Posts Tagged ‘Chora’

Timo Smeehuijzen - May 24, 1987 - June 15, 2007
There are no words to fully express what the Smeehuijzen family has gone through since 2007, when their son Timo was killed in a suicide bombing in Afghanistan.
The bomb went off as a Dutch convoy headed back to base after celebrating Women’s Day in Tarin Kowt. [...]

One of the things that Michel and I kinda obsessed over while we were in Afghanistan was the idea of a job where the stakes could include death - either yours or someone else’s (a kill-or-be-killed kinda thing).
We couldn’t imagine ourselves in this situation and relentlessly questioned any soldier who’d had a life-or-death experience.
What we [...]

Life on the base is a little more relaxed on Sundays - soldiers get to sleep in, breakfast goes on a little longer (actually it’s technically brunch… and it’s pretty good!), there’s an Afghan market on the base, and there’s even a service in the chapel.
I spoke to the priest about what it’s like talking [...]

This week on Curious Orange (the radio show)…
It’s the fourth - and last - part in our Dutch in Afghanistan series: When the going gets tough.
In our last days in Afghanistan, a rocket attack killed one soldier and wounded 6 others. We’ll hear more about that from a soldier’s perspective - how they deal with [...]

In many ways, life in Afghanistan is just like life anywhere else - you get up, eat breakfast, do stuff, eat lunch, do stuff, eat dinner, do stuff, and go to bed… then you do it all over again the next day.
When you look at that list, you realize that eating is a pretty significant [...]

Soldiers work long hours. Ofter 12 or 14 hours a day, 6.5 days per week (they get Sunday mornings off).
So it’s not surprising that they occasionally want to relax a bit.
Unfortunately, there aren’t a whole lot of leisure activities on the base. Of course there’s Echo’s, the Dutch “bar” where you can get something to [...]

While we were still in Afghanistan, we posted a video of the inside of the Afghan bakery on the base (you can see that here).
Now that we’re back, we finally found the time to edit the interview we did with one of the bakers (I won’t even attempt to spell his name). You can listen [...]

Lou Cuypers is a Dutch entrepreneur working in Uruzgan. He is not affiliated with the army and he likes to keep it that way. Basically, he works with local farmers in Southern Afghanistan… and they aren’t too keen to have army trucks showing up at their door - that might get Taliban attention, and that’s [...]

Obviously, Dutch forces in Uruzgan have many encounters with Afghans. These encounters could involve the interrogation of a captured insurgent, a friendly meeting with a tribal leader, or a session teaching local police officers investigation techniques.
Of course, there aren’t too many Dutch people that speak local Afghan languages… and there aren’t [...]

This week on Curious Orange (the radio show)…
We’ve got the first in a 4-part series of Dutch-in-Afghanistan shows. This week we’ll stick with the basics and “Define the Mission” - we’ll tell you why the Dutch are there and what civilians, soldiers, and politicians think about it.
We’ll also tell you what the Dutch doing, how [...]