BBC BBC.

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Hello and thank you for downloading Wittness from the BBC World Service with me Monica Whitlock.

And today in Afghanistan a turbine is being installed in a power station

in Helmand which could upgrade electricity supplies to southern Afghanistan.

But the story of how that turbine got there goes right back to 2008 and an audacious

military operation.

As I was getting on the flight to go to Afghanistan in the July of 2008, I didn't even know

where Kajaki Dam was in the world. Major Joe Fossi of the British Royal Engineers, his mission to transport a turbine to

the Kajaki Dam on the Helmand River to produce electric power and potentially change the lives

of hundreds of thousands of people. A turbine. It sounds straightforward, but this turbine weighed 200 tons.

That's about the weight of 20 elephants, or two space shuttles.

Some of the smaller parts were in ISO containers, so shipping containers,

but the main parts of the turbine were these great big sort of grey boxes,

8 by 8 meters, plonked on the back of our equipment transporters which are the great big front end

cab and then these sort of low backed trailers.

This convoy was in excess of a hundred vehicles,

diggers, cranes, bomb disposal, engineers,

two kilometers in length.

This enormous procession of Afghan and international armies wanted to slip through 160

kilometers of desert, avoiding the main road and with it the Taliban.

The Royal Engineers task was to lead and build the way.

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