Worm

Hello once again and Happy Birthday to my niece, McKinley! 1 year old today. Wow! I hope they are enjoying their time in Cali and having fun with the family. Shannon and Leyton will head out to Oregon on Wednesday to visit Ben, Sonya, and McKinley. Im sure they will have a good time and I'm jealous I will not be able to also visit.

This week went by very fast. Clayton left the team site and is now checking out of the mission. He has served his 1 year in Liberia and headed back to Brazil. He will be missed. Tudor will also be on leave this week but will return early next week. It will be very quiet and boring week without the both of them here. Tudor will check out the first week of Feb., so all the younger UNMOs are leaving me. We will be receiving two new team members tomorrow; one Major from China and a Lt Col from Nigeria who will be our new deputy team leader. The dynamics of the team are really changing. The new team Leader is great... a lot better then our previous "leader".

The commander of all American UN military in Liberia this week from DC. He makes a trip to all the UN sites every 6 months. He will be coming to Gbarnga on Thursday to check out my digs and see how things are going. He will depart the same day back to Monrovia. I will take the UN flight into Monrovia on Friday afternoon to be there for the team meeting. Should be a nice weekend, even though I have Monrovia.

I start school again this week. I have two classes left to take to complete my masters degree from the Univ. of Arkansas. I was supposed to be done in Oct 2010, but this little detour to Africa prevented me from finishing. I am hoping that the internet will be sufficient for the online requirements. These past few weeks have not been internet and electrically friendly. We are also having some firewall problems with the UN and it will not allow me to enter into the Uark websites. Hopefully I can manage and get my two classes done before I get back. That will be nice.

The temps are still great. Instead of sweating while I sleep, I find myself burrowing in the covers. It has been very nice and I wish it will stay like this.

Enjoy the photos and take care.

Here is UNMO Team 10 right before Clayton departed. (Left - Right: Me, Shadreck form Zambia, Tudor from Romania, Clayton from Brazil, Lt Col Guillen from Paraguay, Abdallah from Jordan, and Mohd Lazim from Malaysia.)

This is some Bangladeshi monument outside the base here in Gbarnga. The (funny) thing about this picture is that this monument if used by many locals as a backdrop for their wedding pictures.. obviously because of the AK-47's.

These kids were playing the fields when we started taking photos and they wanted to get in on some of the photo action.

I went to the Kpatawee falls again yesterday for a bit. I found this nice earthworm crawling around the rocks. It was the largest worm I have ever seen.

The Kpatawee Falls. the water level has really gone down since my last visit due to the dry season.

In deep thought at the falls

This was on patrol yesterday. We stopped at this little shop to try to buy some pineapples. I found another Liberian with an Obama T shirt, so I had to take a picture.