 My name is First Lieutenant Natalie Smalley and my job description is I am the officer in charge of the Expeditionary Civil Engineering Group in in a Boston. So we are training on structural engineering, so today we are plastering the walls and installing trusses and throughout the month we have been training on everything that is involved in building a small facility. So for the community in in a Boston we are building a small multi-purpose facility. They don't currently have a enclosed multi-purpose facility, so this facility will serve for community engagements and for evacuation purposes, a large part of the community floods quite often so this will give them a higher point of elevation to evacuate to when it floods lower areas and it's enclosed and has electricity which is a lot different than some of the buildings here. So my role is getting everyone out here coordinating all the personnel, all the materials, making sure the structure actually gets completed and then redeploying us. So operating in this environment is a lot different than our normal day-to-day environment because we don't have access to a lot of the same equipment and materials so we have to work as a team and innovate and learn from our AFP counterparts to understand how to engineer and contingency environments. So it prepares us for a day when we may not have access to all the equipment that we have grown very accustomed to. It is very important to train with allied and partnered nations because it allows us to expand our knowledge base and because it prepares us for future engagements. If we ever need to operate in a situation where we're working with our counterparts, it shouldn't be the first time we should already understand their processes and how they do things. So this gives us a base for that knowledge. This training better prepares us to work alongside our joint and bilateral partners by giving us a practice run for working with people who are not trained in an identical way to how we are trained. For example, every structural engineer in my unit went to the exact same basic training, went to the exact same tech school. So this gives us an option to learn from people and expand our base for how other people do processes but also opens us up to new ideas when we realize that just because the Air Force Engineering Center teaches us how to do processes in one way doesn't mean it's necessarily always the best way. It gives us the option to learn from others. Balakatan overall increases readiness to conduct future operations with allied partners by letting us operate within the Philippines. So most of my people have never operated within the Philippines before and had never been to this country. And this expands our knowledge of the Philippines and of other partnered countries too by letting us learn about their culture and the environment that they find themselves in and the challenges that they need to face day to day. My name is Staff Sergeant Kendall Boyd and I'm an electrical systems journeyman. The training we've been doing over the past month is just building a multi-purpose facility for the in the Basin community. Structural engineering and anything that goes into building a facility. So my role I'm the electrical systems SME here so all the electrical wiring and grid that goes into the facility I'll be the one responsible for the installation of that. Well if anything it gives me the open mind to change I'm an electrician but I'm over here mixing concrete and pouring it and doing stuff that's completely outside my comfort zone so it'll give me an idea of what if this was to come down in the future what to expect for sure. Well working alongside the any other the units as if it's the Marines or the Philippine Army they've given us an open mind to do things different and if anything they've told us to work with what because out here is the resources aren't as readily available they were back in main base so doing things with limited equipment and limited resources is definitely something to take back. Well the Philippine Army they do things completely different from how Air Force guys do things and it's been very interesting learning from them and learning different ways to do things. A lot of times it's a quicker way more efficient and you know taking that information back to main base cadena and and learning from that is probably one of the best things I've learned out from being here for sure. For example Balacantan itself this is my first Balacantan and partnering with another nation such as the Philippines which are great people just allows us to have that partnership just in case something were to happen in the future we already built that relationship and the rapport with him to continue future operations so it already gives us that foot in the door to continue anything that we may have to do. Yeah I am a senior Airman Schuyler Cunningham I work at the 18 CES and my job is a dirt boy or payments and construction equipment engineer so we do any sort of horizontal construction on base or any drains or any hard work people don't want to do. So over the past month we've been doing a lot of training we do a lot of same stuff that we do at home station but here we're learning new ways to do it with AFP. They do concrete completely different and they do any sort of groundwork different so we're picking up a lot of skills with them doing that. My role is to do any of that groundwork so digging the footers for the building or the concrete pad another thing we kind of like choose where the pads placed and where how to square it up so we do a lot of that working with the drainage in the area and trying to make it good once the building is actually in. So operating in this environment it's a harsh environment out there it's hot and we're lifting concrete bags they weigh like 100 pounds so it you can go anywhere in the world and do that if you can do it here it helps out a lot. Okay so this this kind of training helps us work with other groups being the Marines or the AFP by increasing our agile combat employment kind of skills so now we know we can go out and do these kinds of things with different groups and do it efficiently and learn from each other so it really helps out a lot. So Balakotan shows that we can do it that we can come out here and get this project complete no matter what resources we're giving because we're giving some pretty low resources in this low income area and we just find a way to do it and we can do that anywhere in the world so it gives us a lot of confidence going forward.