The second week at Ft. Riley we moved from Custer Hill to Camp Funston where we will complete remainder of our training. Camp Funston is another training area within Ft. Riley that is setup like a forward operating base (FOB). When we arrived we found out that we would be staying in 40-man open bay barracks. I was slightly disappointed, as most of my other 39 roommates were junior enlisted 20-year-olds who enjoyed loud music, staying up late, and drinking. So much for some quiet reflection time. :) The accommodations were sparse, basically a twin size bed and small closet to lock our clothes. Here I am with LCDR DJ Becker, he's one of the anesthesiologists from Naval Medical Center San Diego. He's also got a very nice blog, that's got a great number of pictures and movies. http://danieljmt.blogspot.com/2009_04_12_archive.html
Once we got settled in, the rest of the week they attempted to teach us Dari, one of the two main languages in Afghanistan. The other language is Pashtun which is mostly spoken in the south. However, most medical and official business is conducted in Dari. They started the first hour of each day this week with Dari lessons. Some of the key phrases we learned were hello (salaam), how are you (chetor asti), and thank you (tashakor). The language is very difficult with many sounds we don't us in the English language. Fortunately, each of us will have an interpreter assigned to us during our deployment.
After our first hour of Dari language class and the remaining seven hours each day we had counter-insurgency class (COIN). COIN was actually a great class to give us a better appreciation of what the NATO mission is in Afghanistan. Essentially COIN taught us that our job is to train the Afghan soldiers, policemen, medics, and doctors. We did a lot of case studies on how in the past we had not been effective in winning the 'hearts and minds' of the civilians (i.e. Honduras, Vietnam, etc...). If I could sum it up, essentially, don't kill civilians and make sure we put a 'Afghan face' on anything we do over there. Giving them things or doing things for them does not necessarily do them any good. They need to learn to make mistakes and learn how to fix things themselves. From what I understand the Afghan National Army (ANA) is already progressing well, but the Afghan National Police (ANP) still has some work to do, since we didn't start mentoring and embedding with them until the last couple of years.
On Wednesday evening of this week the training included a leader engagement meeting. During our eight weeks here, we will have eight of these leader engagements, where we will learn the cultural dos and don'ts when interacting with the Afghans. For example, dos include: always ask about the family, drink lots of chai (Afghan word for tea), make sure you socialize with them. Don'ts include: don't shake or eat with the left hand, never show the soles of your feet at them, don't ask about their daughters or wives, and don't rush conversations into business. However, the most important thing these leader engagements do is allow us to practice using interpreters.
On Thursday the Afghan instructors made a delicious cultural dinner for us, so that we'd have an opportunity to try the tastes and flavors once before we head over there. The food was rice and chicken seasoned with many spices. I thought it tasted like a mix of Indian and Ethiopian food. The food was eaten with our hands (the right hand of course). This is one of our cultural advisers. Many of these cultural advisers we have training us also work as interpreters in Afghanistan.
This was a very nice week, but the 8+ hours of classes each day really became tedious and we were looking forward to getting out into the field next week.
