Shopping in Aybak

The duty officer woke me up twice last night. The reasons were nothing serious, but it was good that I got the information right away. So when it was time get up at 0700, it was really difficult to wake up. Getting up is easy, but waking up usually takes its time. We went out to the governor's office to invite him and the provincial chiefs of ANSF to a meeting later. The governor's secretary wasn't there, so we had to wait for the deputy governor to come to work. Meeting him usually takes a while, and this was the case today as well. So we were almost late for the usual OCCP meeting, but just almost, because they started late, too. From there we went to the police headquarters to talk to the training officer. That didn't take as long as we had expected, so there was just enough time to do some shopping.

I got word just yesterday, that a project proposal of mine, my second one actually, had been approved. It was about purchasing heaters with water boilers to be distributed to the ANP checkpoints around the province. I found out that the price for one heater was about 35 to 45 USD for PRT soldiers (and about 25 to 30 dollars for locals). I applied for sufficient funds to acquire 30 heaters, a total of 1200 dollars. It was a really good proposal, because giving away a heater to the freezing police officers is a quick and easy way of getting long-lasting goodwill from the security forces. So today we went to the sheet-metal worker's street and bought 8 heaters, including transportation to the PO, for only 250 dollars. Our IP Y made a really good effort bargaining.


I'm giving the shopkeeper the IP's cell phone number, just in case he wouldn't be able to find his way to the safe house. A woman came up to us begging for money.

When we came back to the PO, a British gentleman was waiting for us. He was a head researcher for AREU, and he wanted to talk with us about the district level political issues of Samangan province. We offered him lunch and had a chat. In the afternoon we had a meeting with the chief and deputy chief of NDS, which turned out to be a very pleasant experience as usual. There was spaghetti and meat sauce for dinner. After the briefing I tried to have a nap but was interrupted all the time by incoming messages. In the evening I wrote three reports about today's activites. It's all in a days work.