BBQ

One more week closer to going home!!! Sweeeet! Arrangements are starting to be made and it looks like Ill be leaving the team site on 26 April and proceed to Monrovia for Check out. My replacement will be arriving in Monrovia on 28 April and will have to go through indoc and check in and all that fun stuff we had to do. Things out at Gbarnga are going good. I drove into Monrovia yesterday to pick up our new teammate, who hails from Ghana. Monrovia was crazy and chaotic as always. It was nice to return to the peace and quiet of Gbarnga. Last Sunday we had a farewell party for myself and my Malaysian teammate, Maj Lazim. Both of our missions end the first week in May. We did it fairly early because 3 people will be departing on leave this week and will return after I leave. I bought 6 whole chickens and cooked them up on the BBQ. We also had plantains, rice, cassava, pizza (from the Pakistani's) and pineapple. It was quite tasty. We invited the sector senior Milob and his staff over for the shindig and we all had a good time. We finally got the water and electricty situation taken care of at our accommodations. After the big storms last week, our power line was cut, our entire fence blew over and we ran out of water... all within the same 2 days. It took a few days to get us back on our feet. We had to beg the Pakistani battalion to come fill our water tank because the UN was being jerks about filling it. But it was nice to finally get water... I was tired of taking nightly baby wipe baths. But things are back to normal (for) now. Here are some pics from this past week.

Here is the mango tree that is right outside the office. The locals call them plums and they should be ripe around the time I leave. These mango trees are everywhere.

Mangos!

Thanks to the recent storm, our fence was blow over. This was a few days after because you can see the electricity wire is re-connected.

This was on patrol where we encountered this gauntlet. This really was very mild, but I thought the picture was cool.

We stopped to talk to a company, Arcelor Mittal, that is mining rock to use for the base of the railroad that is being built. The workers get paid $3 USD per day.

This was a patrol to David's Town.

These chickens are residents of David's Town. I think they found a nice area to nest.

One of the Security guys that works at my house, Joe, brought his son, David, over to meet me. He wanted to be "snapped" so I took a picture, printed it out, and gave him a few copies.

I've found a new street treat that I have been occasionally buying. Corn is in full swing here and people sell corn hot off the grill. Pretty tasty!

This was me manning the BBQ for the party. It was a very hot job.. the weather was very hot and so were the coals.

This was the spread of food we all crushed

The Senior Sector Milob, Colonel Burik from Ethiopia, presented me with this farewell plaque. Here is a recent group photo of us all. As of yesterday, we have one more Milob from Ghana.