Captain Mark in Iraq

For the second time in as many days I am posting using material that is largely not my own.  Mark, a friend to many of us, has been in Baghdad for the past few weeks as a JAG officer (aka. military lawyer) with the Air Force.  While it may seem that the words “lawyer” and “Air Force” don’t tend to indicate danger, Mark is responsible for assisting the municipal court system of Iraq.  This entails rolling with the Marines in the battle gear you see him sporting above.  He’s been kind enough to keep us updated via email so I’m stealing his report and posting it below.  Stay safe Marky Mark, we’re praying for you!

Family and friends –

 

Things are going well in Baghdad.  I’m settling into a routine at work and finally feel as if I have a good grasp on the processes here.  The cases I’m seeing here are truly phenomenal: the very worst of human depravity and the very best of human courage.  What better use of a law degree than to prosecute the worst of the worst?  Few attorneys have this opportunity.  I am grateful. 

 

The judicial system here is beginning to stand on its own two feet.  It is independent from the other branches of government and establishing working courts in the outlying provinces. 

 

Violence is at a low.  Citizens are becoming confident in our ability to capture the bad guys and the system’s ability to see that they are punished.  Folks are returning to the markets, kids to the soccer fields, etc.

 

Recently we had a diplomatic luncheon for the Iraqi Judges.  These are courageous men.  Dozens of judges have been assassinated in the past.   I’ve attached a picture showing the deputy ambassador, our Task Force 134 general (a Marine 2 star), and the Chief Judge in a gift exchange.  The general presented to the Chief Judge what I thought was a poignant gift: the writings of Abraham Lincoln, a man who overcame a similar situation — a country ripped-apart by geographic and ideological strife.

 

I’ve attached a couple of photos: who’s that famous guy with General Petraeus?  

 

Clare and the kids are doing well.  The boys just had minor surgery to remove their adenoids.  They spend every spare moment engrossed in Star Wars legos; Gracie babbling on the phone.  I get to speak to them nearly every day; it does my heart good to hear their voices. 

 

Also, we are very pleased to be moving back to Denver next summer.  Clare is already busy looking at homes for us. 

 

Finally, I’m now in a position to get mail. 

 

 

Love to all,

 

Mark

We’ll miss you, Sis

I just recently learned that the grandmother of my longtime friend Bryan Unks passed away last week. Alma Leslie MacElhaney – I never her knew her as anything but “Grandma” or “Sis” – was a staple of my youth and will be sorely missed. I spent more than my fair share of time at their house for 4th of July and New Year’s parties. Sis and her late husband Sandy always accepted we friends-of-the-family as though we were part of the clan – which for Sandy usually meant treating me like I was in his own personal boot camp, berating me for wearing my hat backwards or inside his house at all. They were amazing people and I expect that I will always think of their neighborhood off York, east of Academy as the “MacElhaney’s.” Below is the obituary from today’s paper wherein those that knew her best pay homage to her memory.

A longtime resident of Colorado Springs, Sis went home to be with the Lord on November 19, 2007. Born in Baltimore, MD on August 23, 1923, Sis was the daughter of William and Alma Leslie. She married Alexander (Sandy) MacElhaney on August 29, 1942, and they enjoyed over 61 years of marriage before Sandy died in 2003. They had four children: Sharon Unks (Rick), Bill MacElhaney, Patti Bradley (Mike) all of Colorado Springs and John MacElhaney of Grand Junction, CO. Sis is survived by her four children, 12 grandchildren, great grandchildren, and her sister Jean Wiles of Franklin, TN. Sis’ greatest joy was her family, but her influence went well beyond. She was quite a sports enthusiast and even though legally blind for the past 9 years, she continued to attend Air Force football and basketball games. She had an infectious smile and endeared herself to all with whom she came into contact. Sis had a wonderful sense of humor that had the nurses laughing right up until the end. She will be sorely missed by all who were blessed to know her. A Memorial Service will be held at 2:30 PM on December 2, 2007 at Liberty Heights, 12105 Ambassador Drive, Colorado Springs, CO with a reception to follow.

In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations to the United States Air Force Academy Association of Graduates, 3116 Academy Drive, USAF Academy, CO 80840-4475.

Published in The Gazette on 11/28/2007.

We love you, Sis!

Ukraine Move Update

I don’t believe that many of you reading these lines are still unaware of our impending move to Ukraine, so I won’t rehash this, but feel free to peruse some some earlier posts on our connection to Ukraine here – I’ll wait…..

Ok, now that we’re all on the same page, here’s how we’re progressing.  Our move date is December 11th when we fly out of Denver direct for Munich.  We have nice long layover there before hopping a short flight to Kiev.  We’ve decided not to spend a night in the capital before continuing our trip to Kerch and instead will catch the 15 hour overnight train to Simferopol where we will be met by our new bosses Andrey and Tanya for the 4 hour drive to Kerch.  Please pray for Campbell and his attitude during an extremely trying 36+ hours of constant travel.

We have come to an understanding with the lovely young lady who will be renting our house and feel confident that our humble home will be in good hands.  Diesel will be staying with my parents and his on again, off again friend and fellow canine Ginger (sometime I’ll post the pictures of Ginger’s scars from their dust-up).

Our support continues to come in slowly but surely and we thank all of you who have given to our ministry or committed to support us monthly.

I’ve been tasked with cleaning up the portion of our beach on the Strait of Kerch which continues to suffer from the fuel oil spill from earlier this month.  I read this morning that the tide is pushing the slick north and east meaning that the effect will be more devastating on the Russian side of the Strait than on the Crimean coast.

Also this morning I discovered that we will not have traditional health insurance while we’re in country, instead we will use a combination of travel insurance (evacuation, catastrophic injury, etc.) and out of pocket doctors visits.  Tanya says that doctor visits run $4-$20 USD which in decidedly less than any insurance premiums available on this planet.

More updates to follow…

Traffic Blip Update

Slick made a comment on my earlier post regarding the unexplained blip in my blog visits saying that he planned to go to my site and hit refresh repeatedly to pad my sitemeter stats, but only on my birthday. This reminded me that I haven’t checked my traffic in a few days so I took a peek over at the recent reports and was shocked once again.  To review, the peak was last Tuesday and after dropping slightly (though still at a good level) on Wednesday, my daily numbers plummeted on Thursday, Friday and Saturday – dropping to half the pre-blip levels.

Then the mysterious occurred.  Sunday the 25th my visits skyrocketed to more than 60% above the previous surge while in just 14 hours, today’s totals rival those of the now less-than-impressive blip last Tuesday!  Since my most recent post prior this one was on Thursday, the beginning of the downturn, I am seriously befuddled as to why some days I have only a dozen visitors and the next I have close to 200.  Please let me know if you have any theories about this cyber-enigma.

Fact of the Day: G is for Gurkha

The subject for this post is one which I have been excited about sharing with you and I hope you’ll find this as interesting as I do.  I first heard about the Gurkha from my dad a few years ago in reference to their service in the Falklands War in 1982 and I developed an instant respect.  As is customary, let’s start at the beginning….

The Kingdom of Gorkha was centered in present day Nepal and claimed to have descended from invading peoples from further south and west.  In the 18th century the Gorkhas rose in power and prominence until their leader became King of Nepal.  Their expansion soon led to clashes with the British East India Company in India and eventually war in 1814.  By the end of the Anglo-Nepalese War in 1816 the British and the Gurkha (the Brits always find it necessary to change the spelling of native words, even just a little) had developed a mutual respect for each other’s fighting prowess.  This was so much the case that the first Gurkha volunteer regiments within the British forces was created before the war-ending treaty was signed.  The peace with Nepal opened the opportunity to bring Gurkhas under the British crown en masse.  As further conflicts within India necessitated military involvement, the Gurkha units (though still commanded by Anglo officers) distinguished themselves as soldiers and gained a reputation as fearsome warriors.  This reputation was furthered by the widespread use of their distinctive Kukri blades in battle.  The knife (pictured in the hand of Victoria Cross recipient Tul Bahadur Pun) is a traditional tool and weapon with which young Gurkha men are proficient at an early age.  Part of their continuing legend is the tradition that once a Kukri blade is draw, it it cannot be re-sheathed without drawing blood.  The fact that this is simply that – legend – was irrelevant to the Argentine troops who abandoned machine guns and mortars ahead of the Gurkhas advance based solely on the Nepalis’ fearsome reputation.  

Though Nepal has never been a British colony, over the past two centuries, 200,000 Gurkhas have served the crown in wars the world over and continue to do so in Afghanistan and Iraq.  They maintain their Nepali citizenship but serve an ally nation as their fathers and grandfathers – there has never been a female Gurkha – did before them.  They can still be seen in the UK, Nepal, Singapore and Brunei with their hats still jauntily cocked to the side and their Kukri on their hip.  See here for the Brigade of Gurkhas portion of the British Army site.

Best Campaign Ad in the History of Man (Mike Huckabee and Chuck Norris)

I don’t think I even need to comment on this one. This is easily the funniest ad I’ve ever seen a Presidential candidate be man enough to put on the air. Huckabee has my respect and maybe my vote too.

Interesting blip and why sitemeter is cool

I realize that this is too small for most of you to read but the bar graph at the top makes my point just fine in this scale.

As I mentioned in a recent post, I have been much more interested in the sitemeter feature on my blog in the past few weeks. Most mornings I pop by the page and see if I can identify who’s visited recently based on the ridiculous amount of information that sitemeter provides. I’ve also started checking what brought them to my page (ie. Googled keywords, blog aggregator, specific input of my address, etc.) and occasionally I check my overall traffic numbers. Sitemeter can plot this on a graph like the one you see above by hour, day, week, month, or year.

This morning I half-heartedly checked to see how I’d been doing the past 7 days. I was shocked to see that yesterday (November 20th) had massively more numbers than I ever recall seeing. I expanded my parameters to look at the past month and saw that this wasn’t my imagination. As you can see above, the 20th (those without magnifying glasses will have to take my word for it) is by a factor of 3 higher than my average for the past 30 days! The division of color in the bar for each day denotes visits (yellow) and page views (orange). Apparently if Google identifies my blog as matching a search criteria, this qualifies as a page view even if the searching party doesn’t actually visit my blog. Even so, the graph shows over 90 actual visits, where I’d never even hit 40 in the past. Sorry to cover my sitemeter addiction again, but I got excited and I hope that the numbers spike indicates that more people are reading.

If you are reading this and have no idea who I am….thanks for making my day by inflating my numbers (and ego).

AIDS Numbers Worldwide Decline

Have you ever come across a story or article that by the time you’ve finished reading, you have gone through a half dozen reactions/emotions? This story had that effect on me. The essence of the piece is that AIDS numbers worldwide have dropped significantly – from 39.5 million to 33.2 – but that the decrease is mainly on paper.

Here’s my progression of reactions as I read through the story:

Stage 1, Elation – “Great news! Whatever is leading to a lowering of instances of this horrendous disease is fantastic! Praise the Lord that fewer people are suffering from AIDS. But wait……..”

Stage 2, Disillusionment – “It’s an illusion, dang it! It isn’t so much that fewer people have AIDS, it’s just a statistical correction. So all the money being poured into the developing world isn’t doing a thing for these people?!?”

Stage 3, Cautious Hope – “Wait, apparently the AIDS epidemic peaked in late 90’s….there is improvement, just not as much as the numbers have been revised. That’s good news!”

Stage 4, Suspicion – “How could the number be off by over six million cases, that’s almost 20%?!? I smell an agenda at work here….”

Stage 5, Cynicism – “Oh look, the story quotes two epidemiologists from elite universities who believe the numbers have been knowingly inflated to create greater urgency and increase funding! As with global warming, science has become political.”

Stage 6, Frustration/Anger – “Apparently the immanent death of over 33 million people isn’t spectacular enough. It cheapens the tragedy of the people who ACTUALLY have AIDS (particularly those who contracted it through no fault of their own) to play number games with the issue.”

Stage 7, Acceptance – Because all emotional stage processes must end with acceptance.

Give this article a read and let me know your reaction.

Fact of the Day – F: Fasces

The Fasces, as pictured at left, is quite simply a bundle of rods lashed together around a staff or ax. Dating to Roman times, the bundle represents the strength of a sum being greater than the individual (similar to the proverbial rope of three strands which is not easily broken). As such, it has traditionally been used to symbolize strength through unity or simply power and jurisdiction. It is one of the most common images in crests, coat-of-arms and national symbology.

It has been utilized as a symbol from ancient Rome to Mussolini’s Italy and from Europe to America. The fasces is present in edifices for all three branches of US government (and both houses of Congress), the back of the Mercury dime, the Lincoln Memorial and numerous other places in DC and the state’s capitals. It may be the most commonly represented object in our government buildings that most of you could not even identify…until now.

I had some trouble finding something even somewhat interesting for my “F” fact of the day. Please stay tuned for Gurkha…

Kerch’s Perfect Storm

I was shocked last night when I realized that I’d completely neglected to keep some of my newer readers up-to-date on an ongoing crisis which directly affects our new hometown in Ukraine. On Sunday, in the midst of a near hurricane-strength storm on the Black Sea, multiple tankers and transport ships sank or ran aground in the Kerch Strait. This channel – between 3 and 11 miles wide – connects the Black Sea to the Sea of Azov, divides Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula from mainland Russia and is a major shipping lane. At least 5 sailors lost their lives and others remain missing. Ecologically the storm was equally devastating. A decrepit Russian tanker broke in half on the huge swells, spilling over a thousand gallons of oil. Additionally, several other ships carrying sulphur sank and are feared to be leaking chemicals into the Strait.

We have heard from our people in Kerch that the Hope Center (the facility that will be our home) is fine and suffered no damage, however the massive pollution from the spills will likely inhibit our ability to utilize the beaches for camps this summer. Please pray for Andrey, Tanya and the rest of our Ukrainian staff as they cope with the program issues and the humanitarian concerns that this storm has created.