Wow, this first week of work has been a whirlwind with briefings and interviews. I absolutely love getting to meet with service members and veterans. It certainly is refreshing to get out and see how VA impacts the lives of our customers. Sitting in the office looking only at claims files or computers, it is very easy to lose sight of our mission.
Monday morning was our first day "alone" Ann and I both had 0800 briefings. She was at Kleber Kaserne for an Army briefing and I was at Ramstein for an Air Force briefing. After my briefing I had a quick lunch then a telephone briefing with Aviano AFB, so it was a full day for me!
We have an office at Kleber Kaserne Army Post, but will be traveling so much that we will only be in the office one day a week for sure. We will spend all day Tuesday at Kleber and all day Wednesday at Ramstein Air Force Base taking appointments. Ramstein is great about keeping our calendar full of appointments on our day there! Of course between all the travel, briefings, and interviews, we both have an e-mail address so, we get a lot of e-mails to respond to!
We are going to have to do some outreach to get Kleber appointments up! Our office there is pretty remote! We are on the third floor of the ACAP Center/Library, with no elevator! Which is crazy because many of our customers are disabled! I did learn that there is a Warrior Transition Unit located at Kleber, (for service members with injuries or disabilities that will more than likely be released from active duty) which I will visit just to see if the service members have any questions.
There was a briefing Tuesday at Baumholder which is about an hour from Kaiserslautern. It was a great group of guys! There were only nine service members present, so it was a nice small informal group. Thursday afternoon I was all set to travel to Geilenkirchen (which is about 3 hours from here, very close to Belgium and the Netherlands) for a briefing Friday, thank goodness I finally got in touch with the office Thursday morning, because they didn't have a briefing scheduled, although it was on our schedule. I guess that shows me the importance of calling ahead to make sure the briefing is still on!
Basically from here on out, Ann and I will be going in different directions! The only thing we know for sure is that on Tuesdays one of us will be at Kleber and Wednesdays one of us will be at Ramstein. We will be all over the country on the other days!
Now that I am somewhat settled, I will post more often!
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