Pictures and elections

I am finally posting some pictures.

Here is a picture of the traffic one day after leaving NDS hospital. The street is only wide enough for a single vehicle with parked vehicles next to the sidewalk. Remember there are no traffic laws so if you can fit, they drive...

Here, we are waiting for everyone to get together so we can leave NMH and head back to NKC

Here is a picture of us at the back of NDS. It is Lach, Dennis, Tim, me and DJ. You can see some of Kabul in the background behind us.
Another picture of the traffic and pedestrians in the Kabul streets. Notice the bicyclist to the left of the picture.

So, here it is 2 days after the elections and no official results yet. I didn't see the big three networks (ABC, CBS, & NBC) projecting the winner in each province on election night here in Kabul. Actually, the last thing I heard was that maybe by Tuesday, the Election Committee will release some results. Yesterday, both Karzi and Abdullah were claiming victory. Only time will tell how it plays out...

Since I last posted, we had a few more incidents in Kabul. Another SVBIED struck a convoy near Camp Phoenix, where I was last week. We got 8 cases in the OR from that incident. On Wednesday, we had 1 case in the OR which was ANP CTP (Afghanistan National Police, Counter Terrorism Police.) You can look up the incident on the web. It was the ANP exchanged gunfire with some terrorists at a bank in Kabul. I won't go into specifics, but again, you can read about it online.

Thursday, was the actual elections and it was eerily quiet. No incidents that we are aware of that brought causalities to NMH. We didn't have interpreters that day as there was no public transportation in Kabul. The streets were locked down pretty tight. I did go up to the hospital with the other nurses but there wasn't anything going on. No cases in the OR. We ended up rounding together on the patients throughout the hospital with several of our docs.

Yesterday, jumaa was a typical day off. We didn't go up to the hospital and again there were no incidents that required us to go up. Today is the first day of Ramadan, so again we did not go up to the hospital as we didn't have interpreters. The hospital was in a duty only status, similar to jumaa. Tomorrow, we are back to a normal schedule.

Other than posting the pictures, not much new to report. Quiet is good...