You don't have to be poor to work there (Iraq), but it helps

[CShine]

Organised by Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR), a subsidiary of the oil services giant, Halliburton, these fairs are held across America to recruit people to support the 145,000 US troops in Iraq - cooking their meals, doing their laundry, driving supplies and a thousand other such jobs. KBR employs about 24,000 people in Iraq for these tasks, 11,000 of them from the US. The majority of KBR's US recruits come from the southern states, and the company makes a point of holding job fairs where there is known to be large military, or former military, population. In many cases, new recruits get just one week of training.

By 8am on Saturday, 100 people, most of the them men, some wearing suits, others in jeans and workshirts and baseball caps, had lined up on the fourth floor of a Houston hotel and were filling in forms and handing them to the KBR recruiters. In a nearby ballroom, stirring music was being piped from speakers while images of KBR's tent camps in Iraq were projected onto a large screen.

"I can tell you up front this is not for everybody. We lose between 30 and 50 per cent of the people to who we make a contingent offer," said Chris Ward, a KBR recruiter who gave a candid, hour-long introduction as to what any new employees could expect if selected. "How many people have been to the Middle East? It's not like Houston. It's not like west Texas." The heat and the dust would be their worst enemies, Mr Ward explained, as the screen behind him showed images of snakes and spiders, some the size of a human hand.

"I have heard of 150, 155 degrees in summer <68C>. It's hot," he said. "And if there are dust storms, it's very dusty. Everything is tanned. We have lost 39 , tragically. We'd rather it was zero. Will there be more? Probably. It's a war zone." Aside from the heat and the dust and the danger of being killed or kidnapped, KBR employees are expected to endure an exhausting schedule, working seven days a week for at least 12 hours a day, with time off every four months. "We eat, we sleep and we work," he said.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=531657