1.5 million war orphans.
KABUL -- It's never hard to find the smallest victims of Afghanistan's unending war, if you're a westerner. Drive to the middle of this teeming city of three million and step out of your car.
They'll find you.
You'll feel a tug at the hem of your jacket, and you'll turn to see a child no older than six staring at you from under a thin, grimy wrap, gesturing with clenched fingers at her open mouth for food, for money.
TRAGIC PARADE
Then another will join the first, and before you can turn around, you'll be leading a tragic parade of orphaned children through the icy streets.
"These are all children of war," said Fauzia Assifi, an Afghan civil servant who works with International Orphan Care, a non-profit group out of California trying to feed, clothe and educate Afghanistan's estimated 1.5 million war orphans.
On Thursday, we joined Assifi as she distributed boxes of hand-knitted sweaters, hats and mittens to street children around Kabul's market centre. With the mercury hovering below -15 C in daylight, these kids still swarmed, begging for morsels or change to feed their own brothers and sisters.
The kids know Assifi well, and it was a mob scene when she showed up. She handed me a pile of clothes and told me, briskly, to get to work. The children, aged anywhere from four to 14, pressed close around us, bickering and laughing as they tried on their colourful new acrylics.
One boy of 12 was carrying a tin can with a few smoking coals inside; he kindly let me warm my hands over it, grinning broadly.
Assifi was born, raised and educated in Kabul. She earned a masters degree in education in Utah, then had the bad luck to return to Kabul just before the Russian invasion of 1979. Her husband worked for an American firm, and they were branded spies. She and her infant child were smuggled over the border to Pakistan, and from there to the U.S.
In 2005, she was lured back by the promise of peace. "I soon found out that Afghanistan has been devastated beyond the comprehension of any human mind," she said.
"It is not only what you see with the infrastructure that has been destroyed. It is the morality of the people that has changed. Especially the youth. The children begging on the street are orphans of the mujahadin and people who have been killed for no reason, victims of bullets and land mines."
There are an estimated 700,000 Afghan orphans living in sub-poverty conditions, 500,000 of them in Kabul alone. Shelter for them is, at best, a thin canvas tent. The IOC attempts to provide vocational training to the children, gives them magazines and maps to sell to tourists in place of begging.
But it's like trying to bail the ocean with a bucket.
BOUGHT AND SOLD
"These kids are being bought and sold," said Assifi. "If the family doesn't have much to eat, they sell the daughter as a bride at six or seven years old to men 30, 50, 70 years old. Some are being sold into prostitution into Arab countries. The little girls and boys are being used for pornography.
"And you hear all the time how a family borrows money from a drug lord in exchange for poppies, and when they cannot repay, they have to give their daughter."
Unlike most public servants, Assifi blames her own government for Afghanistan's growing crisis. The administration of President Hamid Karzai, she said, is so thoroughly worm-eaten with corruption that the massive amount of aid delivered by western nations seldom gets where it's supposed to go.
"The people at the top drive Mercedes cars and sleep in beautiful homes, while old men are pulling carts in the freezing streets.
"Afghans have never been through slavery. They have always been very proud. But you cannot imagine what these people have done to survive for the past 25 or 30 years."
From Canoe Canada
Undoubtedly as Canadians enthusiastically supporting the war in Afghanistan, many people here at Canadian Content will watch their children and their grand children playing laughing and eating Christmas treats and eventually opening far more presents and gifts than any one child really needs.
Will those Afghan orphans who survive learn to love a Canada that prosecutes a war killing generations of Afghani people? Is the attitude that we should just kill people en masse because they might have some tenuous afiliation with terrorists how all these good Canadians want the world to understand and appreciate the people of Canada?
Hell it's just them rag-head kids left homeless and without family...who cares right!?
Merry Christmas to the latest generation of victims on behalf of all Canadians who've cheered the deployment of Canadian troops to Afghanistan. I hope these people are pleased with the results of their morally just response to Amercian oil interests invitation to participate in desimating a nation.
Ho Ho Ho here comes another cluster bomb everyone cheer!
KABUL -- It's never hard to find the smallest victims of Afghanistan's unending war, if you're a westerner. Drive to the middle of this teeming city of three million and step out of your car.
They'll find you.
You'll feel a tug at the hem of your jacket, and you'll turn to see a child no older than six staring at you from under a thin, grimy wrap, gesturing with clenched fingers at her open mouth for food, for money.
TRAGIC PARADE
Then another will join the first, and before you can turn around, you'll be leading a tragic parade of orphaned children through the icy streets.
"These are all children of war," said Fauzia Assifi, an Afghan civil servant who works with International Orphan Care, a non-profit group out of California trying to feed, clothe and educate Afghanistan's estimated 1.5 million war orphans.
On Thursday, we joined Assifi as she distributed boxes of hand-knitted sweaters, hats and mittens to street children around Kabul's market centre. With the mercury hovering below -15 C in daylight, these kids still swarmed, begging for morsels or change to feed their own brothers and sisters.
The kids know Assifi well, and it was a mob scene when she showed up. She handed me a pile of clothes and told me, briskly, to get to work. The children, aged anywhere from four to 14, pressed close around us, bickering and laughing as they tried on their colourful new acrylics.
One boy of 12 was carrying a tin can with a few smoking coals inside; he kindly let me warm my hands over it, grinning broadly.
Assifi was born, raised and educated in Kabul. She earned a masters degree in education in Utah, then had the bad luck to return to Kabul just before the Russian invasion of 1979. Her husband worked for an American firm, and they were branded spies. She and her infant child were smuggled over the border to Pakistan, and from there to the U.S.
In 2005, she was lured back by the promise of peace. "I soon found out that Afghanistan has been devastated beyond the comprehension of any human mind," she said.
"It is not only what you see with the infrastructure that has been destroyed. It is the morality of the people that has changed. Especially the youth. The children begging on the street are orphans of the mujahadin and people who have been killed for no reason, victims of bullets and land mines."
There are an estimated 700,000 Afghan orphans living in sub-poverty conditions, 500,000 of them in Kabul alone. Shelter for them is, at best, a thin canvas tent. The IOC attempts to provide vocational training to the children, gives them magazines and maps to sell to tourists in place of begging.
But it's like trying to bail the ocean with a bucket.
BOUGHT AND SOLD
"These kids are being bought and sold," said Assifi. "If the family doesn't have much to eat, they sell the daughter as a bride at six or seven years old to men 30, 50, 70 years old. Some are being sold into prostitution into Arab countries. The little girls and boys are being used for pornography.
"And you hear all the time how a family borrows money from a drug lord in exchange for poppies, and when they cannot repay, they have to give their daughter."
Unlike most public servants, Assifi blames her own government for Afghanistan's growing crisis. The administration of President Hamid Karzai, she said, is so thoroughly worm-eaten with corruption that the massive amount of aid delivered by western nations seldom gets where it's supposed to go.
"The people at the top drive Mercedes cars and sleep in beautiful homes, while old men are pulling carts in the freezing streets.
"Afghans have never been through slavery. They have always been very proud. But you cannot imagine what these people have done to survive for the past 25 or 30 years."
From Canoe Canada
Undoubtedly as Canadians enthusiastically supporting the war in Afghanistan, many people here at Canadian Content will watch their children and their grand children playing laughing and eating Christmas treats and eventually opening far more presents and gifts than any one child really needs.
Will those Afghan orphans who survive learn to love a Canada that prosecutes a war killing generations of Afghani people? Is the attitude that we should just kill people en masse because they might have some tenuous afiliation with terrorists how all these good Canadians want the world to understand and appreciate the people of Canada?
Hell it's just them rag-head kids left homeless and without family...who cares right!?
Merry Christmas to the latest generation of victims on behalf of all Canadians who've cheered the deployment of Canadian troops to Afghanistan. I hope these people are pleased with the results of their morally just response to Amercian oil interests invitation to participate in desimating a nation.
Ho Ho Ho here comes another cluster bomb everyone cheer!
