Bureaucracy

The last couple of days have been frustrating. It feels like I've spent most if my time pushing a wet noodle. On a carpet.

It's hard to remember all the issues I've been working. The only victory I have is (supposedly) I've finally finished all the hurdles to trade out broken weapons for new weapons. These are for some officers that I work with. It took me about 4 weeks. Record time I'm told.

Both the generators at the MOI biometrics office are broken so work has halted there. It seems the reason they keep breaking is because the maintenance company is incompetent. We wanted to switch to a better company but we were told that they are the lowest bidder by far, so if we re-bid it they'll just win again. When dealing with the Army I've learned to not question such logic. Anyway, so now we are trying to rush a multi-thousand dollar purchase order to replace the burned out components.

I had a meeting about the National ID card yesterday at the USAID. It was painful to listen to the Embassy staff dwell on privacy issues when the Afghan guy says its a non-issue. The nice part was that I got to walk over there so all the kids mauled me on the way. I gave them some socks, and jump-rope, and all my pens. They even wanted the paper wrapper the socks came with. They are good kids. Except for when they fight over the stuff. I kept having to break up the fights.

Today we went to the MOI. Our contractors are no longer able to come other there because they don't have license plates on their vehicles. So I spent much of the day reading though the contract to understand their obligations as well as ours. I was in a pretty bad mood after that.

This thing with the license plates is very frustrating. GIRoA put out an order that everyone, including people in up-armored SUV's, must have a registration. But they enacted it so fast, that many vehicles weren't able to get registered. And our contractors can't even get their vehicles registered because we (the military) leased them (and promptly lost all the paperwork). But my command refuses to register them because they are being used by contractors. So you can see why I feel like I'm banging my head against the wall sometimes.

Several more issues like that but I don't want to revisit them.

The best thing that's happened is that afghans have started planting plants and bushes various places around camp. And someone in my group decided to put some water in the pond. I'll redouble my efforts to not forget taking the malaria pills in case the mosquitos get out of hand.