Aschiana

Both of these photos are from our initial meeting with Mohammed, the manager of Aschiana ("Aschiana" is the Dari word for "nest"). I'm not really sure how to handle security/anonymity issues regarding the people we met on this trip; I don't want to put anyone in undue danger from a reckless blog entry, so even though it's probably not really necessary I won't use full names for anyone we met with.

The photo below shows Mohammed holding the 2009 Humanitarian Award which Aschiana won, beating out more than 4,000 entries from 35 different countries.



These photos were taken in the room containing all the handicrafts and art products that are made by the students at Aschiana and sold, providing part of the income used to run Aschiana. And all the art was absolutely beautiful.



This painting was my personal favorite.


This was the first classroom we visited, where an art class was taking place.









These was the special ed classroom. These women were wonderful with the students--very kind and gentle and supportive.

This cabinet we saw on the path between different buildings and stopped to look at. It contains a display of different ordnance, I believe the word is, that can be found everywhere in Afghanistan and particularly Kabul. This is meant to show the children at Aschiana what different bombs and grenades and various things that go boom look like so they leave them alone. Unfortunately it's not uncommon for children looking for playthings or scrap metal to sell to find something like this and pick it up, only to be killed when it goes off.

Afghanistan is also one of the most heavily mined countries in the world--landmines are everywhere. The HALO Trust is a mine-clearing NGO that locates and destroys landmines and other "debris of war," as their website puts it.



Students in another classroom. The big guy on the right is one of my fellow travelers, not an unusually large Afghan kid.

Notice the poster at the top left of the picture below, and the close-up below that. This type of poster was more common than the HALO Trust display cabinet and was prominently displayed at every school or children's organization we visited in some form or another.




More handicrafts in the woodworking shop. Aschiana also does vocational training, teaching people to make things like this to sell.


The dojo or whatever it's called where they teach judo.

When we walked in and they explained the gym to us, Jake informed everyone that he is a black belt in something or other and Mohammed asked if he would like to go one-on-one with this kid, one of their students in judo.

It was very entertaining--for us at least. We weren't the ones getting slammed into the mat:)






We kept huddling under David's umbrella while we were waiting for Abdul, the driver, to bring the bus over when it was time to leave.

It was cold and rainy the day we went to Aschiana. Aschiana is a program that provides education and vocational training to street children in Kabul, and they do great work.

Aschiana was developed to support street children, who are the most vulnerable in Afghanistan. It is registered/funded by the Ministry of Education. The center we visited is not the only center they operate; there are others in Kabul as well as in different provinces. They work with more than 9,000 children and also work with children from IDP camps, which stands for Internally Displaced People--or in other words, refugees from other areas of Afghanistan. Aschiana works with1,300 families from four IDP camps, which is about 2,500 kids total.

Their main goal is to integrate children from the streets to schools, and also provide vocational training for both boys and girls. School activities include art, literature, sports, health education, work with special ed/handicapped children, etc and vocational programs include carpentry, plumbing, electrical work, and so on.

It costs $20 a month for each child to go to school, and since most families can't afford that Aschiana has a school sponsorship program that finds private donors to sponsor a student and pay that student's school expenses.

Aschiana also has a foundation in the US, based in Washington, D.C. which helps fund Aschiana's programs and also helps locat and provide sponsors to pay the childrens' school fees. If you're interested in learning more about Aschiana or donating to their exceedingly worthy cause, you can find their website here.

The Briquette Project

There is (obviously) no central heating in Afghanistan, so every room has one of these wood-burning stoves for heating. This is the stove in the room I shared with my three fabulous roommates at the guesthouse. They pretty much all look like this.


Wood is becoming scarce in Afghanistan, not to mention expensive in a country where the average yearly wage is something like $300. So someone, somewhere came up with the idea and formula for briquettes. Briquettes are round blocks that burn hotter and longer in stoves than anything else. They're cheap and easy to make and the best part is, they're made of waste products and garbage like shells, leaves, plastic, mud, sawdust, etc. Paper is used as a binding agent so it is always a vital ingredient, but everything else varies according to what is available. The organization that runs the guesthouse we stayed at runs a project that not only makes briquettes, which are then sold and are actually the number one source of income for the organization, but also teaches women how to make them and then provides them with the necessary machinery to do it themselves. That way women can make a living for themselves--and a pretty good living for Afghanistan, at that. The guesthouse therefore always had them available and we used them for our stoves at night. As soon as the fire got going with briquettes it would instantly make the room toasty warm and comfy.

When we visited the girls' school, we also visited their briquette vocational training project they run at the school and got to see how the briquettes are made.