Bread House

"When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other."

-Chinese Proverb

Today we intended on going to the clinic but we had to postpone our trip because there was a student protest taking place nearby. When we went to meet the Wolf Pack we decided to stop over at the Bread House to buy some naan. As I previsouly mentioned, naan is an important part of every Afghan meal. One of my officemates described it as tasting like pizza dough. I uploaded a video up top of them making it. Here is what their shop looks like:

Here is the inside of the shop:

One person hands the dough to another person who spreads it out on a long board. He then places the long board within a fire pit that is dug beneath the ground. When inside the hole the board is slapped against the wall and it gets cooked. After it is ready someone else hangs it up against the wall. Watching them is like watching a well oiled machine at work. All of their movements seem automatic. For $1.00 we bought about 5 huge pieces of naan. Here is Bruce with his naan.

Parked nearby was a jingle truck. I have mentioned these briefly in past posts. This was the first time I was actually have been able to get up close and take a picture of one. Take a look:

You see these trucks everywhere. I am not sure why they add all of the eleborate decoration but it looks really neat.

The next person that I would like to feature on ACSI is an EPal of mine. I will call her by her email name which is proud guard wife. She started a letter writing capanign after she read an "Angle Alert" about a chaplain who wrote about how over 1,100 Army and National Guard soldiers' morale was really low. She wanted to write all 1,100 of them but she knew that it would be too much work for one person. She then reached out to principals in North Carolina and then took it to the other 49 states emailing and/or faxing every states superintendent or comissioner of education. Only 6 states have participated so far and she plans to reach out again to the local and state level. She says that she simply wrote the request and that they were the ones that made it successful. To date she has received box after box of mail along with care packages. I belive she said she has received 50,000 letters to date. She also received a yo-yo for someone's uncle who is "....somewhere out there." It came with a note that said, "Will you please see that he gets it." She is working on delivering all of the letters. She says that she is currently "taking a big breath as we get ready to wrap up this phase of it." All of her efforts are done with her own funds. To complicate matters someone just stole her purse last weekend along with over $100.00 that was suppose to go towards her soldiers' support project. She is even trying to write to all 1,100 Army and National Guard Soldiers in Iraq. She tells me that she is about a third of the way through.

Thanks for reading.