Here's an update from Kirsten. Below a link for some pictures on Snapfish from her Iraqi BBQ
I'd like to share my Snapfish photos with you. Once you have checked out my photos you can order prints and upload your own photos to share.
Click here to view photosA long overdue update, I know. So first and foremost OBVIOUSLY I do not have a computer and this is why my sister has to update everyone for me. It literally broke the morning of my departure, which with my luck I couldn’t be surprised. Even less surprising is the fact I mailed it home on the 4th of January and it still hasn’t arrived at my parents house. So until the US postal service figures out where my computer is, delivers it to my mom so she can to take it to the Apple Store, they figure out the problem, fix it and she mails it back to me, we’ll have to settle with updates from my kick ass sister.
My trip over here was completely uneventful; it was just extremely long. It was 27 hours from the time I took off out of Atlanta until the time I landed at Al Udeid Qatar. It would be another 6 hours until I finally got the chance to lay down, in a bunk bed, in a tent with 30 other female soldiers. I spent about 16 hours at Al Udeid before catching a C130 to Baghdad, spent the night there and caught another C-130 to Kirkuk the next morning. I’ll spare you all the boring details and get straight to the good stuff.
My commander had a talk with me because he was unsure of how the Iraqi’s were going to receive me. He assured me that his door was always open if I needed to vent or if someone was out of line. The rest of the guys in my squadron are like older brothers and are protective. To be honest though, I don’t think they have anything to worry about. The first Iraqi I met at Kirkuk was Col Bassim who is the Flying Training Commander. He’s in charge of all of the flight training here at Kirkuk. He was very receptive and greeted me kindly. I spoke the little Arabic I knew to him and he seemed impressed. The next Iraqi I met was (and I’m not kidding) Sadam Hussein. He introduced himself as “the nice one.” He was much less interested in talking to me. Since then, I’ve found that the younger generation has (mostly) no issues with me, but the older generation is a different story. Although they are professional and courteous, at the same time they are very standoffish and uninterested in anything I have to say. I can tell that Col Bassim is trying hard to convince them, but in reality it hasn’t affected the job here whatsoever.
I flew my first student sortie with a kid named Ali Adnan. His English was pretty good, but it occurred to me quickly that teaching these kids would be nothing like teaching the kids back home. It’s hard to tell if they aren’t listening or if they do not understand. I have to come up with creative new ways of saying things in much simpler terms. The Iraqi culture teaches them that saying that you do not understand something that your teacher taught you is rude. It’s as if you’re telling that teacher that they aren’t good enough to make you understand. So if you ask an Iraqi “do you understand” they will say “yes, yes, yes.” We have a running joke here that he third “yes” negates the previous two. The language barrier makes the flying interesting. Something else to consider, when you fly with these students on the first few rides, is that many of them have never been in an airplane and most of them have never even driven a car. Saying that flying with them keeps you on your toes is a HUGE understatement.
As a farewell to the contractors who were teaching the academic classes as well as the simulators and doing the flight scheduling, the Iraqi’s hosted a fish BBQ. I’ll spare you the details since most of you saw the snapfish photos. The Iraqi’s LOVE having their picture taken with you, so I felt like the paparazzi was all around me snapping pictures. I’d be in the middle of taking one picture when I’d hear a “Ma’am, I take picture with you? Yes?” One of them was a Maintenance guy who speaks very little English. I promised him that I would print out the picture and bring it to him. As I was leaving the flying squadron, he was waiting for me in the parking lot and asked me if I had printed the picture. Mind you that he doesn’t speak English and I obviously don’t speak Arabic, but somehow we managed to communicate that he was leaving on his mujas (vacation) the next day and that I would run and print the picture and be right back. I came back with the two pictures and he was extremely overjoyed. He managed to tell me that he plans on taking the picture back with him to Baghdad to show his wife and kids that there is an American female pilot that he works with. As weird as it may seem, he appeared to be proud to be able to show her.
The last thing I want to explain is my job over here in Iraq. Yes, I’m here to teach Iraqi pilot training, but that comes second to my job as an advisor. We are here to guide the Iraqi’s to producing 100% training and equipped Iraqi pilots. For example, their contract with the Americans ran out to teach their academic classes, their simulators, scheduling and so forth. So the contractors had to up and leave and not the Iraqi’s are forced to run the show on their own. We as advisors had to step in and guide them on how to do this on their own. One of our pilots is now teaching a maintenance captain how to maintain the simulator. He’s teaching the instructors how to run the simulator, how to run a profile, how to turn it on! We’ve finally managed to get them to teach their students the academic courses, but all of this is just in the beginning stages, and it’s just a very small example of what we are trying to accomplish over here. We have very limited time to do the job and the Iraqi’s don’t have the resources like we do in the US to accomplish things. They also have a lack of support from the Iraqi Air Force. Another example is that they do not have current charts of the area that they are flying in. In the US if you do not have a current chart, you do not fly, it’s that simple. Here they are unable to get charts for their students to fly with so they make do with what they have. It’s extremely frustrating from our stand point and very hard to understand how their leadership doesn’t see this as a problem. Anyhow, I just wanted to explain a little more about my job and how I’m an advisor first and an instructor pilot second.
I’m sorry this was so long winded, I’ll keep them MUCH shorter in the future and more frequent. Thanks Sarah for posting this for me!!!!!
I'd like to share my Snapfish photos with you. Once you have checked out my photos you can order prints and upload your own photos to share.
Click here to view photos
