Day 104: Labor Day on Camp Stone

Friday, or Jumaa as it is called here, is Islam’s holy day. Consequently, it is harder to get work done here because our Afghan counterparts are not working. So we use Fridays as our light work day. Don’t get me wrong, we still worked today. Basically it is a seven day work week here with Fridays being the “dress down day”. Everyone wears PT gear (work out clothes) and you can come in and out of work as you please.

Since Labor Day was a work day, there was some celebration of the holiday today instead. One of the activities was a three-point contest and of course I couldn’t resist the urge to give it a try. I had visions of the new guy coming in and surprising everyone with a victory. The only problem was the wind. Herat has what is known as the 120 days of wind where it blows sunrise to sunset for 4 months. We are still in that period and so the wind is pretty strong. As you can see in the pictures below, the flag is flying straight out due to the wind.


So instead of having all of my shots fall nicely into the hoop as I had envisioned, they were blown off course. I know, a likely excuse you are thinking. But really it was pretty challenging to make anything. Well, as it turned out I didn’t win the contest. In fact I only made 2/27 shots (that’s a 7% field goal percentage). Not good, but at least I can blame it on the wind.


Happy Labor Day--four days late!