San Rafael’s graduates from sixth grade in 2009.

Five students graduated from sixth grade this fall in the small Guatemalan village of San Rafael. To many readers, this might seem like an everyday occasion. For those five kids, it was a major achievement, one which few in their village had achieved before.

On first glance, the beauty of San Rafael is breathtaking. The indigenous Mayan community is full of the colorful and intricate dress worn by the women and girls. Tucked into the rolling hills, the village is surrounded by a luscious, vibrant patchwork of cropland.

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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.
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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.

More than 70 children have received urgent medical care through this unprecedented collaboration of American and Afghan civilians.

Exciting things continue to unfold with the Helmand Children’s Medical Fund project. Every day donations come in, and every day Najib and Wasim run more and more children to the hospital. So far over 70 children have received urgent medical treatment. I am home recovering from the most exhausting 15 days of my life. I have also been working on a strategic plan to leverage our resources in order to provide more substantial and lasting support to these IDP kids in such desperate need. My goal is to make sure that this effort is more than a temporary “Band-Aid.”

I have just a few more details to work out and will soon be making an official announcement on the future plan for the fund. It’s a brilliant plan, if I do say so myself, so cross your fingers that it all comes together!

In the meantime, check out these videos posted by CNN and KARE 11.

>> Read the article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune
>> Read the initial blog on how the HCMF got started

HCMF Donations at War Kids Relief Children’s Culture Connection

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.

If I thought the past two weeks have been busy, they’ve been nothing compared to the past two days of running around getting the last video footage for our project before we leave. It’s been a wild carnival ride as Habibi, our driver, whizzes us all over Kabul in his little Toyota while Najib lines up appointments on his cell phone as fast as I can think of things to put on the list, which includes interviewing a bank and a radio station, attending a girls basketball game and a conference for disabled land mine victims, taking three more kids to the hospital and attending a wedding. Somehow Najib stays calm and collected throughout all this. I guess praying five times a day really helps him stay centered. Maybe I should try that, too.

Yesterday, of all the things Najib managed to line up for us, the only one he was having trouble arranging was an invitation to an Afghan wedding. As I already mentioned, Najib is a master networker who seems to know half of Afghanistan so I could tell it was bugging him that this wasn’t coming together. Every day when I asked him if we scored a wedding invite he’d quietly say “not yet.” Unexpectedly, while we were at the International Disabled Persons Day conference (Afghanistan works especially hard to take care of the many victims of the landmines laid during the wars. Would you believe that of the ten million land mines buried in Afghanistan, more than 3 million are still active?), Najib overheard a manager in the hall talking about a wedding that would be held there the next day. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

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One of the founders of NEED, Kelly Kinnunen, is working on a video documentary project in Kabul, Afghanistan. He is travelling 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.

Because of the press coverage, Helmand Children’s Medical Fund got a lot of donations, so Sunday was a busy day at the hospital. So far we have brought 26 children from the IDP camp to the hospital for desperately needed medical treatment. In addition to our first three patients suffering from malnourishment, there have been cases of severe pneumonia, tonsillitis and respiratory tract infections. We are providing a three week supply of milk to every child upon discharge from the hospital to help them continue to gain strength. It’s just a few bucks but will go a long way in their recovery. Depending on how strong donations come in, we may buy blankets for them as well. It’s hard to get better when you can’t stay warm, and the weather is getting steadily colder.

(I’ve also personally discovered that you can’t get better from a cold if you don’t stop running around for five minutes … but that’s my own problem to deal with. I’ll recover when I get home, just in time to do my holiday shopping. That’s always relaxing!)

Through visiting an organization called Aschiana and meeting a family, we got an incredible glimpse into the lives of Afghanistan’s youth, and saw what these kids are made of despite their difficult situations.

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One of the founders of NEED, Kelly Kinnunen, is working on a video documentary project in Kabul, Afghanistan. He is travelling 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.

After all the excitement with the media on Friday (from CBS and CNN in Kabul to the front page of the Star Tribune in Minnesota), we got back to business on our filming project.

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One of the founders of NEED, Kelly Kinnunen, is working on a video documentary project in Kabul, Afghanistan. He is travelling 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.

The HCMF momentum is growing, and we not only took two more children in for medical treatment, but both CBS and CNN news tagged along with us for the fun! I’ll admit it makes things a bit more hectic slogging through the muddy camp with an entourage, but I am happy that they want to help us get the word out, not only on the relief effort, but the reality of the situation for people in these camps as well. I am hoping that by seeing this story that someone or some organization with more power than me can get involved to make a more substantial, enduring difference for these people.

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One of the founders of NEED, Kelly Kinnunen, is working on a video documentary project in Kabul, Afghanistan. He is travelling 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.

Yesterday we discovered that we had received just enough online HCMF donations to take the little girl in yesterday’s blog photo to the hospital. She was severely malnourished, and has quite a few other issues as well that we will learn more about today. Her name is Sahebo, and for as tiny and fragile as she is, she is quite a little fighter. When the doctor drew blood for the blood test she screamed her head off for about 15 minutes straight. It reminded me of my darling daughters when they got their kindergarten shots a few months ago. Such drama queens.

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One of the founders of NEED, Kelly Kinnunen, is working on a video documentary project in Kabul, Afghanistan. He is travelling 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.

First of all, the good news is that baby Rahim is recovering nicely and, inshallah (God willing, as they say), on his way to a full recovery. Of course, the bad news is what we all know he has to look forward to once he leaves the hospital. That part breaks my heart. This whole scene has opened a window for me to the realities faced by victims of war.

Yesterday morning we returned to the camp, where Wusim was finishing up his medical assessments of the children there. We saw so many more tragic cases of children who need serious medical attention, but we were most surprised when we stumbled upon an actual health tent operating at the camp. The word “clinic” would be an overstatement as it’s basically a small tent stocked with simple medicines such as painkillers. Although we were relieved to find out that at least something was serving the 5,000 people in the camp, it’s like having a high school nurse’s office on hand for an entire city.

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