What War Really Is
Posted by Dina Fesler on December 9th 2009 in NEED Magazine, Organizations, Photo Essays
One of the founders of NEED, Kelly Kinnunen, is working on a video documentary project in Kabul, Afghanistan. He is traveling with Dina Fesler of the nonprofit Children’s Culture Connection. Among other places, they have been visiting Charahee Qambar, an IDP camp where people are living in desperate conditions with very little aid. Dina emailed an update about what they are doing and we wanted to share it with you.
Wow, it’s been just over a week that we started our little HCMF fund and I am blown away at how it continues to significantly change the lives of IDP families as it gains momentum. Yesterday we weren’t able to bring any new cases to the hospital because we had some follow-up to do with a few current patients. Wasim brought the little boy with the eye problem to another specialist, and the two girls in the hospital suffering from malnutrition and bone disorders (Sahebo and Fatima) were discharged. With medication, their malnourishment should be under control, but they will need extensive physical therapy so we took them to get registered at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) hospital. ICRC is a Kabul facility famous for working with thousands of amputees injured by land mines planted during both the Russian invasion and the civil war (1980-90s). Since Najib and Wasim worked there as medics, both have lots of peeps on the inside. ICRC will provide physical therapy for the girls on a weekly basis, and will also give each a wheelchair. It won’t be easy to wheel them through the mud in the camp, but it’s a start.
We went back to the camp to pay Rahim’s mother a visit because CNN wanted to meet her for its news piece. It has been over a week since she has seen her son and she was eager to learn how he was doing. There wasn’t a dry eye in the mud hut when Rahim’s mom watched the video of him in the hospital on the CNN laptop. Despite her tears she was happy that he is getting stronger and is going to live. She said thank you to me a million times but I told her she shouldn’t thank me. I am a mother and it’s our job to look out for one another. She’ll pay it forward someday, too.
Even though we are doing our best to help the kids in the IDP camp with their medical needs, I can’t stop thinking about why this situation is as bad as it is. Every day I get emails from people who are shocked that nobody is doing more to help these folks out. Where are the big NGOs? With all the aid money pouring into Afghanistan, why is this little health tent so underfunded? Being the busy-bodies that we are, we returned to the local health tent directors to do our own investigation into this matter.
It turns out that the whole IDP issue is a sticky situation. Because these people really shouldn’t be there (they should be back in the provinces where they came from), the Ministry of Repatriation doesn’t want to make life too comfortable for them here in Kabul. It wants them to go back to their homes (or what’s left of their homes) the instant that the bombing and fighting stop in Helmand Province so that Kabul doesn’t have to absorb this massive influx of people. These people would like to go home as well, but unfortunately, nobody knows when that will happen so they continue to linger in the camps. I could tell that the director wasn’t too comfortable answering my queries (he’s caught the middle of this political web), but he admitted that “the government doesn’t encourage donors/NGOs to support the IDP camps.” NGOs have to keep their political standing in order to continue their work in Afghanistan, and it wouldn’t be in their best interest to make a huge stink about this IDP crisis. The result is thousands of innocent people who everyone basically wishes didn’t exist.
Sometimes I wonder if I am being a bit dramatic about all this, but then I go back and look at some of those photos of the camp and the way these innocent people are living and I get all upset. These aren’t just “poor people” we are talking about. They are people who are stuck in this camp as a direct result of the war effort. It’s unfair that they are invisible simply because they are inconvenient.
Back to our film project, we also visited a madrassa. It was a great experience not only because it was one of the most beautiful buildings I have even seen, but because I learned that the term “madrassa” is not synonymous with “terrorist training camp” as the media had led me to believe. It is actually a religious-based school where law, sociology, philosophy and other subjects are taught in addition to religion. Like Notre Dame for Muslims. Some of the college students who attend school there were very happy to speak on camera to students in the US for our project. Nearly every group of students we have spoken with on this trip has the same message for the American kids: please help us.
We also visited the National Mine Museum, which was eye-opening for me. It was so creepy to see the many forms of weapons that have been used to tear apart this country. When we were looking at a display of missiles, Najib said, “Those make just a terrible noise.” Kelly and I realized that this man we spend every day with has seen war with his own eyes to the point where he knows what sounds these bombs, mines and missile make. It was chilling.
Later in the car I asked Najib a few questions about his life during the civil war in the 90s, the darkest and bloodiest time in Afghan history. For the record, the Afghan civil war started when the mujahidin fighters, to whom the US had given billions of dollars of weapons to fight the Russians for us, fell into a massive power struggle after the Russians left. Helping the Afghans defend themselves seemed like a good idea at the time, until you consider that these fighters were also militant extremists, including Bin Laden. And these same weapons were used to kill thousands of innocent people caught in the crossfire of the ensuing power struggle, many of whom Najib knew, loved and treated as a medic.
The US has a bit of a fingerprint left on this situation.
Najib told us candidly what it is like to watch missiles fly by your head, see people blown in half right in the middle of the street and watch just about everything around you get destroyed. As we drove along we passed a bombed out/shot up movie theater and he told us about how he used to enjoy going there. It’s almost like if the World Trade Center aftermath never got cleaned up and New Yorkers were forced to walk by the wreckage every day for 20 years. Imagine the trauma that people would experience every single day seeing that. Najib is only 39 years old and has seen war, not as a soldier, but as a guy trying to get to work in the morning and get home at night to his family.
Kelly and I talk a lot about most how Americans have no clue what war really is. We know that we don’t.
HCMF Donations at War Kids Relief Children’s Culture Connection
