Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Kandahar Afghanistan

     As-salaamu' alaykum - or Peace be Upon you. This is my first blog and my first entry into my first blog. A good friend told me at home to document and write about my experience while deployed to Afghanistan. So this is my attempt to be as much as a writer as I can be. It's not easy for us Engineers to string words together to try and convey thoughts without trying to draw pictures.

     I arrived here three weeks ago and have been very busy transitioning with the outgoing unit that we were replacing. The hand over was as seamless as it could be and we're now on our own to pick up where they left off. Although it's only been three weeks it's felt more like three months. It seems like we've already gone through a lot since our arrival here. The weather has been nice, the highs have been in the lower 80's and the night lows have been around 60. So it's a far cry from the negative temperatures in Wisconsin.

     A brief comparison of where I am: I basically live at Kandahar's version of JFK airport and I'm stuck in East New York, Brooklyn. The actual city of Kandahar is as far and out of sight as Newark, NJ. As far as I can tell there is no 'Nice' part of Kandahar and I am glad to report that the 'Blow out' hair cut has not made it to Afghanistan. So I finally found an area where Long Island hasn't influenced. :p

    I will update every so often and tell you of funny stories that happen and post pictures of the bizarre things that I'll see. So stay tuned and comment.