Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

Hola,

I know you've all been waiting with bated breath (what in the world does that mean, anyway?) for my latest dissertation on life and the like in sunny El Salvador. I'm still deciding whether or not to call it a weekly letter or a whenever I feel like it letter. I'll get back to all of you when I come up with a decision. Thank you Mom and Dad for your support in my growing literary career. For the rest of you, I hope you are enjoying reading my weekly tirades as much as I enjoy writing them. Well, I guess this isn't one of my now world famous letters until I start with a variation of my opening sentence, so here it goes.

Not much going on here, but as you have all been reminded before, I tend to downplay things a bit. Since I last wrote, let's see....it was shortly after the beginning of the new year.... Ah yes, I went on another mission, my second medical oriented mission, to be precise. This one was not, overall, as...how should I describe it? Fun? Eventful? Well, for the most part, it was just a bit more frustrating. But with everything in life, there was good side to it. I'll get to that a bit later.

The festivities began the day before when I had to get my truck 'inspected' by one of the meka-nics (mechanics). It didn't happen. It seems that my truck was unable to function properly because I was lacking a certain folded piece of plastic and cardboard...namely a log book. Apparently, without this piece of folded of plastic and cardboard, my truck would mysteriously shut down upon leaving the base, and not restart until pushed back within the confines of the gate. But what this mechanic did not know was, I drive a special truck. So I drove off with my faulty/special truck without receiving its inspection. I'm taking my toys and I'm going home.

Bright and early the next day, Moe (My team daddy, not a sock puppet like Branon thought) and I loaded up our inspection failing truck and meet up with our newest group of medics. I thought the first bunch was bad. If these folks micromanaged anymore, I'd have one person standing on my left saying, "breath in, breathe out..." and another on my right periodically saying,"blink". Whatcha gonna do?

We moved out two hours behind schedule (they lost track of time while they were...heck, I have no idea what put them behind schedule. Perhaps someone's log book went kaput). At a snails pace. We drove 150 km in a mere three hours. That's an average of a bit faster than 30 mph. Ninnies.

The medical sight and the base we were sleeping at were an irritatingly long distance apart. Every day we drove to and from the military base and the med sight. At 40 miles per hour. I wonder about what a war would be like with some of these people. Would it be over by the time they got there?

The COL in charge of this medical mission, well, I've seen dead hamsters with more personality. He looked like a tree sloth that had been beaten into a coma, tied up with fishing line, and drug around like a badly controlled marionette. Where do they find these people?

Two good things came of this mission. Both of them are related to food. The first, as it was last time, was Domino's pizza. And it only cost us 1,500 colones to feed 40 people. That's about 200 ducks. Not bad.

The second was better, albeit we did have a few Ugly Americans to taint the evening. I neglected to mention earlier that the town we went to, Cuco, was situated on the Pacific coast, on the eastern most side of the country. Beautiful. The second night, Thursday, we stopped at a small local restaurant in town. There was a small cove, and the covered deck sat just 30 meters from the breaking waves. The sun set as we ate, turning the water beautiful shades of orange, red, and pink, with a tint of ocean blue. After my chicken and rice (one Ugly American, a southern belle Captain, wanted to eat at Wendy's kept insisting we were all going to end up with somililla) I took a nap in one of the three hammocks that were hung up around the restaurant. That's what life is all about.

The next morning, we tried to leave at five. We couldn't. We had taken the doors off our truck and put them in another truck that was carrying many doors from many trucks in our traveling three ringed circus/medical mission. We found one door...the other was back at the medical site. The Meds needed a table. Guess what they used? So, we drove another two hours out of our way before getting on our way home.

Once we returned, we got our truck packed and ready to go to Nicaragua. Hooray! Today we unpacked. I'm still in El Salvador. Surprise! Heath, our commo guy, Steve, Steve, and Mi Capitan are all in Nicaragua. They have the TV/VCR. This is most distressing. But we have the computer. {insert evil laughter here}.

We leave tomorrow for another med mission tomorrow. Should be fun. In theory. It's better than sitting around here. Just another act in this three ringed circus we like to call JTF Aguila.

It seems to me I'm out of interesting things to write about, so I shall bid you all a good evening. I'll write again whenever I feel like writing again. Buenas Noches.

Love,
Kurt