Saturday, June 14, 2008

Money Money Money

Hey everyone,

I know I know my time between posts seems to be getting longer and longer. I guess I have gotten settled into a routine and there doesn't seem much worth writing about. So why did I title this Money Money Money. Well the government has a program that we buy goods from local vendors to support our misson. We can buy everything from pens and paper to computers and many other things. So today I picked up 20k dollars in cash. This may seem odd but in a worn torn country like Iraq the american dollar is still king. By spending money in the iraqi economy it is one small way to help infuse money into thier economy. It's really scary how much cash we use over here. We are all use to credit transactions and bank transfers. It's kind of wierd to see a contractor paid to build a building in cash. It's not uncommon to see transfers of more than $200-$500k.

You can rest assured there are very tight controls on the money. It takes 2 people to complete any transaction and 3 to request the money. Give me a credit card any day it's much easier.

Well the temperature over here has seemed to hold at about a steady 110-115 everyday. Some of the hotter days have gotten into the 120s. We are told that 140's in the summer aren't uncommon. I'm not looking forward to that. I've asked some Iraqi's how they deal with the heat. They say they go find some shade and air conditioning lol.

PIC, I think I've talked about this before. It is Provencial Iraqi Control. That is when we give a providence over to the Iraqi's to manage. We still stay here but we don't intervene unless we are asked

Our Providence will soon obtain PIC, which is a big deal. People talk about how little progress we are making, I can honestly see the light at the end of the tunnel. Now I'm not saying we will be ready to leave any time soon but I think things will start to look a lot more like they do in Germany.

I could go on and on and get on my soapbox but I will save that for some other day some other time.

On a completley different topic my step son just turned 6 which if you had asked him a day after his 5th birthday he would have told you he was almost 6 then. I'm sure he's telling everyone now he's almost 7. In just a short time Dade will have his Bday party My sister along with her boys and lots of the family will be there as well. Oh I forgot to tell you that they are having the Bday party at a go cart track. It's days like today where I really want to be home. I want to be home every day but it's days like today that I want to be home even more.

Well I hope everyone has fun today and the weather holds out. Micca is going to try and skype me in for some of it we will see how that goes.

Later for now

Brent

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Happy Fathers' Day to you, Brent. You are in the thoughts of all of your family and friends today, even though you cannot be at home today. The Support Our Troops fundraiser was a success yesterday. It was a beautiful sunny day for the golf outing and the pork chop meal was delicious. Some of the guard teams were not present for the golf as they were called to duty sandbagging at the river. Take care of U. D & J