True to his word Drew called back about a half hour after his original call. He doesn’t have a schedule yet for calls but he’s 11 and a half hours ahead of me so I suspect they’ll be coming in very early in the morning if he starts calling on weekdays. He was pretty tired when he called today since it was close to 11:00pm and he’d been up since 5:00am.

Unlike Bosnia where he got a computer timed allotment to five phone numbers a week, in KAF he has been issued a phone card with only 35 minutes on it. Each week he gets a new round of minutes. He can “spend” those minutes any way he likes – multiple short calls to various numbers, one long call home, two shorter calls home, etc. – but informs me that since this is all the time he gets he won’t be calling anywhere other than home. We’ve already spent all his minutes this week. I forgot how quickly time passes when it’s limited and you’re trying to share days worth of news.

Sorry friends and family. You’re not getting any of our precious calling minutes! You’ll just have to get your updates from reading my blog or talking to me.

He doesn’t have Internet access yet so can’t reply to any messages he may have received. He also has a limited allotment of data transfer available to him each week. Since the webmail account for his email displays message size he won’t be opening any large emails. Don’t bother forwarding funny pictures or videos. They’ll just get deleted. If you’re sending pictures from home save them at lower dpi settings, zip the files, or burn them to a disk and mail them.

Per Drew the area he’s in smells like poop. Apparently he’s down wind of the sewage treatment area. At least he can laugh about it. He’s also complaining about the cold at night. He also says that it’s surprisingly humid there and the humidity is causing him to feel the famed “bone chilling cold” humid areas are known for. Yes he has been reminded that 0C temps, even with unexpected humidity, are no where near as cold as the -30C temps he left back home.

Troops have to pay to send mail back home to friends and family so I’ve now been asked to send stamps. He also suggests that if anyone who adopted troops includes a self-addressed stamped envelope with their letter or package they will likely get a reply quicker. They can’t always get to the mail room to purchase stamps when they’re outside the wire or working odd hours. Makes sense.

I haven’t sent his first package yet. I’m still working on filling it. Guess it’s a good thing since he sent some request for books from our household library, paper Timmies gift certificates, and stamps. I have a letter to write and want to print off MOT’s first post and the replies so he can read it and pass them around to other troops.

Daylight is wasting so I’m off to complete my shopping mission. Oh, and I’m leaving his previous messages on the phone until I can record them off of voicemail. Just for the days when I miss hearing his voice.

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