Marjah blog 2: Jordan, T E Lawrence and popcorn
Apologies for being quiet for a few weeks, I was on leave (yes, again) in Jordan and then was bouncing around between my base in Marjah and the HQ of the Provincial Reconstruction Team in Lashkah Gah. Internet tends to be the best way of communicating in this part of the world, but when it goes down - as it did in "Lash" - the world seems to stop. How did we manage before the Internet? Oh yeah, we wrote "letters".
If you are thinking of a slightly more adventurous holiday I can recommend Jordan. No, not the model. Awesome scenery, really nice people, good food, easy to get around. I had always wanted to see Petra (it featured in the closing sequences of Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade) and was not disappointed. Wow, pretty darn cool.
Anyway, you're not reading this to get my views on future holiday spots.....But maybe you are? Just as I was returning to Helmand, President Karzai was announcing that the district where I work, Marjah, would be one of a number of areas included in "Transition". In a nutshell, this is the process whereby security operations are handed over by ISAF to the Afghan security forces - police, army - and ISAF step back and provide mentoring, some specialist military assistance and what is known in the trade as "QRF" - a quick reaction force. But ISAF are no longer in the day-to-day frontline. In parallel, the folks who do the type of work I do (no, not lunatics, Stabilisation Advisers) start to stand back from assisting local government directly and move to a sort of over-watch role - keeping an eye on developments and reporting back to the PRT in Lashkar Gah when we see holes in links between the provincial and district levels of Afghanistan's government. There is an element of sitting on your hands which doesn't come very easily when we have all been so actively involved in the process of helping to reconstruct Afghanistan. But it makes total sense. The Afghans rightly want their country back and letting them just get on with it is the natural step. So less dashing out with the District Governor to shuras; less meetings with tea and nuts.
So, here we are, the weather getting decidedly chilly and life switching from sitting outside our container homes to very much sitting in them with the heating cranked up. Thankfully we do have heating here in Marjah - unlike the fun times in Shazad (see early episodes). My colleague, Sera, has brought in some Christmas decorations and brightened the place up a bit for the festive season. We even have a Christmas "tree" - see above photo. OK, yes, it is more of a Christmas stick. Our Friday night outdoor movie is now accompanied by a roaring fire of broken-up packing cases.... no marshmallows being toasted but the US Marines often bring along micro-waved popcorn. All a bit surreal
really: there we are sitting in the middle of Afghanistan, a small bunch of US Marines and civvies watching a movie on a projector screen, munching popcorn, wrapped in blankets, star-light sky..... it could be Lawrence of Arabia all over again. Except that was filmed in Jordan and I don't think Captain Lawrence had popcorn.
