One of the founders of NEED, Kelly Kinnunen, recently returned from Kabul, Afghanistan, where he was making a video documentary with Dina Fesler of the nonprofit Children’s Culture Connection. Their trip took on a different focus when they visited Charahee Qambar, an IDP camp where people are living in desperate conditions with very little aid, and decided to do something to help. Kelly and Dina have returned to Minnesota and the medical project they initiated continues in Afghanistan.

Rahim, Sahebo, Fatima, Qadir, Marai, Ajabhul, Zib, Frishta, Sawid, Qandagha, Rohina, Suirullah, Shirhd, Piroz, Ayob, Nuzia, Pulwasha, Hayutullah, Khomari, Faizullah, Omarkhan, Nazia, Saifulla, Fatima and Ajabhul.

These 25 kids living in the Charahee Qambar IDP camp were the first to receive urgently needed hospital treatment as a direct result of donations to our Helmand Children’s Medical Fund. And as I write this report, one month since we began this grassroots effort, 151 additional children have been taken to Kabul children’s hospitals for treatment. That makes 176 kids, and the number continues to grow every day!

If that wasn’t cool enough, donations from all over the world have so far helped us purchase 96 pairs of shoes, 96 sets of warm clothes and 150 malnutrition kits. Upon discharge from the hospital, each child is given a kit including a three-week supply of milk, sugar, high protein biscuits, soap and a toothbrush. These kits were Najib’s brilliant idea, and he even sourced all the items in a wholesale market for maximum value.

Equally important as the tangible benefits that this effort has created, the intangible benefits are opening up paths to some serious peace-building. Just one month ago the people living in this camp told me how US bombs tore apart their lives and forced them into this squalid camp. They couldn’t imagine that anyone on this side of the world even knew that they existed, let alone cared about helping them. But now they are aware that Americans in every corner of the US, as well as people in Singapore, Finland, Switzerland and Hong Kong (thanks CNN!) have reached out in support of their families.

This is big deal when you consider that Afghanistan is an extremely clan-oriented society, which means that for every child saved approximately 50 relatives are directly touched by this show of support. (Unfortunately, the same formula can be applied to every civilian casualty or displaced Afghan, which works against our military efforts and strengthens the Taliban who exploit these people’s hardships.) Whether these relatives are living in the camp or back in Helmand, the word is out on what we are doing! According to my math, nearly 9,000 Afghans have seen the generous spirit of Americans, and there is no telling how far this effort can go towards promoting peace.

As for the Helmand Children’s Medical Fund, Najib and Wasim continue daily trips from the camp to the hospital, and they estimate that 50 more kids need hospital treatment. They believe that they will be able to screen and treat the rest of the sick children at the camp with the drugs available through the on-site health tent. If donations keep up, we should be able to provide warm clothing for every child who needs them as well. That means that by mid-January, we will have helped every sick child in the camp. Wow! However, before we break out the champagne, we need to make sure that this effort amounts to something long-term. Winter has begun and the mud camp is now covered in snow and ice. Even with warm clothes, we need to prevent these newly-healthy kids from backsliding into sickness.

So where do we go from here, you ask? Well, for the past month Najib and I have been networking maniacs, leveraging every resource to put together a pretty amazing game plan.

First, we have formed a partnership with A4T (Afghans4Tomorrow), a highly respected, US-based nonprofit that focuses on the reconstruction and development of Afghanistan. A4T established one of the girls schools that we visited on our trip, it runs the A4T guesthouse where we stayed, and both Najib and Santwana Dasgupta, executive director of Partnership for the Education of Children in Afghanistan and our partner in the War Kids Relief program Junior Investor, are on the A4T board.

In January, A4T will set up shop in the IDP camp to continue our health care work, provide education for the children and create business opportunities for their parents.

• Health: A4T is joining forces with SHARDO, the camp health tent provider, to strengthen its existing effort, and to continue providing the supplemental support we have been giving: assessing the children, providing hospitalization and transportation for serious cases, and distributing malnutrition kits.

• Education: Remember Aschiana, the organization that provides schooling to Kabul’s many street children? A4T is joining forces with Aschiana, as well, to develop a camp school that will be able to educate the thousands of children there who are currently out of school.

• Business: A4T will set up a vocational training operation in the camp to help IDP parents learn how to start low-tech businesses such as bicycle repair and briquette making (an inexpensive brick-like heat source for wood stoves made from paper scraps, water and wood shavings) to better provide for their families during their displacement. Meanwhile, here in Minnesota I am rounding up civic-minded entrepreneurs who want to help finance the first 50 upstart businesses and to provide mentorship. It will be like microcredit, but the return on investment will be in the form of monthly progress reports from each Afghan businessperson, and the realization that entrepreneurs on both sides are using their skills to create amazing change in the world! Just like War Kids Relief’s Junior Investor program, but for adults.

The reason we are able to do this is that every day for a month we demonstrated to the camp elders that we truly care about them. We built the solid relationships that anyone who has read Three Cups of Tea knows are necessary to do any sort of business in Afghanistan. “The first cup of tea you share with us, you are a stranger. The second cup, you are a friend. The third cup, you become family — and for our families we are willing to do anything, even die.” According to Najib’s last report on how happy they camp elders are about HCMF, we just had our proverbial third cup of tea.?

So that’s my big news! Starting in 2010, all these players (Children’s Culture Connection, Afghans4Tomorrow, Aschiana, SHARDO and American entrepreneurs) are coming together to create an exciting, holistic approach to supporting Afghanistan’s future.

Synergy rocks.

The one question still on everyone’s mind is, “How is baby Rahim doing?” Najib told me that on the day before New Year’s Eve, Rahim finally left the malnutrition center at the hospital and returned to his family. He had a happy reunion, especially with his mom who got to hold him for the first time in a month. For my New Year’s celebration, I made a midnight toast to a year filled with continued magic and miracles for Rahim’s family, for all the families in the Charahee Qambar camp, and for your family, too!

PS. In order to provide warm clothing and shoes for every camp child, we are going to keep the Helmand Children’s Medical Fund open until January 15.

• HCMF Donations at War Kids Relief
• Children’s Culture Connection
• A4T
• Partnership for the Education of Children in Afghanistan
• Aschiana

This entry was posted on Monday, January 4th, 2010 at 2:48 pm and is filed under NEED Magazine, Organizations, Photo Essays. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.