Moving Forward

Dear All,

It has been a busy week but full of new adventures and progress. Things are moving forward with our center. We are thrilled. The cleaning and painting has begun and that feels wonderful. Paint is very limited here on base so we only had two colors to pick from. We chose a light gray. When it first was going up and in contrast to what was there it looked like a beautiful shade of baby blue. Fortunately for me that was nice since I love blue. As more and more goes up and you see less of the old paint it is a light gray and will be just fine! We have a crew of Iraqi Nationals who are doing the painting. That is an interesting opportunity to work with them. We also have two soldiers who guard them so all is well. I will say they don't believe in working long hours and they expect many breaks so we are lucky to get two hours work out of them during their three to four hour time with us! They are very short on supplies here on base so you have to be a bit creative to get the work done!

It will be great when finished. We are anxious to get our offices set up and the rest of the center. We still have phone lines to run and Internet lines to drop so we are a ways from the finish line but we at least can see where we are going.

The United Through Reading is going well! Books are starting to come which helps so very much. Thank you all who are sending them. I will try to get some pictures of the set up and some of our troops reading. It is such an inspiring program and something that really means so much to our troops.

I had one soldier come Friday, grinning from ear to ear as his wife had given birth to a beautiful baby boy. He was so proud. Of course I wanted pictures and all he had was on his computer. He took my thumb drive and put them on there so I could see the baby. Beautiful! Beautiful! That night I made a couple copies and brought them to him Saturday so he could expand his bragging rights. Kind of hard to walk around with a laptop all the time to show off pictures. He was thrilled. He read a book to his new son! And, let's see, what did Linda do......cried like a baby!

Another hospital staff person walked by and told me about his new son also! Isn't it amazing the sacrifices these troops are making for us. I can't imagine not getting to be there for the birth of my child and missing it's first couple months of life. It makes me doubly proud and honored to be here and rejoice with our troops in these new arrivals.

Well I need to run. This afternoon we have a memorial service for three that we lost this week. This will be hard but something I want to be apart of. Again so proud and honored to share this time with our troops...even the hard times!

I love you all dearly and miss you!
In His Mighty Grip,
Linda