Afghanistan: Kabul
An Angel In Kabul
Kabul, Afghanistan, June, 2007
Dear Friends,
I just returned from Afghanistan and I thought you might like to hear how your donations are helping children in this very poor, war-ravaged, country.
Months ago, when our partners invited us, they told us it was safe. Of course, one week before our trip, a suicide bomber in Kabul killed 35 police recruits. Part of a new Taliban offensive aimed at bringing the war to the capital. We almost cancelled. But a celebration had been planned. Patient home visits had been arranged. It seemed the staff of our partner hospital was counting on us. So off we went.
Flying into Kabul was I must admit a little spooky. Looking down from the airplane the terrain was bleak, barren and a lifeless. Rocks, rubble and dust. Our airplane felt more like a time machine bringing us back to the stone age.
What looked Godforsaken from the air, looked even worse from the ground. Aghanistan has been at war for 30 years – and it looks it. 30 years of bombs, bullets, betrayals, executions, rebels, insurgencies, beheadings, broken promises, honor killings, forced marriages, tribal warfare, occupation, religious extremism, invasions, etc. The drive to the hospital from the airport was one I will not soon forget. Crumbling, cemeteries with broken headstones and crooked graves. Bombed out buildings. Burnt out trucks and cars. Bullet holes everywhere. Rotting garbage. A dead donkey. A dirty, smelly stream tricking through the center of town where a vibrant river once ran. A city that looks like it is on life support.
The one nice thing we saw were hundreds of girls in uniforms coming home from school, laughing, smiling, wearing backpacks. Little symbols of hope amidst so much destruction and desperation.
The average life span in Afghanistan is just 43 years. (In the U.S. it is 79 years.) The government expenditure on healthcare per capita is $19. ($5,234 in the U.S.) One out of every 3 Afghan children is an orphan. One out of five children die before they reach their 5th birthday. (Some parents don’t give their children names until after their 5th birthday.) 80% of marriages are arranged and 57% of the brides are under the age of 16. 4 out of 5 women are illiterate. They face the highest maternal and infant mortality rates in the world. And an annual income per capita of $231.18. ($40,000 in the U.S.)
As if living on 63 cents a day is not bad enough, the Taliban is doing everything it can to make life even worse. They’re killing as often and as many as they can – foreigners and Afghans. Burning down schools. They beheaded a school teacher in front of his wife and 8 children because he had the audacity to teach girls. The week we were in Kabul, the Taliban sent a six year old boy on a suicide mission. Luckily soldiers spotted the oversized jacket and disarmed him.
I could go on and on about all the things that are going wrong in this poor country, but instead, I want to tell about something that is going right. Right smack in the middle of Kabul stands an oasis of hope: our partner hospital.
This small, 60 bed hospital is run by a heroic staff of Afghans and ex-pats who’ve come from all over the world to help the people of Afghanistan. It is a non-profit hospital supported by donors from America and around the world, that has had a very big impact in a very short time. In addition to the life-saving work this hospital does with ob-gyn and orthopedic surgery, it became a Smile Train partner and began offering free cleft surgeries about 8 months ago.
Just a few free TV commercials aired over a couple days brought hundreds of children with clefts and their parents from all over Afghanistan to this hospital begging for help. We met a young boy and his father who traveled 800 kilometers. That’s like traveling from Ohio to New York. By foot. It took them 3 weeks.
Every child we met was different and yet they all told the same story. They were all extremely poor. Most had to borrow money to make the trip. Some sold off family possessions. For many it was the first time they ever left their villages. Virtually all the parents were illiterate and uneducated but somehow each one was smart enough to know that this might be their only chance to ever help their child. Their only hope to save their child from a lifetime of heartache and suffering.
We met a 17 year old boy and his smiling Dad two days after surgery. I asked the Dad how he felt when he first saw is newborn son. “I was so ashamed,” he told us. “I decided to kill him.” Now this actually happens quite often in many countries. We have met hundreds of children who were thrown away hours after they were born because of their clefts. But I’ve never heard anyone actually say these words. I asked why he never killed his son. “I never found the time,” he told us with his arm around his son.
We met a remarkable young man who’d been born with a massive cleft that ran down the entire middle of his face. We wondered how he managed to survive 22 years. This picture is AFTER he has already received 2 surgeries and he is scheduled for several more. He kept trying to thank us, by putting his hand over his heart and bowing his head, he can’t speak. It was heartbreaking.
We met a school teacher, a very polite, soft-spoken man who tried to tell us how much this surgery meant to him and the future of his son. He started to cry as he thanked us, and told us in his broken English, how important it was for his son, his only son, to have a chance to go to school and to marry and to have a life. This surgery saved his son’s life he told us.
We met a remarkable Afghan surgeon named Dr Hashimi. As often is the case, the key to a successful Smile Train program is a local, dynamic, determined leader like Dr. Hashimi. He used to perform only a small number of cleft surgeries because so few parents could afford it. Now with our support, he can provide free cleft surgery for thousands of children who would otherwise never it. One of the reasons we went to Kabul was to thank and recognize Dr. Hashimi for performing 250 cleft surgeries in just the first 8 months of our program. He and his very capable staff are off to a very good start. He is excited about just how many children he can help and so are we.
“There are so many children who need this surgery,” Dr. Hashimi told us shaking his head. “So many years of war have created a very large backlog.” We didn’t have the heart to tell him just how big a backlog. Our data shows there are more than 25,000 children in Afghanistan with unrepaired clefts.
We asked how many surgeries he could do in a year. Maybe 800, maybe 1,000, he told us. “I will do the very best I can,” he told us. We assured him that whatever the number was, we would give him all the support he needed. We encouraged him to get those TV commercials back on the air and promised to help him build an additional O.R. if needed.
We told him how The Smile Train has never turned away any child that asked for help and that whether there were 2,000 or 20,000 kids in Afghanistan, we would stick with him till we helped each and every one. This made him smile. “That’s very good,” he laughed, nodding his head. “We will need your help. Because for every child I send home after surgery to a village, 5 more will come when they learn about this program. We are going to be very busy for a very long time.”
After we had a short ceremony at the hospital celebrating the 250 surgeries, thanking the staff and giving Dr. Hashimi a plaque to thank him, we raced to the airport to catch our plane back to civilization and the 21st century. As we drove away from the hospital, I thought of all the remarkable doctors and nurses we were leaving behind in this truly Godforsaken place. I thought of what a special guy Dr. Hashimi is. He could easily be in the U.K. or the U.S. with his family safe and sound making many hundreds of thousands of dollars a year doing cosmetic surgery and playing golf every Wednesday. He and his colleagues are true modern-day Good Samaritans. I meet a lot of surgeons in my job – I feel pretty lucky to have met Dr. Hashimi.
I apologize for the length of this letter and I thank you for reading it. I hope that somehow I have conveyed a few very important things that you, as one of our most generous donors should know.
First of all, we bring your donations to the poorest countries on earth where the value of every dollar is 1,000 times greater than it is here in the U.S.
Secondly, we don’t just send your money around the world – we send ourselves. This past year my colleagues and I have traveled to Bangladesh, Indonesia, China, Nigeria, Brazil, Mexico, Africa countries? to make sure your donations are being spent on helping children and that our programs being run as best they can.
Finally, and most importantly, you need to know that your donations are helping children one else will help. Your generosity is changing lives with a simple surgery that takes as little as 45 minutes and costs as little as $250. You are making a difference.
These kids need our help…and we need yours.
Brian
