Meager Gestures

 Sorrow wears a sweater.

America is rich.  Even our poor people have enough access to food to become fat.  In the midst of financial crisis and high unemployment, it's easy to forget how blessed we are to live in the land of the free and the home of the brave.  But when confronted with poverty of great severity, the disparity between ourselves and others becomes all too apparent.

Consider this.  The average yearly salary for a worker in Afghanistan is around $400.  Yearly.  Salary.  Consider also that a house (like you and I think of) in Kabul costs hundreds of thousands of dollars because of international agencies and Coalition contract money driving up the price.  The high cost of living combined with the low earning potential makes Kabul ripe for class disparity.  The rich are very rich, by Afghan standards, and the poor are very poor, by any standard.  We are fortunate to be in a position to help.

The Volunteer Community Relations (VCR) program at Camp Eggers takes donations of clothes, school supplies, toys, and toiletries and arranges opportunities to distribute these items to the neediest of the needy in Kabul.  Every week, volunteers come together to sort the items by age group, size or category, and parcel out the items into equal portions.  About once a month, the organizers put together a convoy to visit a local refuge camp or an orphanage or other area where these items are needed.  To be eligible to go out on one of these missions, you must have participated in at least one VCR sort, and those that haven't been on a mission previously get preference over those that have for filling the spaces.  It's a good way to get out of the office, get off camp, and assist in doing the local folk some good.

 An Air Force officer showing the kids pictures of themselves on his digital camera.

Minds = blown.

The mission that ran most recently was entitled Operation Get-Ur-Done.  No, I'm not kidding.  It was actually rather appropriate.  This mission had been canceled four times due to planning snafus.  The chaplains office has primary responsibility for the VCR program, augmented by other volunteers.  Everyone involved has their "real" job to do, making finding time to organize VCR stuff difficult.  The people in charge of planning these missions also have very little mission planning experience, making it take longer than it really should.  An infantry officer would be able to do this stuff in his sleep, but a chaplain, not so much.  A site must be found, surveyed for security purposes, traveling routes planned, security escorts coordinated, vehicles reserved, passenger information gathered, mission briefing planned, mission briefing given, cats herded, all before a single item can be given away.  All of this must be done on top of the sorting and the packaging of the actual goods.  It's a lot of work, and it's a testament to the dedication of the volunteers that it gets done at all.

This mission was to be fairly large with five fully loaded SUVs and a box truck to carry the goodies.  We were visiting a refuge camp that houses people from the southern region of Afghanistan, people that had lost their homes or their livelihood in some fashion or another.  The booty was 90 trash bags full of stuff.  This wasn't enough to give one bag to each family living in the camp, so the group running the camp held a lottery, drawing names of 90 families to receive aid.  It's unfortunate we weren't able to supply something for everyone, but we only do what we can do, and hope we have an opportunity to visit again in the future.  An added wrinkle to this mission was that instead of having an American infantry platoon provide security for us, we would be meeting up with an Afghan National Army (ANA) unit.  And not only were they going to provide security, they were bringing other items to give away to the refuges.  I was quite interested to see how this was going to turn out.

 An ANA soldier stands guard from the bed of his pick-up truck while 

children watch from the window.

The drive to the camp took about 20 minutes through the heart of Kabul.  On the way to the camp, we passed by the Iranian Embassy, which was an interesting experience.  Seeing the guards standing guard outside the gate and knowing that they could be guarding any number of things designed to disrupt Coalition efforts in Afghanistan made my skin crawl a little.  I was lucky enough to be seated next to a local resident that served as an interpreter for Camp Eggers.  He was able to point out several things in the city that we would have missed otherwise, and answer questions we had about the things we did see.  As it turned out, he only lived about three blocks from the refuge camp, and he apologized profusely for not being prepared to have us come and visit his home.  For all the things the Afghans aren't, one thing they are is hospitable.  These people will give until they bleed and ask if you'd like seconds.

On arriving at the camp, I was rendered speechless.  The dwellings where these people were living were clay brick huts, clearly hand-built, with a tarp for the roof.  While this by itself wasn't really that surprising, the juxtaposition of these mud huts next to a ten-story apartment building was striking.  The camp appeared to have been built on an empty field in the middle of a city of 2.5 million people.  Coming from America where zoning laws and building codes and public health regulations and any number of other things would render this little shanty town illegal, it was hard to screw my mind into the reality staring me in the face.

 The road leading away from the refuge camp into the nice part of town.

Unfortunately, I was too gobsmacked to take pictures of the camp itself on the drive in, 

and we weren't in a position to see the camp during the distribution.

 The ANA set up their perimeter and brought in the supplies they had to distribute while we got the box truck in the right spot and got the bags ready to hand out.  Someone produced a rope and stretched it across one end of the road for the people to line up behind.  There were kids crawling all over the place to see what we had brought for them.  I'd dealt with kids in two different spots in Afghanistan before this trip: the German school, and the street outside ISAF.  The school kids are clean, well kept and well mannered.  The street kids are dirty, persistent, and prone to picking pockets if they think they can get away with it.  The kids at the refuge camp were filthy beyond belief, very polite, and genuinely glad to see us.  Not in the "Yay!  I can make money off you today!" way of the street kids, but in the ecstatic, bubbly, hyper-curious way children act on Christmas morning.  Most of them were dressed in clothes from America, obviously handed out to them by some organization once upon a time.  I was glad we were here to help them further, but the supplies seemed so meager for a need so great.  I wished we could do more.

If sandals are all you have, you wear them.  Even when it's muddy.

Once the distribution started it was bedlam.  The people getting supplies were orderly, waiting their turn to have their hand marked with a sharpie before being allowed to cross the rope to the truck.  Everyone else was going nuts.  There was a small trench near the road where people were walking back and forth, climbing the low dirt wall to see if they could convince someone to give them something, even though they weren't one of the ones in line.  There were kids just curious to see what was going on, underfoot like an annoyingly adorable kitten.  There were herds of goats being ushered through our midst.  But through all the madness, the ANA were amazing.  They took charge of the distribution, not only of the stuff they brought, but of the stuff we brought as well.  The Camp Eggers crew was quickly but politely brushed aside to let the Afghans pass out the aid to their countrymen.  Which ended up being perfectly fine with me, as I got to snap away on the camera and take in the scene.

 An Afghan girl collecting supplies for her family.

To only be able to help 90 families was hard.  Judging by the size of the camp, there were at least several hundred families living here, I wanted to be able to help them all.  Sadly, it was not to be.  The supplies disappeared quickly, and were soon gone, spirited away on the backs of children, women and old men (very, very few working age men came to pick up supplies, interestingly) into the mouths of clay huts.  As we loaded back into our cars, some of the kids gathered around the vehicles asking for pens or candy.  One old man made it very clear through pseudo-sign language and charades that he was hungry and wanted us to give him food.  But we pulled away, aid tapped for the time being.

Stinky, smelly goats being herded through the distribution.  I had to laugh.

 And the goat herder.  His flock of twenty or so animals was completely under control.

The experience was rewarding, and definitely something I needed to see.  I understand now why they give mission preference to people that have only been to one VCR sort over the people that have been twenty times.  Seeing poverty and sorrow and strife on TV or in a magazine doesn't punch you in the gut like it does when you see it first hand.  True recognition of our privileged existence requires staring into the face of a child who doesn't know where his next meal will come from.  Going on one mission is all you need to want to help out in anyway you can.  

A few days after the mission, my Little One had a birthday.  She turned four.  I was able to "attend" the party through Skype and watch her and her friends make crafts, eat cake and ice cream, and, of course, open presents.  As I watched her rip open her packages, dwelling on each box only long enough to absorb what she had received before moving on to the next one, I was overwhelmed by how lucky my little girl was.  She had a warm home that wasn't made out of mud, a full belly, the beginnings of an education, and not a care in the world, beyond whether or not the present she wanted was in the box with the blue paper or the purple paper.

I tried to imagine what the toys and money being lavished on my daughter would mean to the little girls huddled together for warmth in the refuge camp.  How many meals would that money buy them?  How many nights would they be kept warm and dry by the clothes being unwrapped?

I wondered if their wildest dreams even approached my little girl's reality.

Somehow, I doubted it.

*****

If you have any items you wish to donate to the VCR program, box it up and send it to:

VCR Program (Pool House)

Chaplain's Office NTM-A/CSTC-A

APO AE 09356

Donations accepted include clothing, toys, school supplies, toiletries and other hygiene items, diapers, etc., etc.  Think about what you'd donate to a homeless shelter.  Those items will be welcome.  Try not to send anything with pigs or a religious message, as these will not (and actually cannot) be distributed.   And DON'T put the word "Afghanistan" ANYWHERE on the box.  If you do, the box will get kicked into the Afghan mail system instead of the military mail system and will never be heard from again. 

In addition to the Afghan outreach, VCR also sends boxes to soldiers on remote operating posts around the country.  Magazines, microwave popcorn, old DVD movies, and anything else you think a soldier in the mud would relish are welcome as well.  Many of the places around the country don't have a store to shop at, so they depend on home for resupply of all the good things in life, like Gold Bond and clean socks.  Trust me, you'll make some grunt's day.

That's all for tonight.  Out here.