First Mission

Without giving specifics of the missions (when, where, excactly what), I will say that missions for CAGs include things like repairing Mosques, building or repairing schools, water treatment plants, electric power plants... things that Iraq needs to live every day life.

In a letter from Brian (a couple of months ago):


In addition to the mission, I handed out school supplies, toys, candy, and water to over 30 little Iraqi kids and interacted with them quite a bit. I did some first aid on some of them that had cuts and scrapes and stuff. I cleaned off and dressed their wounds. Nothing too serious. They seemed utterly fascinated with the band-aids that I put on them. After I cleaned up the first kid they all started coming up to me and showing me their little cuts and scrapes and wanted me to put band-aids on them too, even though most of them were already almost healed. I felt really good after helping them. These kids live in poverty and have nothing. They fought over the bottles of water we handed out, let alone all of the toys and such. I made sure every one of them got something though. Some of the bullies tried to take stuff from the smaller kids and kept coming back for more stuff, but I made sure the little ones kept their stuff. I took lots of pictures that I will show you. They even kept trying to get me to give them my camera and my ballistic sunglasses. We were absolutely swarmed by these kids. It was a lot of fun though. There was one little kid that I met named Umar. He was probably about 7 or 8 years old and he was really sweet. He didn't push or shove like the others and we taught each other a few different words in our native languages. He kept trying to speak Arabic to me really fast and I think he kept forgetting that I couldn't understand him. He could say a word or two in English though, so we could communicate to an extent. I bandaged up a scrape on his hand and he was very thankful. I gave him a couple extra band-aids for when that one came off and he shared them with the other kids that had cuts. I thought that was really neat. He was the only one that did something like that. I got a couple of pictures with him, which he was very excited about, and he would look at them on the camera and smile and say "Very good, very good". He seemed really intelligent and he said that he goes to school, so I made sure that he got a little bookbag with some pencils and paper in it. They had a little school in this village, but who knows how much the kids learn. I hope I get to see that little guy again.