Setting up Camp in Baladwayne

When we moved into Baladwayne and set up camp - Baladwayne was made up of primarily, I would say probably about 6000 people and within a few days Baladwayne had swelled to close to 100,000 people. They came in for the security of having the Canadian soldiers around and came in because we had food and supplies to pass out to them. We, I know that we went out and our engineers went and rebuilt bridges that the next day all the material was taken off of them stolen. In Baladwayne itself, there was no electricity mainly because the, all of the lines, all the electrical lines were all stripped off the poles and sold. There were children that didn’t, hadn’t gone to school for three years and our structural technicians, our “struct techs” as we called them, and a group of Navy Seabees which were their equivalent, went and rebuilt schools for them. Wives and girlfriends and that back in Canada sent us supplies over of writing tablets and pencils and picture books and things like this, and all of these schools were stocked. Like every window was fixed, every wall was fixed, and there was still... if you went back to it the day after, everything was gone and the kids were left with nothing. So you had to pretty well guard around the clock to ensure that the school wouldn’t be touched or anything like that. The little hospital that they had, we looked after it with our own generator and we had one person that looked after it all the time. We couldn’t even imagine what the generator would look like after we left, because it would probably be stripped down for parts and sold.

Mr. Campbell describes the situation in Baladwayne and how thousands of people came for the security of having Canadian soldiers around.

Robert Campbell

Mr. Campbell was born in May of 1956 in Elmsdale, Prince Edward Island. At age 10, his father decided to move their family to the farming community of Alberton. With the desire for something better to do in life, Mr. Campbell left the farm life and joined the military. In April 1975 he joined the Canadian Forces and trained in Cornwallis, Nova Scotia. He then travelled to Borden, Ontario to complete his technician training which resulted in a military career as a mechanic. In 1992, Mr. Campbell joined the Royal Canadian Horse Artillery Regiment and stayed with that unit for four years. During this time, he served in Germany and Holland. Mr. Campbell was later posted to Petawawa and became a member of the Canadian Airborne Regiment, with deployments in the Golan Heights and Somalia. During his mission in Somalia, Mr. Campbell was promoted to the rank of Sergeant. In 1997, he returned to Petawawa, Ontario and was medically discharged from the Canadian Forces. Mr. Campbell and his family moved back to Prince Edward Island where he worked with Veterans Affairs Canada.