Ramadan - The Sky Is Falling

Well, we had our power point presentation on Ramadan. For those of you who are not Muslim or like me, just not very knowledgeable about it, I can tell you all about it. We already had our first causality from it. It is the Muslim holiday where they essentially fast for about 30 days. They can’t eat or drink anything of nutritional value from sun up to sun down for the whole month just about. ( I wonder if they can drink coffee or pop, I was told that stuff isn’t good for you anyhow but does it have nutritional value?) They also can’t do anything during the day that is pleasurable like, you guessed it, sex. (Hmmm,I wonder if that has any nutrional value, never mind). They also somehow think shooting their AK -47s and mortars into the air is a way of praising Allah. They tend to do that at the beginning mainly, and at the end of the holiday. Occasionally, just for fun, they shoot them off during the middle of the holiday just to remind us they are out there. I guess that works when you have a small place out in the freaking desert, where you don’t have to worry about where it lands. However, when you are in the city, with 1 -2 million other people around who are also shooting off their toys, what goes up eventually comes down. Amazing how that works. Anyhow, our casualty was just walking on our base and caught a ricochet off the T –wall and was hit in the abdomen. Fortunately, it was just a flesh wound, but still, imagine if it hit him in the face or head. It has the potential to do some damage. One of the little mortars hit one of the gyms that I work out at. Fortunately it didn’t do any real damage. I would have been pissed if it was damaged and I couldn’t work out there anymore. I think all it did was scare the cockroaches and scorpions. So, there is a memo out we got to stay indoors as much as possible for the next month, after our cleanup and work is done. Maybe that is not a bad idea.

The pics are from our OR. As you can tell, it is not too much different than our own back home. Maybe just a few years behind the times, but really, not too bad. We do share the room. There are 2 OR beds in the same room. So if we get massive casualties at the same time, both beds are used simultaneously.

The other pic is for the OR people at Condell. The scrub shirt was given to me by the OR people. That’s when I embarrassed myself by putting it on at the party (Boy that was a good party of what I could remember). Anyhow, the OR people enjoyed the comments on the shirt, like “Duck” and other comments.

Tom