Made it to Shank

The first picture is of my bunk house at Qalaal House, the second is Kabul, the third is look back through the pass to get to Kabul and the last is a community near shank.  All the houses and fields are surrounded by walls.

Something I meant to blog about yesterday but I forgot.  The Corps hires nationals to do things like clean the barracks and offices and to cook and work in the DFAC.  They also provide security and work as inspectors on our jobs.  We pay them pretty good money for over here.  It provides some of them the skills they need to better building back their country, a good income and compensates them for risking their lives to work for us.  To my point, one of the cooks was a jet pilot for the Afghan Army but now works for the Corps as a cook.  First, I didn’t know that Afghanistan even had jets.  Second, that’s just plain crazy.

It’s been a pretty busy day.  I had to get up early and get all my gear out to the compound so it could be loaded for the trip to the airport.  We drove by the US Embassy on the way out.  

OBSERVATIONS ON THE TRIP TO THE AIRPORT:  The houses were even worse shape than I remembered.  It looked like a pretty bad place outside the green zone.  A lot of people living in tents.  I did see some horse drawn carriages racing down the street trying to keep up with the traffic.  I also saw some dudes riding around in the back of trucks with guns.  They weren’t insurgents, I think they had something to do with the local police.  The Afghani National Police has a lot of different factions, some more professional than others. 

OBSERVATIONS ON THE FLIGHT:  I actually saw some water!  There was one lake or reservoir on the other side of the mountain from the Green Zone.  There are a ton of houses in Kabul.  I don’t know how many people live there, but they are packed in tight.  I also saw some houses in some strange places on the way to Shank.  Once outside the city most of the houses were built along river beds in the ravines of the mountains.  One valley had one house in it along a small river bed, I’m not even sure how that person gets to their house.  I didn’t see any roads and it was in the middle of nowhere. 

FOB Shank is a pretty big base.  It’s real congested at one end and pretty wide open at the other.  That’s where the runway is and where we are also building some of our projects. 

Well, I think I’m calling it a night!