8 Mar

Above is a pic of me with a few of the children from our trip to the school a few weeks ago. I do not have any exciting pic so I thought I would throw this one up for everyone to see.

Today I spend a large part of my time coordinating some of the repairs for the recent damage to our facility; and I thought owning a home was a lot of work! My role here is not to do the work but help teach the Iraqi Officers how to motivate and manage the workers that do the work. Every day we get closer and closer to being organized to handle all the logistic issues at my location, but this was not always the case. In the past few weeks we have been more reactive then proactive and I hate playing catch-up. In addition to being busy there were 135 new Iraqi Soldiers that arrive and required training. These lucky soldiers are straight from the streets. They enlisted and were sent to our location to get their initial training - yup...no boot camp for them. I am sure the US did the same thing back in the late 1700's so really this "street to soldier" concept is not new. I have met a few of the new soldiers and them seem to be eager to work and support their country...we will see how they feel when they are moving boxes in the middle of the night when it is raining. That's all for now....