Day 390: Moving Boxes

Since I have been in the military I have moved a lot of boxes. In fact, outside of practicing medicine, moving boxes has probably been the thing that has occupied most of my time over these past five years in the Navy. There have been innumerable boxes that I have packed, moved, and stored as the Navy has sent us on our journey from Washington, D.C., to Virginia, to California, to Nevada, and finally to Utah. I don’t think “clearing out the boxes in the garage” has ever left the weekend to-do list since Sue and I were first married. So you would think that coming here to Afghanistan would finally give me a chance to get out of the box moving business for a while, right? WRONG!




Honestly, if you added up all the boxes in the moving trucks, storage units, and garages I have had over the past several years, they would be nothing compared to the pile of boxes I have moved since arriving here at Camp Stone. There have been shipments of urine specimen cups. There have been taxi’s full of vaccines. There was even a bus that was completely full of first aid kits (I wish I would have taken a picture of that one). I have moved boxes from one end of Camp Stone to another. I have hauled them over to the neighboring ANA base. I have moved them from storage containers to humvees and from trucks to storage containers. About the only thing I haven’t done is loaded boxes onto the back of a camel.

Well, lately I have enjoyed my box moving experiences a little bit more. This is because I have been receiving the boxes containing the donations from our Afghan service project. It ended up being a huge project and the amount collected and sent over was amazing. Yesterday I received the latest shipment--approximately 15 boxes (shown below). Over the past few months, as I have moved each individual box (totaling well over a hundred), I have been humbled by the love and generosity of those who donated so much. Each box contains something that will change a life--from clothes that will cover a newborn baby to backpacks filled with paper, crayons, and pencils that will help a child gain an education. Your donations have made and will continue to make a huge difference for thousands of Afghan children.


So thanks again for your generosity and helping contribute to the “watch Justin move 452 boxes in 452 days” project. Luckily, I only have a few more weeks of box moving left until I make it back home. And what will I do once I make it back home? That’s right, my first item of business is to pack everything I own into boxes and move them back to Fallon!