Shakira, Shakira!

After days of wiring, rigging, firewall ruling and gaff taping, there's a 4.5Mbps wireless pipe into Jalalabad, Afghanistan. We are very tired, there are many pictures, and doctors at the public hospital are downloading Shakira videos like there's no tomorrow (I'm seriously not kidding).

Standing around a bustling public hospital in the second largest afghan city is an interesting experience. First of all, there are ALWAYS hundreds of people just milling around--so many that there's a group prayer square in the middle of the courtyard:

There is also a remarkable amount of violence. I suppose the hospital is a good place to fight, given the ready access to medical attention, but still... In two days we witnessed two different incidents, not 10 feet away, where someone, for no apparent reason, started wailing on someone else, including an occasion where one guy started beating an old one-legged man with a small log, drawing this reaction from a pair of onlookers:

Despite the distractions, we did get everything rigged up (and later weatherproofed) in time to take a million pictures:
Day 1 Photos
Day 2 Photos
Day 3 Photos