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HTAC in the News
Articles
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Everyday Heroes in Afghanistan
Home Again, to Afghanistan
The van bounces over potholes the size of swimming pools on its way through Tajikistan's dusty no man's land of mine fields and barbed wire. Destination: the Afghan border. What should have been a 6-hour ride is going on 17. The van's broken down a frozen times, and they've been stopped at umpteen army checkpoints. Still, Suraya Sadeed is smiling. "There it is," she says, pointing. "My country." The landscape is scarred by tank treads made during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan two decades go and the civil war that followed. But just beyond the drabness shimmers the green, fertile valley of the Amu Darya, the river that defines the border of her homeland.
It is November 2001, and Sadeed-the daughter of a former governor of Kabul and now a naturalized American citizen-is on her 18th humanitarian mission here. Her goal is to deliver 239 tons of food and blankets to some 150,000 displaced people on the drought-stricken plains of northern Afghanistan.Many live "open air"-that is, without so much as a tent-and are nearly starving. This is her first trip back to her birth country since her adopted country began bombing it
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Sadeed's van clears the final checkpoint before the border. Suddenly two gray-black plumes of smoke mushroom up a short distance away. Then come two eardrum-popping kapows. A pair of American B-52s, clearly visible against the azure Afghan sky, have just bombed Taliban positions.
Though Sadeed supports America's war on terrorism, this is her country, and it is being pummeled. As she stands there, the planes drop a dozen bombs. Tears run down her cheeks. For years Sadeed ventured alone through Taliban lines, over mountains on donkey-back, bringing in food, cash and medical supplies. The founder and life force of Help the Afghan Children, Sadeed and her bravery went pretty much unnoticed until the onset of Operation Enduring Freedom, America's response to the September 11 attacks.
She hadn't intended to stay so involved with her homeland. She left at age 24 and stayed away for 15 years. Then in 1993 her husband had a massive heart attack and died. "In seven minutes my life changed completely," Sadeed says. "The pain of losing him was so overwhelming."
It was time to return to Afghanistan. "I went to see how life was for the millions of people who also lost their loved ones-how did they cope with this pain?" Sadeed says. "When I got there, it wasn't the same country."
She was in Peshawar, Pakistan, where thousands of Afghan refugees had recently arrived, when a woman called her name. "She was wearing a chadari," Sadeed recalls, using the Afghan term for a burka, "and I couldn't see who she was. She said she had been in my psychology class in college. I said, "Who are you?" She said, 'I won't tell you, but could you please give me fifty rupees? My child has no milk.' I gave her the money and she ran off. This woman was like me-educated, privileged. I thought I could be one of these people."
When Sadeed returned from her trip, she founded Help the Afghan Children in a Washington, D.C. suburb. With just three staffers and a few volunteers, she started 17 clandestine schools for Afghanistan girls and five medical clinics. In 1998, Sadeed says, the Taliban overran one of her clinics. "They burned it down-nobody got out alive." Still, the Taliban didn't intimidate her. Sadeed told them, "I was here before you, and I will be here after you."
Sadeed walks through Qum Qishlaq, a tent city for some 8,000 people. She listens to tales of loss and grief. All complain of the bitter cold-either have frozen to death in the last two weeks, they say-and lack of food. Dysentery and malaria are rampant. "Why do I do this?" asks Sadeed. "This is why I do this. They need to tell their stories." As relief trucks arrive, young men, old men, Afghan women and Afghan children step up to collect their five kilos of sugar, eight kilos of cooking oil and 50 kilos of wheat-the bare minimum a family can survive on for a month. Sadeed smiles as the procession continues. For 12 days in seven locations, she bears witness to the distribution of her food. That, indeed, is something she can smile about. Her next focus: building schools for Afghan children. "Taking emergency aid might save kids' lives from this Afghanistan war," Sadeed says. "Giving them education will prevent the next one."
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