1000 Words from Iraq

A post from Kuwait

For the last week, I lived off of the Southern hospitality of an Alabama National Guard signal company. They set us up in their living area at the airfield as we waited to fly out of Iraq and to Kuwait. Being a northern girl myself who’s moving to Tallahassee, which is practically in Georgia, I was trying, without success, to pick up a southern accent. I did find out that I definitely will not be passing for native any time soon. But the guys were very nice and went out of their way to make us feel comfortable. I caught up on my movie-watching (which I’ve done quite a lot of the last couple months anyway) and did my best to gain a couple pounds before I came home so my family wouldn’t think I had starved the whole time I was here. The airfield is the only camp in Mosul that has fast food (a pizza place, burger shop and a tex-mex restaurant, located in Iraq and run by Turks) so we all took advantage of that. And while we haven’t had to do any work for the last week, I’m glad it was only a week that we spent waiting because we were all anxious to get home.
I landed in Kuwait at an insanely early hour this morning. One step closer on our journey home. I can’t describe the weight that I felt lifted off my shoulders when it finally sank in that we weren’t in Iraq anymore and, unlike leave, we wouldn’t have to be coming back any time soon. Well we may not be home officially, at least we aren’t getting shot at here.
I was staring out the window as we drove down the Kuwaiti highway in a bus this morning. Kuwait, like Iraq, is a mainly muslim country which was once involved in conflict. But if you drive through Kuwait now, the highways are immaculately maintained, there are new trees being planted throughout the country, there are nice cars on the roads and you feel safe on the streets. It’s the exact opposite of anything you would see in Iraq (except the road signs are still in Arabic) and I thought, if Kuwait can do this, why not Iraq? Maybe there is still hope for Iraq, but they just need some time.
At any rate, I’m not too sad to have left Iraq behind me last night. There are a lot of friends I left behind who I will continue to pray for and I’ll probably continue to track the news to see how things are going, but I feel like in the last year I have done what I could to make things better and now it’s up to the people following us to continue what we have started and improve upon it. It’s time for me to continue with my life.
With any luck, my next post will be from the wonderful USA.

posted by Blair Heusdens @ 5:00 PM