Halpin at large

November 25, 2007

About this blog: Michelle Halpin, Solano Magazine's production manager at large, is a public affairs broadcast journalist, currently deployed to Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa, which is headquartered at Camp Lemonier, Djibouti. A member of the 69th Public Affairs Detachment, a California National Guard unit in Fairfield, Calif., she is currently attached to and deployed with the 131st Mobile Public Affairs Detachment out of Mobile, Alabama; she left in March 2007 and is scheduled to be back in the U.S. in early summer 2008. Halpin says, "So far on this deployment, I've bounced from Fort Dix, New Jersey, to Tampa, Florida, to Atlanta, Georgia, back to Tampa, Florida, to Qatar, to Djibouti, and to..."

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TADJOURAH, Djibouti -- Finally, my first blog entry. And it only took eight months to finally sit still and jot something down. I've been meaning to start for some time, but there's always more to add to 'the story' and then the sheer amount of time needed to say all the things I want to say becomes too intimidating to bother. So you must wonder then what finally happened to cause me to start so late in the game.

Basically, I'm on a mission right now that has hit several bumps in the road. I don't mean in the overall deployment (that is another story altogether). For the next couple of days, my mission is to assist, along with several others, three journalists from Al-Jazeera English. Things had been going splendidly until this afternoon.

Our small convoy departed our base this morning on a journey that would last an entire day. Al-Jazeera would film some of our military-to-military training for a news package they've been working on. So of course, after a long, bumpy and beautiful daylong journey through what looked like National Geographic scenery, we finally arrived at our destination. Unfortunately, officials in the city decided, seemingly out of the clear blue sky, that they didn't want Al-Jazeera there, and they didn't want us, the U.S. military, there either. They basically said we needed to leave the town right away. That, despite having everything cleared in advance with all the right officials. It was like some kind of bait and switch and no explanation was offered. The Al-Jazeera folks were suddenly in fear of what would happen with their jobs as this was the most critical part of the story they were looking for. They had extended their stay here in Djibouti so that they could get this part of their story. And then the door was shut in all our faces, so to speak. The next thing you know we were racing to the next town, a mere hour away to seek shelter at the local inn, which only had two of the three rooms we needed.

Of course, the female Al-Jazeera reporter and I are now sharing one of the two available rooms by ourselves and have kicked the four males with us to the curb and made them all sleep in the same two-person room. The new bunkmates consist of our Air Force lieutenant, the guy in charge of the mission who thinks North Carolina is the greatest state in the union; a crazy Army sergeant who thought he was out of the Army until he was suctioned back in almost two years later as a member of the Individual Ready Reserve, also known as the IRR, and also thinks North Carolina is the greatest thing since sliced bread; and the two Kenyan Al-Jazeera reporters. Wow. Talk about getting cozy with the media!

So now here I sit without TV or radio, no light for my book, and a toilet that doesn't flush properly (at least we have one) or any other distractions from writing this very first blog entry, one in which I'm straining my eyes because I can't plug my power cord in to make my laptop screen bright enough to actually see what I'm trying to type. Yes, now I sit in the dark on the front porch in front of my 'room' at this lovely establishment, where I'm currently being bitten alive by mosquitoes that most certainly carry malaria. Of course, being a member of the U.S. Army, I have been both inoculated for every disease and biohazard known to man, two or more times of course, and I'm also on a regimen of preventive medicine for malaria, of which a major side effect is to experience very lucid dreams, which are too unmentionable to mention. And I can still get malaria-just not as bad as if I wasn't taking the pills. Huh?

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