Sisyphus

This morning I had the IP call the provincial governor four times. That's the number of phone calls that were necessary to find out that I had to see him in person. We prepared a patrol and drove to his office. The provincial governor said that some villagers from the area in which we were interested in building a new compound in had visited him this morning. They had said that the Russians had had a camp near their village and one night 13 Russians and 36 people from their village had died, and that they didn't want any ISAF camp near their village because the same could happen again. I told the governor that it was very insulting for ISAF to be compared to the Soviets. Then the governor told me that we should have come in through the door and not through the window - the land ownership issue was not the mayor's business (like he had told us before), but the agricultural departments.

A delegation of officers from PRT HQ came to brief us - and to be briefed by us by lunchtime. The lunch was prepared by each soldier individually, because on of our cooks had been duty officer, and the other one had a sudden case of stomach flu. The same disease struck our operations officer, too, but fortunately no-one else. They had both been to the landlord's dinner and so had I, but I showed no symptoms of food poisoning.

The chief of the agricultural department came to see us at the PO in the aftenoon. It soon became evident that neither he or his colleague had nor the knowledge or the intellectual to help us determine the ownership details of any specified land area, let alone the courage to sign a certificate about the matter. They promised to return on the next day with a gentleman from MeS, who would know more about who owns land in Samangan. While we were discussing, a delegation from the Faculty of Education of Balkh University turned up at the gate. I had asked them to visit us because I wished to find out more details about the usage of the so called universty building in the outskirts of the city. They wished for the PRT to build a paved road to the building. I got my wish.