I had a lot of reservations about going to Afghanistan.

To be honest, I was kind of hoping something would happen that would give us an excuse to cancel the trip.

It seemed like every day there was another roadside bombing or suicide bomber attack on the front pages of every American newspaper. I had three young children who were six, eight, and nine years old.

I had no business going into a war zone. My wife was furious. “Why would you go to such a dangerous place?” she asked. She wasn’t thrilled with the fact that life insurance policies are void when you enter a war zone.

When a bomb went off in Kabul and blew up 38 police recruits the week before we were supposed to go, I said that’s it, there’s my excuse.

But when my 74-year-old father, who was supposed to go on the trip also, refused to cancel, I was stuck. Plus, I felt pretty guilty. We had promised our partners in Kabul that we would come, they had planned all these patient home visits, partner meetings and even a celebration with all of the doctors and nurses who’d been working hard for many years.

These modern-day good Samaritans have chosen to live in this war zone to help people – the least we could do was come and visit for a couple days. Most of them were volunteers and ex-pats who moved there to save little kids. If they could do that, I could at least visit for a couple days. At least that was my rationalization.

So off we went.

We took a 14-hour flight to Dubai and then the next day caught a three-hour flight to Kabul.  It didn’t really hit me that I was going into a war zone until the pilot said fasten your seatbelts – we are about to land in Kabul. Looking out the window, the terrain was bleak, barren and a lifeless. Rocks, rubble and dust. The houses were really just hovels built into the side of these hills.

Our airplane felt  like a time machine bringing us back to the stone age.

What looked Godforsaken from the air, looked even worse from the ground.
Afghanistan has been at war forever – and it looks it. Decades of bombs, bullets, betrayals, executions, rebels, insurgencies, beheadings, broken promises, honor killings, forced marriages, tribal warfare, occupation, religious extremism, invasions had definitely taken its toll.

We were greeted at the airport by a tall, athletic surgeon named Dr. Keith Rose who used to be a college football player at Baylor and was in the military for years.

He was unlike any surgeon I’ve ever met. Not bookish or nebbish or small and unassuming, he was like a big John Wayne complete with a Glock pistol tucked into the back of his pants. He had with him his buddy Tommy Lynch, an ex-Marine, who is in charge of our security detail which included three Afghan Northern Alliance freedom fighters. They helped the US when we invaded Afghanistan.

They each of them carried an AK-47 and their heads swiveled back and forth, back and forth looking for something. hence their name: swivelheads. I don’t know if they made me feel secure or nervous. Three guys with machine guns is a strange number — is it too many or not enough?

We got our luggage and jumped into Range Rovers took off for the hospital.
As we drove to the hospital from the airport, no one said a word as we all looked out at the bleak surroundings and devastated landscape.

They seem to be a cemetery on every corner with crumbling headstones and overcrowded graves. They were buildings that had been bombed and you could see bullet holes everywhere. There was garbage trash all over the place. Dead donkeys and dogs.

And in the middle of Kabul where there used to be a vibrant, Russian River there now was a dirty, smelly brown stream filled with garbage and debris trickling through town.

Amidst all of this squalor and destruction was one tiny ray of hope. Hundreds of girls walking to school, wearing nice clean school uniforms and shiny new backpacks.

The average lifespan in the United States is around 78 years. In Afghanistan it’s 43 years.

The Afghan government spends about $19 per person on healthcare while in the US, our government spends about $5,200 per person. 33% of all the children in Afghanistan are orphans and 20% die before they turned five years old. This is why many parents do not give their children names until they turn five.

Afghanistan is a very traditional Muslim country where the vast majority of marriages arranged, and more than half the brides are under the age of 16. 80% of the women are illiterate and a face the highest maternal and infant mortality rates in the world.

The average annual income in Afghanistan is $230 dollars. In America, it’s $40,000.

If these statistics are not depressing enough, consider the fact that the Taliban is doing everything it can to make life even harder for the average Afghan. They are sending suicide bombers to weddings, schools and marketplaces.

They shoot at girls as they go to and from schools and behead teachers who have the audacity to teach girls. The week we visited Kabul, the police caught and disarmed a young boy who was wearing a suicide vest. He was six years old.

Dr. Rose gave us an overview of the hospital which had operated on 800 children already. It was inspiring that with all the things that are going wrong in Afghanistan, right in the middle of Kabul, there stands a beacon of hope: our Smile Train partner hospital.

The hospital has about 60 beds and a heroic staff that includes local Afghan surgeons, doctors, nurses and other medical professionals combined with ex-pat doctors and nurses who have traveled here from all over the world: Scotland, England, Canada, Japan, France, the U.S. and South America.

All of them were volunteers, living in a war zone as they tried to make the world a better place. Most of their work was centered on maternal mortality, or, death during childbirth.

The death rates in Afghanistan for mothers dying during childbirth are what they were in the United States in the 1700s.

Working together, these medical teams have helped and saved the lives of tens of thousands of children and adults in Kabul. It is the number one hospital in Afghanistan for OB- GYN and orthopedic surgery and with our support they have dramatically scaled up their cleft surgeries within the last year.

Suddenly, in mid-sentence Dr. Rose gasped and went silent as we were driving through downtown Kabul. All of us froze.

Dr. Rose said, “I do not like the look of that….” And he paused for way too long, “…dumpster.”

It was coming up on right the side of the road. None of us said a word. I closed my eyes, held my breath and said a prayer as we drove by that dumpster — and nothing happened!

All of us knew exactly what Rose was talking about. The Taliban comes out in the middle of the night and buries IED’s all over the place. Then they just sit and wait for a couple Range Rovers filled with Americans to drive by. When they do, at just the right time they press a button on their cell phone, and everyone gets blown to pieces.

After we passed it, Dr. Rose starts talking as if nothing had happened.

When we arrived at the hospital, we met a really talented Afghan surgeon named Dr. Hashimi who leads our cleft program. Dr. Rose who lives in Texas flies in once every couple months to operate with Dr. Hashimi and help him improve his techniques which were getting better very quickly especially with these large volumes of surgeries.

Dr. Hashimi gave us a tour and his own briefing. For our Smile Train cleft program, the hospital ran TV commercials and print ads all over the country announcing free for poor children. This brought thousands of children and their parents to Kabul and this tiny hospital in the hopes of being chosen to receive free cleft surgery.

We met a boy and his dad who walked for three weeks, 400+ miles, to reach this hospital.

We went from bed to bed, meeting children with unrepaired clefts and those who had already undergone cleft surgery. All their stories were different, and, in some ways, they were all the same.

What they all had in common was extreme poverty, illiteracy and desperation. Many of them had to sell some of their possessions or borrow money from neighbors to make the trip.

For most of them it was the first time they had ever left the village. First time they ever saw a doctor. Their parents a could not read or write but somehow, they could figure out how to travel long distances to reach this hospital. And somehow, they understood that this could be their only opportunity to get the life-changing surgery their child had been waiting for four years.

You could see the desperation in their eyes.

We interviewed a teenage boy after his cleft surgery and his dad who was beaming. I always ask a parent how they felt when their baby was born with a cleft in what they thought caused it. This father told us that he was so ashamed when his son was born with a cleft. “I was so upset I immediately decided to kill my newborn son because of his cleft,” he told us.

I had never heard this before. Many parents do actually kill their newborn babies or abandon them because of their clefts which many believe is a curse or the mark of the devil. But I had never heard any parent actually say out loud what this father told us.

After an awkward silence while I tried to regroup, I followed up with another question.

I asked the father, with his son standing right next to him, why he never killed him.

“I never found the time,” he said with a big smile in his arm around his son. His son wasn’t smiling at all. I think perhaps this was the first time he heard the story.

We met another young man who stood out because his cleft was gigantic. Most clefts are small holes in the lip or in the roof of the mouth. But this poor guy had a cleft that ran down the middle of his entire face. We all were in shock as we’ve never seen anything like it before. It was a miracle that this young man had survived.

What was even more shocking was how grateful and appreciative he was of the many surgeries this team had given to him and the tremendous care and support as well. He could not speak because of his cleft but instead he put his hand over his heart and bowing his head. We all understood exactly what he was saying. It was heartbreaking.

We met a polite, soft-spoken man who was a schoolteacher in Kabul. He explained to us just how much this surgery meant to his young son and his entire family. While he was thanking us, he started to cry as he explained that this surgery meant his son could now go to school, and that after school he would be able to find a good job and get married and have a family and a normal life.

This surgery saved my son’s life he told us as he shook our hands and hugged us and think this again and again and again.

I can’ tell you how impressed I was with Dr. Hashimi. He was the driving force behind all of these life-saving surgeries and miracles that are happening in a place where miracles are few and far in between.

He is a very humble hard-working surgeon born and raised in Afghanistan. While so many doctors and surgeons have fled Kabul over the years and traveled to the UK where they could make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year doing cosmetic surgery, Dr. Hashimi chose to stay in Kabul and help his people.
He has been doing cleft surgeries for many years but in very small numbers until our program came along. This was because few families could afford to pay for surgery in the hospital was too poor to provide free cleft surgery.

But now with financial support from Smile Train, this hospital has scaled its cleft surgeries up from a few dozen a year to hundreds of cleft surgeries a year.

In the first eight months of this year Dr. Hashimi and his team have already performed almost 300 surgeries. That’s a lot of lives to change every year. And none of this would be happening without Dr. Hashimi.

One of the reasons we came on this trip was to meet him, thank him for being such a good partner and to honor him.“We are very proud to be able to provide so many surgeries for those who cannot afford it. But there are so many more children out there who are waiting for surgery.”

Dr. Hashimi told us shaking his head. “Because of all of the wars and fighting there is a huge backlog of children in Afghanistan who are suffering with unrepaired clefts and waiting for surgery. Most of them have waited many, many years.”

Our estimates are that there are around 25,000 children in Afghanistan with unrepaired clefts waiting for some to come along and save them.

When we asked Dr. Hashimi how many surgeries he thought he and his team could do a year he said perhaps 1,000. He told us, “We are working very hard to do as many as possible.” We thanked him and assured him he has our full support.

We talked about possibly building another operating room and giving him money to run more TV commercials and print ads.

He really appreciated all of this. “We wouldn’t be doing any of this without your support,” he said, “We will really depend upon your help – and you need to stick with us. Because every child that we operate on goes home to their village and tells everyone people what we’re doing here. That results in more and more children coming who need surgery.”

After out tour, we set out for some patient visits.

The first little boy we visited was about seven or eight years old. We were sitting in the living room on the floor talking with him and his sister and his mom and his grandfather.

When I ask where the father was our interpreter points and says that the grandfather is not the grandfather, he is he father. I say no that can’t be the father, he is 75 years old.

He says no, that is the father, and this is his third wife and she is 30 years old. That kind of turned me off, actually very much turned me off so we get out of there quickly. But that’s the way it is in Afghanistan. A lot of things going on that I do not like, and we cannot change.

But what we can change or is the plight of Afghan children born with clefts.

It was weird walking through Kabul with these guys with machine guns looking around with their heads on a swivel. I did feel uneasy and everyone was staring at us which was not good. We did not blend in very well. So, I can imagine word was out that we were there and if someone wanted to do something it would’ve been pretty easy.

Dr. Rose told us that when he takes a cab, if the cab driver makes a phone call, he gets out immediately. He explained that people need to call up the Taliban and ask for permission to kill people, that’s what happens with sometimes when cabdrivers call up the Taliban and say they have an American in the back of my cab, I want to kill him, may I have your permission?

The week we were there two German tourists traveled from Kabul into Kandahar which was the most insane thing to do. Of course, the Taliban found them and slaughtered them.

Driving around Kabul was depressing. The city looked like it had been a war zone for 30 years which of course it was. There were bullet holes, mortar scars, bomb craters everywhere.

What surprised me was that there was nothing being built. Billions were being poured into Afghanistan but where was the construction. The only thing we saw being built was a huge mosque and a madrasah that had been donated by Iran.

I was wondering where all our money is going, the billions and billions that we’ve been sending to Afghanistan. I did see plenty of fancy range rovers driving around with UN logos on them and USAID logos.

After a long hot day of travel, hospital visits and patient visits, we went to our hotel: Hotel Serena. Security was tight, lots of guns and metal detectors in front along with plenty of physical barriers so you cannot drive a car bomb in. The room was nice, it even had CNN.

I took a quick shower and as I was getting dressed, I heard the call for prayer, screeching over the loudspeakers outside my window and al across Kabul. Ironically, at the same time, on CNN they were showing footage of Paris Hilton being released from prison. What a world, I’m in Kabul and they’re calling people to prayer the way they have for 1,500 years and back in America everybody’s watching Paris Hilton.

We took the hospital team out to dinner, we toasted them and thanked them for being such good partner in for all the cleft surgeries they had done. These people were true heroes. Risking their lives living in constant for fear in a war zone and horrible accommodations and for little to no money. And yet they were saving a lot of lives and changing a lot of lives. I was in complete awe of their dedication and selflessness.

We go back to the hotel around nine o’clock and Dr. Rose whispered to me: do you want to go out for a beer with me and Lynch? I thought he was kidding.

We’re in Kabul, it’s 100% Muslim, alcohol is illegal, etc. not to mention the fact that what would my wife say? If I was killed holding a baby in the hospital in Kabul that’s one thing, if I get killed holding a beer in a bar that would be really bad.

So of course, I said yes.

My dad and Delois went into the hotel to the watermelon juice bar, strictly non-alcoholic. And I went out with Rose, Lynch and Mark Atkinson who is a really talented photographer and member of our Smile Train board.

All three of our Northern Alliance fighters with AK-47s had gone home so it was just the four of us in the Jeep Wagoneer driving around Kabul in the dark.

They took us to this big cement building with two guys out front with guns and a little slit in the door. I don’t know what they said or what the password was, but the door opened up and we went in. The entranceway was filled with skate lockers just like at a skating rink.

Rose and Lynch went and found empty lockers and started to put all their guns and various weapons in these lockers. It was amazing. Of course, Mark and I had no weapons, so we were humiliated! I think I’d stuck my hat in a locker to make it look like I was one of the guys.

We walked around the corner in there about 300 people drinking beer, doing shots of tequila, chugging margaritas, having a grand old time.

It was unlike any bar I’ve ever been to. Everyone I met had a different story, hello I’m from Italy I’m with the embassy, hello I’m with private security, I train bomb-sniffing dogs, I’m with the US, Canadian, British, Australian, Japanese government, I’m with Russian nuclear power, I’m with the United Nations, etc.

These folks came in all shapes and sizes, all ages, men and women, young and old and they were all in Kabul, Afghanistan for their careers, for the money, for the thrills, or whatever.

Lynch told us a fascinating story about how he makes his money with his security for firm. He has a camp in which he has a whole kennel of bomb sniffing dogs that he sends out every day on assignment.

You can get paid $180 thousand dollars a year for a bomb sniffing dog with a Filipino trainer. He pays the dog nothing, but food and he pays the trainer $20,000 dollars a year.

The dog doesn’t go to work unless he passes a test every morning on a bomb sniffing obstacle course at the camp. Lynch says he sends out 50 dogs every day, I did the math, 50 dogs at $180k a year, is $9 million.

Even after he pays his Filipino trainers $1 million and buys all that dog food, that is a lot of profit. I don’t know if it is worth dying for though. Lynch also does various other security details like protecting VIPs, NGO folks like us, etc.

The Japanese embassy was one of his big clients he told some funny stories. In the middle of our talk his daughter came up, yes, he has his daughter living and working with them in Kabul. She was a hoot; she was working on the bomb sniffing dogs.

I couldn’t believe Lynch allowed his daughter to come to Kabul and work with him. But who was I to talk? I had brought my 74 year old father on this trip – and I was glad I did.

My dad works for Smile Train for $1 a year and fills in for me on trips I can’t take. He has done a great job representing Smile Train in some of the most dangerous please on earth including Pakistan, Indonesia, China and India. And now Afghanistan. Before he retired, my dad was Vice Chairman of Gillette and he and my mom travelled to more than 160 countries opening up Gillette factories, opening new countries, you name it. Everywhere he went for Smile Train they loved him – and wanted him to come back.

The next day we visit more patients and take a big tour around Kabul. We stopped at a store and I bought two fighting shields to bring home that had bits and pieces of the Koran written on them that were supposedly 300 to 400 years old. This store had plenty of old rifles, helmets, fighting shields and knives — it made me think about the history of Afghanistan.

For the most part it’s been non-stop war in this country for more than 1,000 years. Which raises the question – what the heck are we doing there? Do we really think we will be the first ones to figure out how to get these people to stop fighting and killing each other?

Alexander the Great came here to fight and he said, “Afghanistan is easy to march into – hard to march out of.”

After a long day we go to the airport. It is a broken-down crumbling war zone type airport. Barbed wire everywhere, about the guns, chaos. After we’re there waiting for two hours, they tell us there is a problem. We have to split up because only six people can fly back on our scheduled flight.

Delois and I volunteer to wait. Our friends leave. The airline takes our tickets and give us back two pieces of paper with handwriting on them. These are our airline tickets? Handwriting?

They tell us our flight will depart in two hours. We sit there sweating, nervously. It is 100°. You look around and there are about 300 Korean soldiers. There are also another hundred guys that look like they are Taliban.

About 200 people that look like us, missionaries, do-gooders, doctors, as whatever.

Every 20 minutes or so a bomb goes off in the distance and everybody jumps.

This was one of my worst airport experiences in my life. I was so relieved when they finally called out flight 67 and we raced to get in line and get on the plane.

I have never felt so good as when the wheels pulled up on the plane and I turned to the DeLois and said, “Congratulations! we made it!”

I reminded her that you don’t want to climb up Mount Everest — you want to get down from Mount Everest. I sure as heck didn’t want to go to Kabul – I wanted to get home from Kabul!

We were so tired from the stress and the travel we both dozed off. I woke up to feel the plane was descending. It was a little strange because I looked out the window and there were all these green hills – not the white desert of Dubai which was our destination.

I call the flight attendant in a mid-panic and ask her if we are landing.

“Yes,” she said.

“Is this Dubai?” I ask.

“No,” she replied, “We are landing in Kandahar.”

My heart leapt into my mouth. Two German tourists were just slaughtered in Kandahar. It is the Taliban stronghold and America’s military headquarters for the Afghan war. a very active war zone. This is really dangerous!

The flight attendant must’ve seen the terror in my eyes as he patted me on the shoulder and said don’t worry it is just a two-hour refueling – then we go to Dubai.

When we landed it was like we landed in the middle of a war zone – which it is.

Fully armored Humvees racing up and down the runway patrolling. Dozens of Apache attack helicopters lined up as we taxi in. All the fighter jets, troop transport helicopters and airplanes, huge military cargo planes, surveillance planes, tanks, attack vehicles you name it. Hundreds of Marines in formation running around doing PT.

I thought I had to get a photograph because no one is going to believe I went to Kandahar. I got my camera out and started to shoot out the window at the airport. There was a big sign on the airport terminal that said, Welcome to Kandahar”.

The airline crew started screaming at me, “No photos! This is a war zone!”

They opened the door of our plane and they had a staircase down to the tarmac. I stood out there for about an hour taking it all in.

The guy standing on the wing, putting the gas into our plane looked very much like a Taliban guy which made me a little nervous. Especially when he gave me this big smile and waved to me!

I was happy and relieved when our two hours were up, they closed the door and we took off for Dubai.

I dozed off again thinking about what a remarkable man Dr. Hashimi was.

And determined to work even harder when I got home.