The Inauguration

So, I was in DC to finish out processing off active duty (I am now officially a civilian as of 16 Jan, woohoo!), pack for my month long vacation and attend the inauguration. Some of the photos from that day.


The 3rd Street tunnel was closed to traffic, but not human traffic as you can see. It was amazing to hearing the singing and cheering as people came up out of the tunnel. It's normally about 3-4 lanes of vehicle traffic.


My ring side seat view of the inauguration from inside the Marian Koshland Science Museum of the National Academy of Sciences on 6th and E NW. They had a big screen in the main hall and filled it with as many people as wouldn't violate the fire code. There were people out in the foyer as well. It was so cool.

This was the crowd we watched the inauguration with. Everyone was pretty excited and there seemed to be a great sense of reverence for the historical-ness of the moment. It was pretty cool to be a part of it in the same city.

So, even if you don't agree with the politics of the current administration, it was still very cool. It was a day that set an example of democracy at its finest and truest to the rest of the world. It was a fine day to be in DC.

Really, I'm a Princess!

So, I spent a few days in the great state of Washington visiting nieces and nephews. It was great fun spent sledding, watching Enchanted and episodes of He-man with the nephews. One of the highlights was playing dress up. Here's the photo.


Okay, so I was the queen that day complete with homemade crown made to fit. It was great fun.

I love snow

In December it was homecoming time. It was great to be back in DC for a few days and then head off to Utah to see family and a few friends. It was fun to see siblings and nieces and nephews, oh, and parents too.

Plus it snowed a lot and I love snow. Some fun snow photos of northern Utah.

The family dogs enjoying the snow.


Me, walking through all almost 3 feet of snow. I'm kicking my leg out to show how deep the snow is. Plus, it's kind of hard to walk through that much snow.



I love snowy scenes with animals.


A beautiful snowy day looking towards the mountains to the east of my parents' house. It was so pretty that day. I loved it.

Okay, enough of the boring stuff--on to the next adventure!

My apologies

First of all, my apologies for not having written anything for a while. I had two laptops that died while in Afghanistan. I sent the newest one still covered by the warranty back and was waiting for the check to come in order to buy a new one. Then I traveled for a month to Italy, Malta and Kenya, so I was completely out of the loop.

Now, I'm in a place where there is great internet and a brand new Sony laptop (Boo on the two HP laptops that died), and I'm now able to update the blog. So, I will share a bit more of Afghanistan and then my trip to Utah to see family and then my month long travel through Italy, Malta and Kenya. There will be multiple posts today covering different aspects of my life over the past few months. I hope you enjoy.

P.S. My Mom is doing much better. She is recovering from having a plate inserted on her clavicle so it will heal correctly and from everything else. Thanks for the prayers and support.

Home

It finally happened. I arrived back in the U.S. on Wednesday evening. Baltimore International Aiport never looked so good. After an excruciatingly long flight from Kuwait to Germany and then BWI, complete with delays and the wickedest turbulence I've ever been in, we arrived exhausted and probably a little bit smelly after traveling for close to 20 hours.

The volunteers from the USO are great and were just outside customs with smiles, handshakes, thank-yous and a little goody bag. It was humbling to have my hand shook by several people as I pushed my bags along and to feel that I was finally home.

I hopped on a plane for a 20 minute flight to Philadelphia and then hopped on another plane for an hour flight to Norfolk, where I am now. My east coast mom and dad, my cousins Jay and Sue, were waiting for me at the airport and helped me get settled in. It was so good to have family waiting for me at the airport, to get hugs and have someone else carry MY bags for a change. It was even better to finally take a shower without shoes on and use all the hot water I wanted. I didn't turn off the water to shave my legs either... Heaven.

The next morning I started the admin process for coming off active duty and returning to my real life as a civilian and a reservist once a month. I finally got to the go the dentist to check on a tooth that had been annoying me for about three months. I ended up spending the afternoon reclining in the dentist's chair getting a root canal. Not my idea of a fun way to spend my first day of freedom, but my tooth is not bugging me anymore and it was the least painful root canal I've had thus far.

I can now walk barefoot across the floor to the bathroom. I am sleeping in a comfortable bed. I can walk anywhere I want to and walk for more than two minutes before I'm at my destination. I saw one of my best friends. This is my first weekend off I've had in close to 10 months. I'm in a real home with my cousins, eating home cooked meals and sitting on a real couch. I went shopping and bought a new dress. I drank water from the tap without fear of getting some horrible waterborne parasite.

This morning after breakfast in my pjs (luxury), I sat and watched the birds and squirrels feeding in the backyard. The bird bath had ice on it and I watched a robin trying to break the ice. I watched squirrels chasing each other across the yard and up and down trees. I saw a bright orangeish-red cardinal bouncing along on the ground scooping up seeds. Heaven.

The highlight of today was raking leaves for about an hour outside this morning. It was great listening to the sound of leaves being piled up on one another, it's one of my favorite sounds. It was beautiful just being able to rake leaves.

While it's great to be home, it is a bit of an adjustment. My heart hurt last night as we drove through a shopping area and I compared it to what I left behind. We have so much and they have so little. I hope I don't start to take it for granted. I hope I remember frequently how much I am blessed with.

Life is good and the simple things in life provide the biggest pleasures. Home!

Heading Home

It's difficult to believe that a year has come and gone, however it must have because I'm sitting in Kuwait on my way home from Afghanistan. I thought last year's Thanksgiving would be the weirdest ever--Safeway's turkey dinner from a cardboard box with my parents, the ward missionaries and a couple of friends in my empty apartment that I had moved into storage the weekend before--but I think Thanksgiving in Kuwait is one for the books. Dinner was good twice, both for lunch and supper. And then three of us women traveling together played pool in MWR for an hour and afterwards watched a Cary Grant movie. Ah, Thanksgiving will never be the same again, thankfully.

A lot has happened this past year, some of it I can talk about and other parts I can't or don't really want to remember, but over all I'm really glad that I had this experience. I learned so much about myself, other people and a new place in the world. I'm sure that I will be using my experiences and learning from this past year for the rest of my life. My biggest hope coming into this was that I would help to make a difference in the world and I feel that I have.

Everyone has a role to play and even the person in the back corner of the stage must play their role well in order for the whole production to succeed, at least that's what every play director says to their cast. It may seem cliche but it's true. I was not the one out in front making decisions or going outside the wire everyday, but I supported the people who did those things and tried to make sure they had less to worry about.

I think our team did make a difference. The Farah Provincial Governor Ahmin said this a few weeks ago, "Peace doesn't have feet. It's up to us to bring it here. Peace doesn't have a voice. It's up to us to speak for it." He summed up our purpose for the past year and our ultimate goals in Afghanistan beautifully. We are hoping for peace, working for peace and in some cases giving up everything for peace.

One day while at lunch we were eating bananas, a rare treat in Farah. One of our intrepeters told us that during Taliban times bananas were not allowed in some places. We asked why. He said, because in order to eat a banana you must take its skin off, making it naked. We laughed thinking he was joking and then realized he was serious. Think about that the next time you peel a banana.

The steps to peace are small in Afghanistan, but not insignificant. There is hope and peace will one day have a strong, supported voice there.

**************************************************************************

P.S. Okay, totally off subject: My mom fell down a flight of stairs at home a few days ago and broke her collar bone, some bones in her face and cracked a couple ribs. Thankfully, no brain damage and so far no surgery is needed because all the bones stayed together and didn't separate. However, as you can imagine she is in a lot of pain. Hopefully, she was able to leave the hospital on Wednesday. Please keep her in your prayers as she recovers. Thanks.

See you all soon at home in the U.S. Much love, Christine

A drop in a bucket

Earlier today I was writing to a friend of mine, actually he’s a retired senior chief, about life here. He had asked me how life was in Afghanistan. Most days that's an easy question for me, but for those who live here it is so not easy.

Lately I’ve thought a lot about our team’s mission of helping the Afghans achieve self governance. It seems like a losing battle at times, but we are very blessed right now with what seems to be a good city mayor, as well as a very bright and good governor. At least they seem to be less corrupt than the previous ones. Nevertheless, it is difficult to identify substantial changes and quantify them as we look forward to the end of our deployment. We hope we made the right decisions and took the right steps in implementing programs which encourage not only self governance but self sufficiency as well.

In our leadership training at Ft Bragg, NC one of the take-away points was more or less this: “We are not here for touchdowns, but first downs. Teams that come behind us may score the first touchdown and we should not expect to leave a huge scorecard behind.” This is true because every move we make doesn’t reveal the results right away, and all we can do is hope it works right and move our objectives closer to the end zone. (I’m not a fan of sports analogies, but they do work.) I think we are achieving success, but only time will tell.

While this is not the place to go into details about some of our successes I can relate this story. I listened to a post-mission brief this afternoon. One of our teams had gone out to do a quality assurance check on a project funded by us, but carried out by local Afghans in a remote village. One soldier related his conversation with one of the village elders. The elder told the soldier that he really liked it when we came to his village, because for several days afterwards his people are in a good mood. He also said that he likes us to come because we treat his people with respect and we genuinely help them.

This is good for us to hear. It means we are getting part of the job right and our soldiers are doing their jobs right. It also means that at least in this village these people are open to their own government and are probably more willing to work the provincial government now. This is good news for us, but it’s only one village. It’s a drop in the bucket.

In the email to my senior chief friend I used this analogy to describe measuring our success. It's like having a 5 gallon bucket that you need to fill with water and the only water source is a drip from a faucet outside in the middle of a desert. So, you put the bucket underneath the drip and hope that it fills up. Granted it's going to take a while, but eventually it will fill up. It's overwhelming to see the need in our province and know that we are only looking at a drop in the bucket and that maybe our effort is only a drop in the bucket to them.

It's a difficult thing to set out to win a war by conquering the hearts and minds of a people. No one is sure that it can be done, because quite frankly where has it been done before? We can't leave now that we are here. If we do, then Afghanistan becomes a safe haven again, where Al Qaeda can regroup, train and prepare attacks. Granted we have that now in Pakistan, but they are focusing on getting us out of Afghanistan and hopefully don't have the resources to do much more.

I think we are making good things happen here. There are good people everywhere who make the right choices and living according to the light and truth they have in their lives. There are good parents everywhere too, who are trying so hard to get the best opportunities for their children, the best education and the best jobs. So many have limited choices and all they know is the fight to put food on the table, let alone clothes on their children's backs, but they still try. We can't give up on them. We have to keep putting drops in the bucket because eventually and with enough drops of water the bucket will start to fill and we will see more positive changes and so will they.

My favorite things

So, in a world where all around me is dust, yucky boys and very limited wardrobe choices, I've had to come up with a list of things that I like about this place.

Rain drops on roses and whiskers on kittens... Okay, seriously a few of my favorite things.

Letters. There's something about holding a piece of home in my hands and that's a letter is--a piece of home. It helps shorten the distance and depending on the day makes you either really homesick or just feel loved.

Pink. Not the hugest fan of pink, but I do like it. With my limited wardrobe choices, pink is a favorite thing. I have pink sheets, pink pjs, a pink mug, pink blanket, hot pink Crocs, pink nail polish and even pink pens (with black ink). It helps me feel like a girl and I really need that here.

Music--any kind, but here I especially love MOTAB--Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Not only are they America's choir, but they are also good for when I need that extra boost in my day. I usually don't have time to stop and read during the day, but I can turn on my iPod and listen to them anytime I need to.

Scriptures. I love reading the scriptures. Not only do they bring peace into my heart, but it helps me to escape the daily grind of being here. The same with reading books.

Friends. I have some really good friends here. They make this whole thing worthwhile.

Jets. After a few hours of being rocketed, the sound of a jet flying low is a beautiful sound. It's a safe sound. It means we really aren't alone out here.

Thoughts of home. Yes, I get homesick, but thinking about home is a good thing. It's what I'm here for. Lately, it's been fun to think about what I'll do when I get home. For instance, not set my alarm and shower barefoot and drink a glass of real milk.

Running. Yes, Rob your big sister is actually saying she likes to run. I don't love it, but I do like it and it's great for stress management.

Funny one-liner jokes. For instance: Why do gorillas have big nostrils? Have you seen the size of their fingers! Or this one, my new favorite from Reader's Digest... A dyslexic man walked into a bra. (Seriously, I'm laughing here.)

Game Over. The call sign for when our guys are back inside from their mission. It means they're safe.

HIMYM. For those who don't know Barney, and "Have you met Ted?", if you need a laugh this is the show to watch. As they say on How I Met Your Mother, "It's gonna be legen-wait for it-dary!" I love the laughs on this show. It's one of my guilty pleasures.

The sunset. Lately, the only quiet I get somedays is when I'm standing at wire looking out over the walls at the mountains as the sun goes down. The rocks change color as the sun goes down--purples, reds, pinks and oranges. It's beautiful. My camera doesn't do it justice.

Pancakes every Friday with strawberry syrup. The strawberry syrup is made fresh and has whole strawberries in it. They're the best food thing here and we have them every Friday for brunch.

....these are a few of my favorite things.

Anyway, I know you all want to hear more about my adventures here, but I really don't have any. I haven't left the FOB in a while, which is kind of boring, so there's just not much to tell. Life here can be pretty simple though and I do like that. Simple is a good thing.