Tent Living [Part 2]

Welcome back! This is part two of where I've lived since coming to Afghanistan. Originally this was all going to be one post, but the more I thought about all of the quirks with the locally built tents, the more I knew it would need to be a separate post.

When I left off last time I told you about the tents that were built for us as part of the "Afghan First" initiative. I'm excited to get to tell you a bit more about these tents and why they were such a bad solution. At first glance they don't look too bad, I guess. Here's a view from the outside:

A few notes:

1. Watch your head going in and out. That door frame is about 5'5" tall. I was bleeding after several encounters.
2. What's with the death-stakes holding the tent up? In the middle of the night, when you trip on a stake, the thought that goes through your head is not "I better catch myself or I'll hit the ground hard," but rather something along the lines of "This is it. I'm going to impale myself on the next stake, it's going to puncture my lung and I'm going to be laying there, unable to call for help, bleeding out on the gravel of Afghanistan."
3. Can these things possibly be waterproof? The answer, we would soon find out, was a resounding "No."

At first they weren't too bad, though. We had a TON of space and with the moderate temperatures of fall the HVAC system kept up nicely. We were even able to hang rings from the center support, a great way to practice our muscle-ups!

Over time, though, things started happening. Pieces started falling off:

The tent also started breaking/ripping/tearing when helicopters would fly overhead. Granted, this is more of an issue with the German pilots flying too low, but these tents were built for the military which has..you guessed it..a lot of helicopters.

Not too much later the weather turned cold. These tents each had one heater that was not designed to withstand Afghan winters. Many nights the temperatures outside would drop to -5C (about 20F). Inside the tents the temperature stayed at a warm and cozy +5C (about 42F). That's a cold tent to sleep in!

Not long after that we started getting into the rainy season. The tents leaked. Badly. One such night my tent-mates and I became overly dramatic as we surveyed the damage (and came up with our own methods to mitigate the effects):

It wasn't long after the rain came, along with a little bit warmer weather, that black mold started growing inside the tents:

Thankfully we were able to move out before the snow collapsed them!

And now, after moving several times and enduring an Afghan-winter in an Afghan-tent with Afghan-mold, we live in much better conditions than I ever would have expected over here.

Our current setup is warm if we want it to be, cold if we want it to be, always dry, and we have plenty of space. I even have a real bed and space for a desk underneath. Can you believe it? It really is a good setup. Hopefully we stay put for the rest of the deployment!