Sooooooo COOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So today we were on another patrol. I was the assigned driver and my German friend Matt was my navigator and communicator. We were heading along one of our normal routes having a casual morning with the music playing and the windows down (it was a cool morning of about 27 degrees).

We were about 10-14 kms away from camp (about 20-30 minutes) when Matt sat straight up and was looking at something. As I have explained before as the driver you can not afford to take your eyes off the road immediately in front of you for more then 10 sec as the road will change and you'll hit a rut, rock or hole.

All of a sudden Matt is yelling "look look over there what is that?" I try to slow down and get a look and what I see is what appears to be the ass end of 3 rather good sized LIONS!!!!!

And then over to our left someone spots another one in the distance. They were running away from us and we only caught a quick glimpse of them but it was AWESOME!!! Oh did mention they were heading in the direction of our village and our camp?

We figured we'd wait till we got home to see if they made it into town LOL

The patrol went well. Another ( and my last) soccer ball was delivered to a needy village.

The next day we had off!! I am not sure why... but I'll take another day off. Really I still go to work but in shorts and T Shirt and i still do work but only 2-3 hours. We (Kai and I) decided to finally begin the next phase of the Bar and we painted it ( all of the posts). It was painted UN Blue (its all the market had). The next phase will be buying bamboo for the walls.

The paint looks great!

I have only 2 weeks before I leave again to Europe. I have to get some CIMIC projects off the ground by then (it will be hard to do). I have found some interesting avenues to help this country and this community plus one other community.

Our village has 6 main roads leading to other villages and the rest of Sudan. These roads, as i have mentioned and shown pictures, are BAD! The roads get destroyed during rainy season and never get fixed. I have met with a UN civil engineer who is here working on one main road and have spoken about hiring locals to provide manual labour for other roads. He loved the idea and he brought up points like if they just do this simple task then the roads will survive the rainy season. I Think it is do able.

This is also part of my mandate as there are many unemployed males and females between 20-35 y/o. As part of security and peace it would be good if they had jobs so that when the elections come around and the army offers them employment for a VERY small wage they can say no as they will be making a better wage with the road crew and NOT have to leave their families.

The second project is a little sad. So far in the past 2 months in a large village 6 children have been wounded and disfigured by playing with land mines! One child had died. As far as I know there has NOT been any new education programs for the children of this village. This is a project I will get off the ground and implement in the next 8 weeks. Hopefully before any more children get hurt or die!

So today we have found out that our camp generators are no good. One has died and the other overheats after a couple hours. so each day around 5:00pm they shut down the good one for 1 hour. This of course is at a hot point of the day. I am typing this blog with my window and door open, I am dripping and its 39 degrees here!! No AC no FAN!!! I'm melting!!

PS still looking for a disco ball and a wall mounted beer opener for the Canadian/German UN CLUB!! Thanks!! :)