Another Update

August 27th 2005, 1645B

I’ve had a pretty good day today, & have quite enjoyed myself taking loads of photos. The new platoon that arrived yesterday has been involved in a major clean up & re-organisation of the camp. & one thing they’ve done is get rid of all the excess rations that were lying around the pantry tent. Instead of handing it back to the ration store in the capital they decided to let the local refugees know they could come & get some extra food in exchange for firewood & charcoal. There must have been about 500 or so that pitched up this morning & for once they didn’t all run away when I pointed a camera at them – the Burundians tend towards the shy unfortunately. I think I took about 150 pictures all told, & picked out about 20 or so that I think are the best of the bunch.
As soon as I get the chance to spend an hour or two on the net connected PC back in Bujumbura, I’ll be uploading them to a site that a friend of mine runs, a guy called Brendon Urwin who served with me in ‘Martizburg. The address for the site is www.travelgallery.co.uk, & it’s a collection of galleries from a number of places around the world – SA, Egypt, Thailand, Italy & a few others. I’d urge you to have a look at the site if you’re interested in this kind of photography, as there’s some good stuff there – this is what you call a “shameless plug”, btw ;) If I’m not mistaken there’s a section for links at the side of the page here on blogspot, so I’ll put a permanent link to it there when next I get chance to update this thing.
I’ve got a fair number of photos, about 40 so far, that I want to upload to the site & it’s getting frustrating that I’ve not had chance as yet to do so, but I’ll make a plan when I’m back in the capital. The IT department was working on the internet link so it was down the last time I was there, but hopefully they’ve increased the connection speed as you really don’t want to know how slow it was. If they have widened the pipe then I’ll try to also post a few photos here, but otherwise there’s very little chance that I’ll have time to duplicate uploads unfortunately.

Speaking of going back to the capital, the other medic that’s here with me went in yesterday. While he was there he had a chat with our new boss, & from what he says it seems quite likely that I will be staying with the UN mission for the remainder of the deployment, which I’m very pleased about. Assuming it’s true, or that things don’t change again of course :P
As I’ve said previously that means I’ll be working out in the field as opposed to in town, so communication with everyone at home isn’t going to be too frequent, but I really think I’ll be far happier working away from town. I’ll still spend some time in the capital, & I’ll have good comms then, but that’s going to depend on the rotation schedule. I’ll let everyone know as soon as I have definite info myself.

Otherwise there’s no news really – same shit, different day & so on. One thing’s for certain though, & that’s that I spend far too much time in this chair, as my back is seriously killing me. The damned tent is on a slope, so whenever I sit in front of the pc I’m at a permanent angle, & it’s finally caught up with me. It’s that annoying kind of back pain, where you’re fine when you’re sitting or standing, but those two seconds in between hurt like a bitch. I’m going through brufen like bloody smarties at the moment, but it seems to be getting better at least.

Anyway, that’s about it for now so I’ll be saying cheers for now. Till next time then ;)