visible over the wall from the far side of the base.

An idea of what traffic is like. There are no traffic laws, so you pass when you want and basically, the big boys win – if you’ve got an up-armored vehicle then you can run others off the road. Gibson is on the left somewhere.

One of the side streets to the south. I was amazed at the amount of ruble and debris in the streets.

I don’t know what military force this is, but they were convoying past us. You can see that our double windshield was a bit dirty, so I couldn’t tell who they were.

This is the view up the road that the ANP base is on. We take a left off of here to get to the range. There are several armed guards at gates that are lined up on the left-hand side of the road. On the right, there are a lot of building projects going on.

Just some of the locals.

One of the guard towers on the ANP base. This guy was a barrel of laughs.

This is ANP-issue uniforms. Note the lack of body armor of any kind. That’s the AK or one of copies that are out there. The language below the English, by the way, is Persian.

Just a wide view of the target range and the hill beyond. If you’ve seen pictures of Gibson looking north, you’ll recognize the hill, but I’ll let you figure that out by yourself. If you are a terrorist, please don’t use this information to strike at the infidels.

At the top of the hill, you can see guard shacks and watch towers every few hundred meters.

That’s it for today – I’ve got some more that I’ll post later.

How do you really get a feel for what it’s going to be like to work in totally foreign environment? I had no idea how to deal with most of the questions that were bouncing around in my brain about what work was going to be like. I had some ideas, but for the most part, I put all the questions in the back of my head and just focussed on the immediate challenges. It kept me open to everything I came up against and I’m adjusting okay.

But the one thing that I did think a lot about was a seven-day work week. Those of you that work every day of the week can excuse me because I’ve never had that sort of job before. (Forgive me for a little Rob Bell nonsense here.)

There is no weekend.

No end to the week.

Just days.

Day after day after work day.

My boss and I have been here for just about the same amount of time, and we both agree that it’s a difficult thing to keep track of time – specifically what day it is. There’s no Friday-type day that marks a mini-vacation from work.

As a bonus though – there isn’t a day that qualifies as a “Monday” either, so there’s that.

But I’m worried about my fragile psyche and the changes that will slowly convert me from a person who shouts “Thank God It’s Friday!” to “Friday is just the day after Thursday and the day before Saturday!” I’m worried that at Karaoke, when my go-to crowd pleaser “Everybody’s Working for the Weekend” becomes “Everybody’s Just Working and Working,” that something inside me will just break.

So I’ve started talking with the site supervisor about changing our calendars to reflect the challenges of a day-less environment. Let me know what you think, but I’m proposing that we get rid of day names altogether. Why use them if they have no meaning? I’ve thrown out there the idea that instead of worrying about which day it is, we should just be worried about whether it is day or not. Get back to a pre-historic man sort of mentality that recognizes two states of time – Day and Night.

[Simulated Discussion between DynCorp Contract Workers:]

“Hey, what day is it?”

“It IS day.”

“Which day?”

“Day. You know – day?”

“Are you asking me now?”

“I’m not asking you sh*t! [Employee one isn't having a good daylight, but profanity probably isn't needed] You asked me about day and I told you day!”

“Hey, hold on there! Just tell me what day it is! Don’t you have a calendar?”

“My calendar is the sky, my friend. See that sun? Ba da boom – day! I’m going to go do some hunting and gathering? Want to come?”

“When are we getting back?”

“Thursday”

In all seriousness, I have really not suffered too much from the continual work cycle, and I think it will only make the time go faster, and more importantly, make weekends a little more precious when I get back from here.

I think a lot of my friends got this story from me as I was leaving:

“I’m supervising AP staff in a finance office in-country for DynCorp. As the country is being reconstructed, companies like DynCorp have been contracted to do some of that reconstruction, but also instructed to use Afghanistan-based businesses – so we are here to pay those bills when they come in.”

Yeah, that’s not it at all.

When I got here, I found out that the only bills I’m paying are the bills associated with the sole purpose of DynCorp’s mission here in Afghanistan. You might ask then, what is that mission? And you may have just asked a complicated question. But in short, DynCorp is a law enforcement company – training police forces around the world to bring their operations up to the standard of the police forces in the United States. Required training courses include: Doughnut Eating 102, Advanced Pastry Selection 203, Philosophy of Cruelers 301, Advanced Bear Claw Dipping 502, and General Deep Frying 101. Looking like a tough guy is a foundation of the curriculum, and as a benefit, all trainees get a pair of pretty cool aviator sunglasses.

Actually, the police training program is very dangerous – our instructors are deployed or embedded with the Afghan National Police (ANP) and spend most of their time at the police stations. You may have heard, but if you haven’t, a favorite target for terrorists in Afghanistan is the ANP stations. Keeping law enforcement as corrupt and unstable as possible is a high priority for the Taliban. So this is dangerous work.

But my job is not so much. I work in a finance office – paying the bills that relate to the primary mission of police training and the maintenance of the camp where I live.

We have several remote training centers (RTC) where we do training activities, and they are all over the country. As this contract winds down, those RTC’s are being transitioned over to another contract, but we still maintain and pay the bills for centers in Jalalabad and Islam Quala, which, if you look at a map, are at the far east and far west of the country. For a country the size of Texas, this situation makes for a healthy bit of travel. I don’t have to go to the RTC’s, but our police advisors do, and every bit of that travel is dangerous.

Lastly, the contract that I am working on with DynCorp was awarded by the Department of State. The contract is transitioning to the Department of Defense. Other popular contracts by the DoS and DoD include, poppy erradication, major crime investigation and bossing people around. I made that last one up.

So I thought you might want to know that this is what I’m doing for a living over here. I’ve got a lot of friends that are scattered across the spectrum of polictical views from far left to far right, so some of you will think I’m a war profiteer and some of you may think I’m serving my country. You would all be wrong. I’M DOING IT FOR THE MONEY! Okay, so you war profiteer opinion-havers would all be right.

One of the two controllable factors in an encounter with a terrorist who is targetting you for attack, is what they call “Time and Place Predictability.” If somebody observes you making the same route each day, they can easily plan a brilliant ambush to take you unawares. Maybe this is difficult to read if you have someone over here or in the military, so let’s soften it up a little bit. . . .

One of the two controllable factors in an encounter with a salesperson in a department store who is targeting you for a sale, is what they call, “Time and Place Predictability.” If you always go to the store on Mondays and you walk the same route through the ailes, it becomes easy for that salesperson to plan a brilliant sales pitch that will quickly relieve you of your resistance and cash.

Everyone tracking?

Well, I was thinking about that this afternoon when I headed out for my first run around the camp. One lap around the place is about a half mile, and it’s a great course because the long end of the rectangle that you run is on a hill, so on the back side of the camp, it’s a long 250 meters of uphill.

But as I was running, I was completely time and and place predictable.

[Simulated Terrorist Dialog:]

“Rahim – look at this guy! He’s in the exact same spot every 3.5 minutes! Is he insane?”

“Shall we shoot him?”

“Rahim – who do you think you are? Osama bin Laden? [Rahim feels mocked by these words] Don’t you know that you never shoot someone who is exercising?” [Rahim is cuffed behind the ears]

But let me tell you, running at 6500 feet is . . . what’s the word? Oh yes – hard. The thing I keep thinking about is how when I get back and run my first race at 2,700 feet in Boise that I will seem to have two sets of lungs – each set of lungs will be so amazing that I’ll finish that race at least a few minutes ahead of my personal best. And people will be like, “Nice lungs.” And I’ll be like, “Which pair?”

So while it may put me in the wrong place at the wrong time, over and over and over again, I think I’m going to stick with it.

Today was a day on the range – allowing a bunch of non-security people like myself to shoot guns so that we know what it is like. We shoot the M9 pistol by Berretta and the M4 Bushmaster rifle, both of which are available at your local Cabella’s.

The shooting range is north of camp, which was a nice little drive from our camp, heading south, then east, then north to the range. It was the first time I’d been outside the camp and it was, again, very shocking to see the outside world and the kind of desolation that is out there.

Here’s me, shooting the M9.

My stance is all wrong and I look like an idiot, but I’ve got to admit, shooting this pistol was really fun and not as difficult as I thought it would be.

I’ve never shot an assault rifle or a 9mm pistol, so this was all new. Nobody else would step up, so I went first on both weapons. You can see my pattern here for the M4 – not very good, especially since I fired 20 rounds at only 25 meters out.  My rifle was malfunctioning though, and a few of those high shots are due to the fact that even though the selector was on semi-, there were several trigger pulls that resulted in some two-shot bursts. I think if I was expecting them, I could have kept the second rounds down a bit, but as it was, I was just glad to get 50% of my shots in the center, and another 25% in the center-body area.

Here’s the pistol target at the same distance. You can see my leftist tendencies very clearly. But I was proud of this one because that pistol is a bit harder to shoot 20 shots in a row at this distance. Plus, I blew this guy’s right arm right off. Unless he’s a lefty, he’s now completely defenseless.

Our instructor in the picture is actually from Coeur d’Alene, which was cool – to find that there are some other Idahoans here.

So anyway, look out Taliban. Not only will I audit you, but also shoot you. Audit first, shoot second, ask questions later. Audit questions.

Actually, I don’t get to carry a weapon or even shoot one again the entire time I’m here, so this was my first and last hurrah. I think I made the most of it.

This latest Rob Bell book that I finished had a lot of things to say, but as I was reading it on a plane on my way to Dubai, one thing stood out in the middle of one of the chapters. Rob threw out a statement about people – sort of a universal idea – that we are all members of the same tribe, all in the same boat, all on our way to some different or greater future. He was talking about heaven and hell, but when I was waiting for my plane to fly out to Kabul, I was looking all around and seeing a huge variety of people. I was seeing all the differences, but somehow feeling a kinship to each of them. We were all headed to the same place.

Since I’ve been here, I’ve heard a lot of opinions about the locals. I’m working in a section of four desks with low cubicle walls between them, and two of the four desks are manned by Afghanis who have worked for my company for several years now. They drive an hour each way to work, through Kabul.

They speak Persian, these two. One has a tattoo on his arm, right where I have a tattoo as well. His tattoo is Dari for his name. Mine is a large cross. I was asking him whether or not my mark was offensive to him and his religious beliefs. He laughed and said that it wasn’t, but he was happy that I would ask. The other Afghan is studying to get his bachelor’s in Business. Both of these guys are making something of themselves.

I look at them, and I see the obvious truth – that the Afghan people have as much potential as I do. They are people. We are in the same tribe and in the same boat – on our way to something different or greater. I have a lot of hope for the people here in this country. My company is helping to train people to be the best police force that they can be here in a third-world country. I’m optimistic that somewhere down the line, the Afghan National Police may be all that it needs  to be.

But that’s not the story that I get from most of the guys that we hear from about the locals. The tame end of the opinions just talk about the Afghans as stupid – that they don’t think as well as we do. They walk out into traffic without looking. They have no moral compass, working as police during the day, but placing IED’s along the road at night for the Taliban. No loyalty. No honor. This group of people is just dumb.

Those are the conservative judgements. Other contractors, who have been on the job for years now, actively signing contracts to fulfill a mission to teach these people modern law enforcement techniques, talk about the Afghans with much less respect. There have been things said about the natives that I would not repeat to anyone else – embarrassing things. These are the kind of rumors that, even if they are true, are not worth repeating.

I stop listening after a while. I know that the truth of the world is that there are a lot of people in it that are different than me. There are a lot of people in this world outside the US that do things that would make your jaw drop to the floor. I don’t deny it. If the rumors are true about the Afghani people, then there are issues here with the sexual exploitation of women and children. There are religious laws that require brutal and swift punishments with uneven effects for men compared to women. There is forced labor for kids, and people are often sold into slavery – exported to Dubai to work for the super rich. Copyright law is a joke here, and most of the movies that you find at the bazaar each week are pirated copies.

I will grant all of this, but as I heard all of those allegations, I couldn’t help but think, “We are converting them to Americans!” One quick swing through the internet will show you all of these transgressions and worse, right inside our own borders.

Now, I don’t have the experience these cops have in spending time with the people. But what I do know is this – Afghanistan ain’t the nicest neighborhood in the world. In fact, the history of this place is one long string of war, invasion, and subservience to dominating world powers. I’m not talking about the United States or United Nations. I’m not even talking about the Taliban or even the Soviet Union.

Afghanistan is the crossroads of Asia, and Kabul is right on the busiest trade route between Asia and southern Europe. For over two millennia, this area has been the stomping grounds of the world’s most dominating military forces. In 700 A.D., Alexander the Great bludgeoned his way through the valley, building castles that stand to this day. 700 years later, Genghis Khan brought his own brand of conquering, killing as many people as he could, and bringing his own ethnic tribe to the area, seeking to breed the Afghans out of existence. They weren’t called Afghans then, but it wasn’t too much longer after the Khan’s dominance faded,  that the British established a presence here. India, which included Pakistan at the time, needed a definite border with Afghanistan, and it was the British who determined what it would be. 25 years after that, the Soviets, who had been friends of the region, invaded to prevent the spread of Marxism in the country. That invasion was a ten-year debacle of scorched earth warfare that left the Soviets with nothing to show for 10 years of war, and left the Afghans with little more than a valley of dust.

The Taliban instituted that strict, conservative Islamic law that is the thing of legend and TV news report. When they stood their ground and didn’t give up Osama, the US took it’s turn as invader.

Can anyone in the United States who has not immigrated from another country, say that they in any way understand the Afghan people? How in the world could we make a judgement about what this people group should or should not do? We don’t know what life is like after 2,000 years of oppression, poverty and an outright struggle for survival. We in the United States know 200 years. We know 200 years of relative super-prosperity. Our actions, decisions, abilities and resources are based in the experience of having nearly everything we want.

Here in Kabul, people live in mud-walled huts. They struggle to find enough food to feed their families. There is not enough water to go around and no dependable city systems for things like sewage, water or electricity. A policeman makes $120 per month. The life expectancy of the population is decades less than that of the US. In the winter, the air is thick with some of the worst pollution on the planet because the people burn anything they can to stay warm in the high mountain winter. They burn tires and other plastic products, which give off a toxic smoke that is killing the people who are using it to keep warm.

These are a whole bunch of facts that come together for me like this: in the US we understand a few things. As the best educated and wealthiest people on the planet, we understand that before a person can start to address their inner desire to become all that they possibly can become, they need to work on a few lower-level needs. Like food. Shelter. They need to have a feeling inside that says they are safe. We here in the US have got those needs covered – in spades. We’ve got houses built to exacting and super-safe codes, and in those houses we’ve got pantries full of food and on the street outside, the best law enforcement that exists in the world. We’re safe. We’re smart and we are able to reach out to others to help.

The people of Afghanistan don’t have these things. They fight for survival – which is not just the lyrics to a Journey song. They literally wake up in the morning with a mindset that is focussed on staying alive. How many times did you wake up this last week with the thought, “I’m going to stay alive today, no matter what it takes!”

Again, I don’t have the firsthand experience with the people in Kandahar or in the other parts of the country, but I’m going to just say that the people here have every ability that I have, but they never get to the level that I am on because they just can’t. There are too many needs that they have to worry about before they can even think about the things I am thinking about on a minute-by-minute basis. The people here are not less than human and they are not less than us – they are just the end product of 2000 years of tyranny and being in the wrong place. All. The. Time.

I had to write all this stuff down, and even though sometimes I want to scream that Gahfoor just can’t learn to create queries in Access, I quietly remind myself that he has to drive his car through areas that are still bristling with landmines. I’m going to do two things as I consciously choose not to judge him – one, give him the benefit of the doubt, and two, cut him a huge amount of slack.

And if you agree – post this as your Facebook status.

That was a joke I made up. The rest of this was pretty serious, huh?