I am home!

What a poor job updating this blog I've done! In short, the last five months were so uneventful I really didn't have much to write about. Sad, but true. I've returned to the USA and appreciate it much more than I had before. Be thankful everything you could ever want is not more than a few minutes drive from your current location. In Djibouti, the main mission for the day for an average Djiboutian is to find enough water to drink. Everything past that is just a bonus.

While an interesting experience, my greatest lesson learned is that I can accomplish far more from outside the government than from within it. Also, the average person really doesn't care about politics, skin color, etc., but just wants themselves and their families to make it through to the next day. A tiny fraction of the world population creates trouble for the gigantic majority. Someone should try and stop them . . .

Five Months Left

Apologies for such a long time since an update. For awhile internet was almost non-existent, but laziness is most to blame.

I passed my half-way point in February as most of the people I'd arrived with hopped on a plane headed home after their six months was up.

Since December, a few things have happened. Namely:

I've switched jobs. Now I work in the office that schedules aircraft to come down from Germany and fly passengers and cargo all over East Africa.

I got to fly around in a French helicopter to see a live fire exercise put on by the Foreign Legion.

I got to ride around in a C-12 (small twin turboprop plane) and see familiar places by air.

Shot some machine guns in the desert

Flew around in a rescue helicopter and pretended to be a downed air crew while the pilots practiced their landings.

Spent many unproductive hours in the office.

Read "For Whom the Bell Tolls"

Visited Kenya

Rode crazy go karts that are faster than they should be.

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I was impressed with Nairobi, Kenya. Compared to Djibouti, Nairobi is 20 years in the future. Traffic and air pollution is horrible, but business is thriving and people appear to be leading productive lives.

I've fallen into a regular routine now. Djibouti is so small that once you've seen the sights, there's not much left to do. Some people go out every day but I don't have the energy or the desire to do that. Getting sacked by homeless people begging for money gets annoying quickly.

I wish I could say I'm doing more, but my job is very repetitive and predictable.

Whale Sharks, Lake Assal, and Germany

Not too much to report in the last couple of months.

I went on a shale shark trip near the end of October. We took a larger boat into the Gulf of Tadjoura and then got on small boats to go look for whale sharks. You look for the end of their tail sticking out of the water and then jump into the water before they swim away. The whole day we saw about three tails. One of those sightings turned into actually seeing one in its entirety. We saw the tail, and I jumped out of the boat. I accidentally jumped out right on top of the animal so I swam away from it only to be run over by the boat. Luckily the props weren't running so I didn't get chopped up. The whale shark was pretty big but it dove after a few seconds and was gone. Only one other person got a good look at it before it swam away.

The ride back was naptacular and I was able to get some good pictures of the sunset as we returned.

The next weekend some of us went to Lake Assal. Lake Assal is super salty. It's also well below sea level.

On the way to the lake we saw some baboons running around.

Would you like some water with your salt?

It's very easy to float in Lake Assal.

After we finished splashing around we went looking for an extinct volcano that was supposedly nearby. After asking some kids wandering around in the middle of nowhere where it was, we eventually found it on our own. The old volcano is in between Lake Assal and the Gulf of Tadjoura. One of the other guys and I climbed up to the top of it.

The extinct volcano crater. Gulf of Tadjoura in the background.

I found out mid-November I would be heading to Germany to attend a class on Mortuary Affairs. Luckily, I have to friends in the area; one from high school and one from college.

Hanging out reading upside down newspapers and eating cereal.

Breakfast of champions.

Heidelberg Castle

Inside the castle.

Downtown Heidelberg

In the streets downtown.

Brats and sauerkraut

Germany was a good trip but it's time to return to Djibouti. I'll speak to you all again once I've returned. Until then, happy trails.

A Busy Weekend: 1-4 OCT 2009

Thursday is like Friday for Djiboutians. That being said, Thursday night is party night. We went downtown to eat at a very good pizza place and then proceeded to a nightclub.

I'm pretty sure this was the first time I've observed, firsthand, prostitutes openly seeking business. I would liken it to being an attractive girl in a bar full of men. As soon as our group got inside we were swarmed. The French Foreign Legion was there in uniform and several of them were leaving with women as we were coming in. I would imagine the legion has its fair share of STDs from Djibouti. When we left downtown we discovered someone had thrown dirt all over the car's windshield because we didn't pay a homeless person to "guard" our vehicle while we were inside.

Friday night we went to a party on a Korean Navy ship. There was plenty of very good food and a lot of people to talk to. A Korean officer behind me spoke fluent English without an accent so I asked him where he was from. He said he grew up in the US, went to college at Virginia Military Institute, then did OCS for the Korean Navy.

There was a French officer behind me the second time I was in line for food so I asked him a question in French and he was happy to talk to me. We talked about the French units in Djibouti and how long deployments are them. Accompanied tours are two years and unaccompanied tours are four months. He also said when you deploy with the French military you get double salary. After dinner the Korean Sailors put on a show with music and dancing. It was a lot of fun.

Sing it, Korean Sailor!

Korean Navy Dance Party

On Sunday one of the guys in the office and I went on a crazy adventure. He had found a beach on Google Maps that looked nice so we decided to find it. The satellite image didn't show how the path to the beach included several hundred feet of elevation change and roads barely passable to goats. I'm amazed that we did not: flip over, get a flat tire, or get stuck. One situation was pretty bad and we had to take water jugs out of the back of the SUV and put them on the hood to get enough traction to get out of the hole we were in. It was nerve racking but we made it out safe.

For some reason there were people every now and then just wandering around in dried up river beds or down huge hills. Who knows why they were there.

We drove down into that.

The point we almost got stuck.

Nice scenery.

19 Year Old MREs: 19 SEP 2009

Today afforded me the opportunity to get my hands on some real Army history. There were several cases of Meals Ready to Eat (MREs) made in 1990 that had to be disposed of. Knowing I'd probably never get to see MREs that old outside of a museum, I went to go help get rid of them.

I was very surprised to see how similar an almost twenty year old MRE is to a modern one. Many of the entrees and supplemental foods are the same and almost every company that makes MRE components now made them back then, too. Items I'd never seen before I kept. These included freeze dried fruits that look kind of like space ice cream you can find in museum gift shops and cookie and brownie bars that are tightly compressed. I kept those because they remind me of food I saw from the Apollo space missions.

I also tasted a few of the items. The chocolate covered cookie looked and smelled fine, but at the molecular level the cookie must have broken down because it tasted nasty. The freeze dried peaches were very sugary and did not taste good. The crackers, however, tasted just like the crackers out of a brand new MRE. I guess that's also why hardtack from the Civil War is still edible.

These Charms had become gelatinous.

Nineteen year old spaghetti: Delicious

"It belongs in a museum!"

Playing Catchup: 16 SEP 2009

I know it's been awhile since I last made an entry. The reason behind my tardiness is a combination of circumstance and laziness. The circumstance is that the macbook I'd had since December of 2007 decided to eat its own hard drive on 16 SEP. It took three weeks for my new Asus eeePC to arrive and until then I made some entries on paper.

The laziness is self-explanatory.

Macbook R.I.P. - December 2007 to September 2009

Acclimatization 22 AUG - 7 SEP 2009

French Foreign Legion in town

Driving through town

The road to the beach

Looking down on the beach

The beach is in a valley

These guys were just sitting on the side of the road

Our trusty Land Rover Defender

My view for the rest of the day

I've been here in Djibouti for two and a half weeks.

I've been assigned to the J-4. In almost all military staffs of battalion size or greater there are certain "'S' Shops" that perform certain jobs. S-1 handles personnel and administrative issues like pay and assignments, S-2 deals with intelligence, S-3 handles operations, S-4 handles supply and logistics, S-5 handles plans, S-6 communications, and some more. The J-4 is simply a joint logistics cell.

Within the J-4 are several smaller offices, two of which are Logistics Operations (Log Ops) and the Joint Movement Center (JMC). Log ops makes sure that teams running humanitarian assistance missions throughout eastern Africa have food, water, and other supplies. Big countries have a single officer assigned to them while smaller countries are clumped together and put under another officer. It is that officer's responsibility to stay in contact with the people on the ground and make sure they have what they need to function. The JMC makes sure that aircraft getting those supplies to the customers are scheduled and figures out what cargo and passengers the aircraft will be flying and where they are going.

Both of the offices have all the required personnel and apparently no one knew I was coming until about two days before I showed up. As a result, I'll be doing odd jobs until one of the country officers in log ops leaves. Then I'll take over his or her countries.

In the evenings I've been helping teach some of the locals English. At the same time I'm trying to pick up Somali and, to a lesser extent, Afar. There are several ethnic groups and languages throughout the area and a lot of refugees from the surrounding countries. I am really going to try to pick up some of the language while I'm here.

Today, Labor Day, some of the J-4 went to the beach. We cooked out on an old exhaust fan duct that had been made into a grill. The beach was great except for the spiny underwater plants that were between the beach and the reef. At low tide you had to swim through the plants to get anywhere. There was an old shipwreck near the beach and we swam to it. It wasn't worth it because there wasn't much to see and it was hard to get out there and hard to get back. There were lots of brightly colored fish swimming around closer to the reef past the plants.

From the horn . . .