1-4-10

I was talking to some guys at work today and they were telling me a story about an Indian guy in our shop who was lifting the cab of a truck up. He didn’t want to wait for it to be all the way tilted and climbed up to work on the engine. Well the cab fell on his hip crushing it. There is no 911 here so they called safety because the guy who got hurt is Indian, if he had been an expat they would have called the MP’s. Safety gets there and calls up the food chain until they get the project manager, he tells safety to go buy four plane tickets to India so they can lay him out on the plane and send him home. But while all that is happening and the guy is laying there in pain with what turned out to be a broken hip and a chunk of his hip bone broken off and floating around in his ass. Somebody called the MP’s and they sent the Canadian paramedics to get him and take him to the hospital. That’s where they found out what was wrong and medivacked him to Germany. Once the Military gets involved in something over here that is just the way it is, there is no arguing from the bosses, it wouldn’t help and the last thing the Sergeant Major wants is to be argued with. The guys in the shop took up a collection for him and raised $2000. Which is about 2 months pay for them; I have seen the pay stub. These guys are second class citizens over here. They make 1228 dollars per month; the lead mechanic makes an additional $60 making his total $1288. And they have to do all the shit work that expats won’t do, and the Indians do it because the last thing they want to do is make trouble and get shipped home. That is always hanging over their heads; if I get fired I could probably be back in country within a month. But these guys had to pay the recruiters that got them these jobs $2000 just to get them the job. So they work the first two months for free.

We heard about this early on in the night and then around lunch time Josh and I and Leo (who is Indian) were talking about dinner. (Note: There are several DEFAK’s or mess halls but only two serve a midnight meal. The Luxemburg which serves a European style cafeteria food and Falcon which serves American style cafeteria food. Think about you school lunches. The army doesn’t care about taste or nutrition so much their main concern is calorie intake. The want the food high in calories, nothing else.) I am tired of the Luxemburg, there is never anything I want to eat and the line to have the guy make you an omelet is always really long. So I said we should go to Falcon and Leo said they won’t let him and Denesh in. I asked what he was talking about and he told me they were going there for a while and one night an American guy was working the door (when you come into the DEFAK you have to wash your hands then slide your meal card) and told him that Indians can’t eat at this DFAK. Leo said that he and Denesh would drop us off and then come back and get us. I told him that was bullshit and if the Army was going to let him fix their trucks with me and cram them in a tent way past capacity because they won’t house them with Americans, then he was at least going to eat dinner with me and Josh if he wanted to. So went to Falcon, Josh and I went first and then Leo went to slide his card and the Philippine guy made Leo show his ID, which they can do. Then the guy says Leo doesn’t have the right color stripe on his CAC card (military ID), I hung back to make sure Leo got in. When I heard him say that, I told the guy “No, he has a CAC card he has a meal card. He’s eating.” Then I told Leo to go on and I waved Denesh through. Leo got in line and I watched to make sure nobody else was going to give them a hard time, and I saw this other Philippine guy laughing. I looked at him and he gave me two thumbs up and kept laughing. He was really tickled with what happened. It’s like an apart idée here, there is a spoken rule that everything is separate, and that the Indians get the shitty one of whatever there is to choose from. Like showers, the Indians got showers after a year of having to use water bottles, no showers for a year! Because the army guys wouldn’t let them use threes.

After work I went to the gym.