Greetings from the North

Hello everyone,

I have a decent internet connection right now, so I thought I would stop in and try and add a short post to the blog.

The new unit I'm with seems to really understand the concept of mentoring the Afghans and winning the hearts and minds of the local populice, so that is very good to see. We are doing a lot of good things up here for the Afghan people, and they seem to be appreciative of that. Whenever we go downtown to mentor our police counterparts we go on foot patrols through the city to talk with the locals and of course buy some local food. Everyone we've met so far has been very friendly, one local baker even gave us a free sample of what looked like a donut hole that you would get an an Indian resturant.

I was fortunate enough to have lunch at a Generals house a couple days ago. It was a meal fit for a king. The Afghans certainly know how to entertain. We started off with fresh fruit from the area. Then they brought out this calzone looking thing that had fried onions, tomatoes, and meat in it. Then came the lamb kabobs, about 9 per person... and of course the typical nan with rice and lamb meat. The best though was this ravioli looking dish. It was fancy ravioli noodles filled with meat and topped with a tomato sauce and yogurt. Afghan yogurt is far different from ours though. They let their yogurt ferment for a long time becuase they like the sour taste. It's different, but pretty good.

Other than that I'm just waiting for the snow to start flying. This hot weather is getting very old.

Take care,

Phil

Southern Afghanistsan

And a few more...

Southern Afghanistan

Here are a few pics as promised in the previous post.

Phil is the guy on the left with the moustache. He's hard to recognize! He has removed it more recently...

Phil has said to me many times that he feels like he's living in the Old Testament or at least seeing what it must have looked like during Bible times. Apparently this area gets pretty green during the spring - not so much this time of year!

This load is one of MANY that Phil has seen. You'll have to ask him the stories, but this is a small load compared to some he has seen, including cars on top of buses! I don't know how this truck doesn't tip over.

Phil is finally "home"

Phil has finally arrived at his new (and hopefully final) location in Afghanistan. We hope he will stay here for the rest of the deployment. He was pretty excited to have his own room, about three times the size of the closet he was in at the last location, but he thinks it may n ot last long with new troops coming in.

If you'd like his address, please click here to email me and I'll be happy to get it to you!

Phil's initial report of the location is that it's pretty. He's hoping to get some pics to me. When that happens, you can bet I'll post them here for you to see, too. It's the agricultural hub of Afghanistan, which must mean that there are plants and maybe even some water!

Phil said that he will ask around about the humanitarian assistance potential - and if it's a possibility, I'll put together some sort of information and you are welcome to participate in collecting supplies if you are interested.

Hopefully Phil will have the opportunity to write a post in the near future...until then, I'll post a few pics from a trip they took to southern Afghanistan on a day that the thermometer maxed out at 125!

Humanitarian Assistance 6 - What You Can Do

Thanks for stopping by! We hope you enjoy the pictures. If you go to the first post of Humanitarian Assistance you'll find Phil's description of their trip (I probably should have done them backwards, but it's too late now!).

A number of people have already asked me if we can send Phil more school supplies. Yes, we can. Phil is very willing to work with the necessary people on his end to distribute anything we send. Our church and a few families will be collecting more supplies for Phil and his team, if you would like to participate, please email me.

-Jolene

Humanitarian Assistance 5

Humanitarian Assistance 4

Humanitarian Assistance 3

Humanitarian Assistance 2

Humanitarian Assistance

This is an excerpt from an email Phil sent this week. I will attach the photos for you to enjoy!

Greetings everyone,

We were fortunate enough to do a humanitarian assistance mission yesterday so I thought I would email out some photos. We delivered some school supplies and some food to a semi remote village. Somehow in the translation the village thought that this was going to be a big food drop, so when we got to the village there were wheel barrows lining the main street.

Unfortunately for them, we didn't even have enough school supplies for all the kids. So the village elder helped us give out the supplies to the most needy families.

Most of the pictures are self-explanatory, but I'll give you a background on some of them. The little guy riding in the truck with us was the son of the one of the Afghan police officers. His dad was actually the public affairs person for their department, so I asked him if he knew how to take pictures too. He said yes, so I asked him where his camera was. He said his dad had it, so I let him borrow my SLR to see what he could do. Hence the picture of me looking all goofy.

The picture of the older man being mugged is what happens when you have stuff to hand out to children. He was handing out No. 2 pencils, that's how little these people have, kids were practically crawling up his leg to get a pencil.

We had two boxes of crayons to hand out as well. So they broke them down and handed one crayon to each child, and they were going just as crazy to have one crayon as they were for the pencils.

They all seemed like pretty good kids. One of them tried, unsuccessfully, to convert me to Islam, but you have to give him props for his effort.

Take Care,

Phil