lightroom questions

I've been using lightroom to organize and tag my pictures and make some minor changes like red eye correction ect. the problem I'm having is LR is not saving the corrections I make to my pictures, I can only view the changes from within LR. If i open the pictures I've made corrections to in the finder it doesnt show any changes.
Before I start getting flamed for not searching online more before posting:
Im currently deployed to Iraq and our internet connection is awful, it takes almost 5 minutes for mac-forums.com to load, and Im behind a blue coat proxy server which effectively filters 90% of the internet from us. Somtimes we can use proxies to get around it but its usually not worth waiting for those to load either. So any help would be much appreciated.

Lightroom doesnt change your original files at all, that's the beauty of it.

When you make alterations to a photo in Lightroom what you are actually doing is writing meta data instructions. These meta data instructions are appear as visible changes to your photos from within Lightroom but, as you've noticed, do not change the original file at all.

If you want to see the changes you've made in a program outside of Lightroom you have to export the photo from Lightroom as a TIFF, JPEG etc.

HTH