Staying Busy!

It has been some time since my last post, so I have a lot of catching up to do. Work has been VERY busy. With only 4 MILOBS here, it means that I am either on duty or patrolling all day, every day…. Which is fine by me. As mentioned in an earlier posting, the month of Oct was very popular for people taking leave, hence me having to adjust my desired dates to get home. Since the Operations Officer is on leave, I had the Ops reigns passed down to me. Nothing too exciting, just a few schedules and reports to tidy up and send to the Sector every week. Patrols are still very fulfilling. I went on an Air Reconnaissance patrol with the Sector commander, a 1-star Bangladeshi General, and his staff last week. There has been some recent instability in Guinea due to the postponement of their run-off elections. They are anticipating some fleeing refugees to take refuge in the border towns of Liberia until the instability subsides. We flew over a lot of the border towns to observe the influx of people. I was chosen to go on this flight because they needed a MILOB to write the observation special report and what better person to choose then me? They seem to think that because I am an America, my English is superb. Haha. Shannon can attest that this is not the case. The flight was very uneventful. From the air, we couldn’t see tell that there was any more people then there should be… which indicated that they are not crossing the border…. yet. The General was pretty cool. We had a little impromptu brief in the morning before we left and he wanted to talk to me the entire time they were briefing. After the brief he invited me into his office to discuss the mission and drink tea. Everywhere we went he had to have a cup of tea and wanted me there. Due to weather, the flight was delayed, so there was a lot of sitting around and drinking tea. We even stopped for fuel in Voinjama and he grabbed me by the hand and went to drink tea. When we got back I wrote up this glowing report. He seemed to be pleased with it because he told his staff to submit it to the Force Commander without question.

I believe on the last post we planned on buying/cooking a goat for a weekend BBQ. We ended up buying a pig instead. We bought a pig from a nearby town for $40, brought it back to the security/undertakers so that they could kill, clean and cut it up for us. We marinated it with some Brazilian flavors (lime, garlic, salt, pepper, onion) and let it sit overnight before cooking it up on the grill. It turned out pretty good. It tasted very similar to what my dad cooks up during Christmas. The first BBQ we cooked up the 2 rear legs and a part of the back. There were only 4 of us that ate it (only 4 because the remaining 3 people are Muslim and don’t eat pork) so needless to say we ate a lot of pork. We gave the rest to the security and other locals and they were happy as can be. We cooked up the rest of it this past Thursday. This batch was much more tasty then the first. I will include some pictures at the bottom of this post.

On one of the patrols this past week, we visited a local rubber farm. Rubber is the largest natural resource in Liberia. Everywhere you look, there are rows and rows of rubber trees. Firestone has a very large plantation as well as many buying stations in every large town. We talked to the manager of the farm and when he opened the door to the office for us, there was a California state flag hanging in the doorframe. On the inside of the door he had Mcain/Palin stickers stuck everywhere. Very random, especially out here in Africa.

I am still on track to leave Gbarnga for Monrovia on Friday the 22^nd, catch my flight to the USA on the 24^th… arriving in VA on the 25^th. I still cant believe that in less then a month im going to be a father. Scary.

I guess that is it for now….. enjoy the pics and I hope the pig pics dont gross anyone out.

Here is the pig we bought. It was tied up (still alive) and placed in the back of the car to be transported to the house. It smelled pretty bad too.

The Security killed the pig (by drowning) and laid it out on some banana leaves so they could easily cut and clean it.

This was right before Operation Marination.

Here is Clayton about to place the two legs on the grill. We cooked them for ~4 hours before we dined.

This was the Air Recce flight with the Sector B CO. He is sitting on the left side of the Mi-8 Helo. The rest of the people are his staff and the aircrew (Ukrainian). The whole time, he kept asking the aircrew if I could go try to fly. I told the General that it would not be a good idea.

Yesterday on patrol we had to stop at a river and cross it using this bamboo bridge. It was quite unstable and the kids liked to laugh at us as we made our way across. They ran across while we took a step every few seconds. This was on the way back to the car after we talked to the town. All of the kids followed us the entire way.

I thought this was a neat picture because until now, I never knew how the banana actually grew on the tree. Banana trees are everywhere... kind of like how there are pine trees everywhere in the USA. The flower hangs down from the bananas, which grow on a vine-like structure.

When we talk to the town chief or whoever, everyone starts to gather because they are curious about what we are doing there. When we finish up and say goodbye, the kids always follow us out. This was the booming metropolis of Voloblai; population 115 people, living in 8 houses.