Haiti blog, new entry

A new feature in the tales of our favourite wanderer, currently residing in Haiti, is this short update from me - S!

You may have noticed my initial, appearing from time to time on the Gaza blog, but yet to appear here on E's Haiti ramblings.... At her request, I bring you an update from Iraq, another part of the Handicap International ‘empire’, where I am currently working.

For those of you who don’t know me, I first met E in Gaza where she joined me on Handicap International's project. We worked and lived together. We became friends. We became close friends. We became more than close friends... :-). We now refer to each other as partners as the tags "boyfriend" and "girlfriend" seem a little young for us...

We now manage our relationship as best as we can across a divide of 11,078km, so Google tells me, and depending on the time of the day it can seem a lot more and occasionally less. Generally, as E goes to bed I am getting up, and this is the time of day we get our most contact. 

Occasionally it's the other way around. So at three in the afternoon I get a skype call from E, who just woke up. Not easy, as any of you who know E and what she is like first thing in the morning, will understand… Ten minutes of eye rubbing, yawning and addressing THAT hair, though, means that we at least get to see each other, and it makes me smile.

My work for HI concerns the removal of weapons from the battlefield, something I’ve been doing for several years now. It has taken me to some amazing places - Kosovo, Libya, Somalia, Gaza, South Sudan and now Iraq. All places are very different but the one thing that is the constant for me is that someone has been trying to destroy someone else with every conceivable weapon you can think of, and some that you can't. Many of these get left behind after the fighting has stopped and are obviously dangerous, so my job is to remove or destroy them so that the local population can return to a normal life - farming their land, walking down their street, going to school etc. without the threat to life.

In Iraq, the problem is immense. Daesh (or ISIS, IS, ISIL - dependant on what news channel you watch) have left behind not only conventional weapons that we are all familiar with, but also Improvised Explosive Devices, or IEDs. These are made to inflict major destruction and hopefully, in the eyes of the maker, death.

Regular accidents occur to people returning to their houses and their fields, or to people trying to set these IED's and Booby Traps off. Many soldiers from the Peshmerga (the Army of Kurdistan in Northern Iraq) have especially suffered, losing hundreds of men to these devices.

Unfortunately, another operator trained to remove these devices, a colleague of mine from Australia, was also killed whilst removing an IED from a farmer's field two weeks ago. This has had an effect on our small community of expat "technical experts" and an extra look skyward is now taken, to focus and to take extra care.

As I told E, I’ve only just found her and have no intention of leaving her just yet!

Life in Iraq is fairly good though (apart from the war happening 35kms away!). The city of Erbil, capital of the Kurdistan region, is very western in style and attitude. A "nice" place to live. Shopping malls and cinemas, hotels with swimming pools and pubs with beer make life easy when we have downtime. No bacon is to be found though...

Time to send my copy to the ‘Editor’. I wonder how much she will edit and whether I’ll be allowed to contribute again............. :-)