I can’t remember which building Chris took me to, but he introduced me to my “sponsor,” David, whose balding head and full beard remind me of Santa Claus in the classic Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, narrated by Burl Ives. David has a slight southern accent and later confirmed that he hails from Alabama. He was friendly and supportive, and he helped me into my spartan room, the room where I will be sleeping and getting ready and writing my blog for the foreseeable future. We agreed to meet a little later, and I set about trying to find a way to make this room look like home.

The hardest thing to write, I tell my students, is a description of a physical location, using spatial transition words and phrases; nevertheless, I am going to try to describe my room right here, right now. As I looked in through the doorway, I saw a long, rather than wide, room. At the end opposite the door sat what some might call an armoire and others might call a standing closet with drawers, and still others might call a chiffarobe. Whatever it is called, it was supposed to be big enough to house all the clothing I brought to wear, because the room has no other closet. I walked straight back to it and opened one of the doors; I saw a hanging rod and no hangers. Immediately to my left was the bathroom, which is about the size of a good closet. Whatever its size, however, I was triumphant in the fact that it is mine, and I have to share it with no one.

The bathroom has all the essentials, including a shower stall with sliding plastic doors that don’t really slide. Interestingly, I noted, though a mirror hangs above the sink, the bathroom contains no electrical outlets for hairdryers, electric shavers, or the like. I stepped back out of the bathroom in front of the armoire (I will take the high-falutin’ road) and looked toward the door I had just entered. My luggage lay on the room’s gray hard rubber floor immediately to my left, and when I took one step forward, I peered around a corner to see a desk and black chair. Right above the desk I saw two triangular shelves nestled into the corner; on the top shelf I saw a 20-inch television and on the bottom shelf, a DVD player. Directly in front of the desk and chair, and leading back toward the door, I looked at my cot that hugs the wall parallel to my luggage. A small bedside table sits between the bed and the door.

I gulped. This was it. The room is cooled by a Samsung window unit, and I heard it click on and off, but I was still in some form of shock. I believed the room to be smaller than Emily’s college dorm room – the one she was in by herself. Fortunately, before I had much of a chance to wallow in self-pity, it was time to meet David for my tour.

David is the perfect person to present to a newbie in the compound; he is cheerful, pleasant, optimistic, energetic, and it seemed to me that he knows everyone here. I don’t know how many people that is, but he introduced me to more than I care to remember – okay, more than I can remember. First, he took me to the dining facility. The Chow Hall. The Mess Hall. The DFAC. Can you guess that one? Everything here, and I do mean everything, has an acronym. If you guessed that DFAC stands for Dining FACility, you are better than I. It took me two days to figure that out. I asked a person for directions to the laundry, and he told me to take a right in front of the DFAC. I was still lost.

Oh, well. While we were in the DFAC, David introduced me to Frank, who is a friend of a William Jewell and UMKC schoolmate, Steve Hemphill. Frank and Steve go way back, but I’m not sure whether it’s way back to Iraq or to Kosovo. Yes. This is one of the parts of this journey that still flabbergasts me. When I was in Washington, almost all, if not all, my “classmates,” for lack of a better term, had extensive foreign travel experience, and most had extensive experience working for international organizations – some had worked for the United Nations! And here I was, selected with this group, me, who has been nowhere, and who has never worked for anyone outside Sedalia or Kansas City (except for Martin Drug and Senn Five and Ten in Thayer)! I found myself in very elevated company. Many of the people had worked in Rule of Law programs, which are designed to bring stability to a country after conflict, and I believe that is what Steve and Frank were doing when they met.

Anyway, I met Frank and his dinner companion, I met other people, and other people, and then we went to other buildings, all of them looking alike to me, all of them overwhelming me, all of them representing something that I was going to have to learn, and then probably unlearn, should I be deployed somewhere else in the country. We stopped in one building to get my meal card, and we stopped in another to register my computer so that I could send an e-mail to Max and Emily telling them that I had arrived and was safe. It was going to take over an hour for the computer to make it through the IT maze, so the very nice “IT guy” let me use his phone to call Max. I got voicemail, but I managed to leave a message without bawling. I was, after all, in front of someone who didn’t know me!

Eventually, we wandered beside one of the buildings, and I saw Wendell! Wendell works for the same company but in a different division; however, we were in Washington at the same time, and he was, like David, pleasant, optimistic, and gregarious. I shrieked, “Wendell!” and he hugged me, and at that point, I knew everything would be all right someday. Right then, a truck pulled up, and Julius, another Washington classmate, jumped out and hugged me. I was surprised, because during the entire 12-day seminar, I think Julius, who had a 20-year Navy career, said two words. Okay, maybe three.

We kept walking, and I saw coming down the sidewalk Ara, yet another Washington friend. I hugged him and told him that I was glad to see him! Ara was the first person I met in Washington, and he was surprised that I connected his name with Ara Parseghian, the Notre Dame football coach. It turned out that this Ara is Armenian, as was the coach, but this Ara was born in Egypt. He and his family lived in many countries in the Middle East while he was young, and he learned all the languages. Ara’s father died while his family was in, I believe, Lebanon during the 1960s. They were undocumented at that time, and during the Kennedy administration, the State Department welcomed any Egyptians who did not want to live in that country because at the time, Egypt was friendly with Russia. So Ara’s family immigrated to the United States, where he distinguished himself as a high school student who spoke five or six languages, but not English.

Eventually, he got a Master’s degree and wrote his thesis on, in the early 1970s, terrorism. That paper brought about an offer of employment from the State Department, but a hiring freeze prevented him from ever working there. Ara now has a Master’s degree in Tax Law (LLM), and he, too, worked in Iraq during the first months of the 2003 invasion, as well as at other times during that war. Now, though I speak only ONE language fluently, I am working alongside him in Afghanistan. We promised each other that we would get caught up the next day.

I think David could see that I was getting overwhelmed, and so he suggested that we call it quits for the night and meet the next day at 11. I was more than ready to try to put my room to rights and be quiet, so I agreed. David told me to expect to wake up during the night and not be able to go back to sleep, but I had faith in jazz and Advil PM.

I know that we ate dinner some time that night, but I can’t remember when. I just remember thinking that I really needed to teach those guys to cook vegetables. They were soggy and mushy. But I cut them some slack. It’s hard cooking for hundreds of people. It was at dinner that I met the person who is in charge of the operation I work for here. He explained to me the chain of command, and he told me that I would someday soon receive a job assignment, but he wasn’t sure when that would be or where, if anywhere, it would take me. Because these jobs are on year-long contracts, jobs come open at different times in different places. He was direct and pleasant, and I figured we would get along just fine, but I decided that to unpack everything would be an exercise in futility.

So I went back to my room, looked around for a while, took out my new wireless iHome speakers, and turned on the music to which I fall asleep every night – Jazz at Night’s End. Every piece on the album is fabulous, and I think it is my favorite. My faith in the music and the Advil PM paid off. I slept like a log, regardless of the fact that the pillow provided me is nothing more than thousands of lumps of foam rubber sewn up in pillow-shaped cloth. The travel pillow that Emily made me buy (for $40 at Brookstone, I might add, that I never used on the planes) saved my night, because I put it right on top of the lumps, and felt just fine.

The next day, David took me on more of the grand tour. Somewhere along the way, we met up with another newbie, this one also a friend of Frank and Steve’s, Bryan, who wasn’t really new. He, too, has worked internationally, and for world organizations. It turned out that Bryan has an Armenian wife, and Ara, who joined us on our walk-around, was pleased. On the tour, I met the people who would make sure I got paid, those who would make sure I got my leave, those who would make sure I got my visa updated, those who would make sure I got maintenance I needed (I assumed that getting hot water was a problem, but it turns out that my water heater was the problem, and Marizel got it fixed!), those who would make sure my clothes were clean, and finally, the people who would give me the things of life. At “Logistics,” I got cleaning supplies, but no scrub brushes or cleaning cloths. I got liquid soap, paper towels, and TP. I did not, however get a mop or bucket. I wheedled myself into a broom, and begged for rubber gloves, which came in a size large. I didn’t care. I got the last pair.

Somewhere along the way, I got an expense report to complete, and thank heaven that I save everything, because not only does the company want my boarding passes, they also want the itinerary they sent me. Fortunately, I had everything I needed, except for one taxi receipt, which I forgot to ask for in Dubai. I think I had been so relieved to make it through all the things I needed to make it through at the airport, that I forgot to ask the cabbie for a receipt.

Though we tried to be time-efficient, every office we visited told us to “come back after lunch.” We finally gave up and went to lunch ourselves. Though I will complain about the food, I will not complain about the people who cook it, serve it, and clean up after meals. They are friendly and eager to please. They can’t help it that the food just doesn’t come out tasting as good as it might. They are also trying to please a variety of cultural palates – since I have been here, we have been served pork at least three times, and Muslims do not eat pork. We can choose hot food, running the gamut from T-bone steak (overcooked) to chicken kabobs (really good tonight), to macaroni and cheese, to somewhat-tempura-battered shrimp. We can eat a sandwich, although the tuna salad looks pretty bland, and the salami looks pretty heavy. We can go to the curry bar, which usually has a meat or vegetable curry, daal, rice, and naan. I can’t remember what daal is, and I haven’t had the courage to try it yet – maybe tomorrow. Naan is soft flatbread. There is a salad bar of sorts; it doesn’t look much like a salad bar, but I did find really good cole slaw there yesterday, and fresh fruit is usually served, although I hesitate to eat that which I cannot peel, such as apples and sand pears, because they have been washed in the water.

We are discouraged from drinking the water, because it is like Mexico’s water, I guess, and our American digestive systems aren’t quite ready for it. We have access to all the bottled water we can drink 24 hours a day. But there is NO recycling. I feel guilty when I used bottled water to brush my teeth and cannot even recycle the bottle.

Regardless of the quality of the food and the potability of the water, all the men who attend our meals are gracious and go about their work seriously. The man who tends the silverware and check-in told me in hesitant, broken English that if nothing on the menu suited me, I could order a hamburger. I did, and it was really good. Too bad I can’t eat hamburgers every day!

That day, David, Bryan, Ara, and I finished our tasks at “Logistics,” and then we finished the day. I found the gym and walked my traditional two miles on the treadmill, I went back to the DFAC (I swear I won’t use that again), and then I came “home” to eagerly answer e-mails and Facebook comments, and to tell those who care about me, by way of my blog, what my day was like. I wonder if anyone will read it.