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    Newsletter#3                                 WELCOME TO THE AFZENDA WEBSITE!  

 
 

 

 

Wednesday, 8 June 2011,  This has been the longest gestation period for a Newsletter yet! My apologies!

 Quarterly Newsletter # 3, Afghanistan Zendabad, Kabul, Afghanistan

February, 2011, happens to be the fiftieth anniversary of the MacMakin family's arrival in Kabul (February 1961) and August, 2011, will be the fifteenth anniversary of taliban entrance into Kabul , (August, 1996) which is also the same date I opened Parsa's Gift Shop doors to the public.

      Last year and continuing to 2011 there were other markers: five beloved people very important to Parsa died.  Most recent was Carla Grissmann.  Nancy Dupree emailed me that Carla, one of the Three Fates, as Bob M. used to call us, died of a massive stroke in London on 15 February. She had been in a wheelchair since she broke a hip. She was a lover of Afghanistan and spent well over thirty years in Kabul working for the Peace Corps, some writing for USAID, then the Kabul Museum . She was a lover of people and loved to get them talking about themselves. Her multiple talents included Cordon Bleu cooking skills and home decoration and her homes - wherever she was - were a pleasure and a delight to be in. Carla may have escaped the wheelchair but she is indelibly in the memories of people she helped and taught to listen, to play, to love with the heart.

      On 3 December 2010 Bob MacMakin died in Farmingdale, Maine, with daughters Amy and Grace by his side. A sweet, quiet person, an avid book person (his birthday is on World Book Day!) and a creative hobby printer, he welcomed adventure, and the biggest one was going to Afghanistan in 1961 where he carried out his job of reinvigorating the Education Press for the Ministry of Education by retraining staff and cutting the accounting department from 144 people down to 15! His love for Afghanistan continued in retirement in Bisbee, Arizona, where he took over as back-up man for Parsa in the USA, putting the donations in the bank,  editing the quarterly "PinK" - "Parsa in Kabul" - our newsletter that kept our Stateside donors and friends informed of our activities in Afghanistan and arranging my itineraries in the US. He was the emergency supplier of cash when we ran out in Kabul and always welcomed me back when I made an annual visit to Bisbee. The past five years he was increasingly disabled by Parkinson's disease and spinal stenosis and I was fortunate to be able to keep him at home until he fell and broke a hip and had to go to Tucson for care. He was a family man, loving to have family members around him. We will miss him, lots.

      In June last year, Zarghoona, beautiful and brimming with energy, a devoted worker with Parsa, died from complications following surgery for a recurrent back problem. A highly-qualified teacher, she had taught at the Polytechnic Institute prior to coming to Parsa where she was one of two courageous home school monitors during Taliban times, and when home schools were no longer needed she housed a Parsa class of female jewelry-makers. Herself widowed five months after marriage she mothered a community of widows in West Kabul , keeping them busy with home gardening, food preservation and social activities and badgered the City to bring in loads of gravel for the muddy lanes leading to their homes. She made sure that her only son had a good education at the Kabul military academy. Her spirit her brightness and intelligence will always be remembered.

      Naheed, another beautiful and inspired person, very conscientious and a hard worker with Parsa, a teacher and teacher of teachers in the large Paghman Education for Women and Girls project serving 750 students, died in June at age 36 from cancer. She had mentioned pain in her breast the year before I retired from Parsa in 2005 and had gone to Peshawar for treatment. However it was not contained, became inoperable, but she continued going to work as long as she could. Thanks to her skills as teacher and organizer hundreds of women and girls in Paghman can read and write. She was a loyal and tireless worker and leaves a big empty spot in our lives.

      In 2009 Nafas Jan,  the mother of Daud, Maruf, Zarif, Lailuma, Shaista and grandmother of Saleem, all of whom worked at Parsa at one time or another, died after a long and busy life - a beloved and respected old lady, famous to the Parsa outreach as our "poster" person: her picture appeared several times in Parsa newsletters showing her seated in front of her door in the sunshine, spinning an arm-load of white wool roving she had prepared. Her passing was well mourned in Paghman and Kabul by her extended family including numerous grandchildren. The cycle of life and death goes on and on....

 News from Kabul: When Sharifullah drove me into the city from the airport last November 11th it was so dark I thought it was evening but no, it was the air pollution! I was convinced I could never live in the city. The next morning dawned clear and sunny, the sky a cloudless blue! How does Kabul do it? That wasn't the first time, either; it pulled the same now-it's- polluted-now-it-isn't trick about once a week. So here I still am, living in a room just the right size for my new, retired, 82-year old self. Very soon after my arrival the renewal of old friendships re-assured me I was doing the right thing, moving back to Kabul and into the arms of friends and the encircling mountains, now thickly covered with snow after a dry fall and winter. The city was dun-colored under layers of dust till several weeks ago when suddenly rains began to fall, steadily, and the dust conquered - for a few days, anyway, and the specter of drought diminished.

       I might be doing the right thing on one level but on the official government level the scenario became mired down in Afghanistan 's new laws for NGOs and workers. So many small things went wrong that I had to ask my astrologer daughter Ellie what was going on - it seems Uranus was having a lot of fun upsetting things. The hoops we had to jump through to get our new NGO, Afghanistan Zendabad, registered as a local NGO at the Ministry of Economy took nearly two months! Ahmad Wali, our accountant and IT wizard had started the process earlier. Right off he had a problem: a Min/Econ official told him that "Afghanistan Zendabad" meaning, Long Live Afghanistan!, was not acceptable - it was "political" - so it was re-shaped to "Afzenda" and, inspired by the fact of Rosemary and Susan being from Australia, we saw we were in a global circle: Afghanistan - Australia - United States so we added "Full Circle" and the Ministry added "Organization" so we have quite a title to live up to: Afzenda Full Circle Organization or AZFCO.

      At each step in the process I would ask our vice-president, Rafiullah, "Do I have my visa letter yet?" And the answer always was, "there's one more step we have to complete and then you'll get your letter." A visitor to Kabul nowadays is granted a thirty-day visa to get in the door, plenty for most visitors, but not for me so I kept pushing for the "letter" that would introduce me to the visa department at the Foreign Ministry.  By early December my visa had expired and I was counting the days I was visa-less - for sure there would be a penalty.  The final hurdle was for me to get a work permit. That meant a trip to the newly-built and imposing Ministry of Labor, Social Affairs, Martyrs and Disabled in old Mikroyan. We were stopped in our tracks by discovering that I was too old to get a work permit! According to Afghanistan 's new labor laws 65 is the age limit to work.   So now I was in a no-man's land for getting a residence visa: it wasn't possible through the Ministry of Economy since I couldn't get a work permit and my name was removed from the registration papers. A nice introduction letter from Farid, now Parsa's Country Director, was rejected and another from the head of Care also was not accepted so I had to go to the US Embassy, write a letter about my situation which the Embassy would then notarize, which I did and surprise! The visa director accepted it and I got a letter to take to the Ministry of Interior to stamp my passport with a six-month visa!

       But wait, no sigh of relief yet, where was my passport? Had I lost it somewhere in the visa office? The officials at the Visa Office are so frazzled from the hordes of Afghans and ex-pats needing visas that they could barely listen to my plea to search the desks for my pass port: "Go to your embassy and get another passport" was all they could offer. So I was on another paper chase, visa-less days ticking by - to find the form on the Embassy's web-site (nothing is easy anymore) for reporting a lost passport and getting a new one - which, incidentally, would cost me $135.00. With the help of Royce, a new Australian friend at AREU, the form was filled and printed out and I was resigned paying the penalty when I happened to go thru papers in my purse for the umpteenth time, and lo and behold - there was my passport! Another mystery.

Next, with great feelings of relief, I walked to the Ministry of Interior (on yet another main Kabul street barred to traffic) to get my visa safely into my newly discovered passport (having left my driver's license in Bisbee I had had no ID whatsoever - not a good idea when on the other side of the world from one's home country). Officials at the Ministry of Interior instructed me to go to the new passport office in Karte Se (no longer in the lane next to the Indian Embassy) across the street from the Parliament building. Sharifullah and I cruised down the Darulaman thruway  - under construction  - amid racing vehicles but could not locate any government office. Someone pointed across the street to the Parliament and said it was in back "somewhere". Like many public buildings Parliament is guarded against terrorist attacks by police and army personnel manning road blocks on every adjoining street. There followed a search in the maze of residential streets in Karte Se, every person we asked pointing ahead and saying "it's THERE!" like, you are pretty stupid not to see it. Finally we ran across it almost accidentally on seeing crowds of cars parked in an obscure street. Construction was going on with a very deep trench next to the road and photo-copiers were perched on the piles of dirt next to the trench so it was an exciting and challenging adventure to get your copies made without ending up in the trench!  Ah yes, plenty of penalty for a total of 57 days without a visa. I had to borrow cash from an American friend, race to Da Afghanistan bank, find the right window in a maze of offices, pay up, race back to Karte Se before the end of the winter work day at 3 P.M. to hear "It's not finished yet - come back tomorrow at 2 P.M.".  I began getting a strange feeling: was I being tested by the Powers That Be to see if I really belonged in Afghanistan ? At any rate the story had a happy ending: I had my visa for six months safely stamped in my passport, my room was comfortable and warm, two proposals had gone to Afzenda's president for delivery to donor agencies and my neighborhood shopkeepers and I were getting to know each other.  

       Kabul is no longer the easy-going center of life in the midst of the two-story cityscape it used to be. Afghans successful in business abroad during the diaspora have returned to build 15 or 20-story office cum residence buildings reaching to the sky. All of a sudden I am dwarfed like Alice after she ate the 'small' cake. Instead of being normal-sized, people now look small as they walk along the sidewalk.   

 The blessed countryside is about the same except for the contents of Pandora's box: cigarette packets and butts, Iranian cookie cartons and plastic bags and bottles blowing over the fields, soaking in streams, paving the streets and alleys of every village and city. In Kabul that garbage and much more unidentifiable detritis is filling up the newly-deepened drainage ditches and is very visible to pedestrians like me on the wide and sometimes beautifully-tiled sidewalks on both sides of all the streets. The mayor’s clean-up teams in their bright orange work suits simply can’t keep ahead of the deluge. And the herds of sheep that Carla and I used to laugh about galloping eagerly toward the pile of kitchen refuse and other things on Flower Street back in 1978 continue to nose through the city’s piles of garbage, competing with dirt-encrusted, scavenging boys filling filthy bags on equally-filthy bicycles with recyclables for the women and girls at home to make usable again – poor people at work, as they do in the cities of the world. In the USA the process is so mechanized and sanitized and kept out of sight so that we have no idea of the waste we produce.

Good News, finally. I was waiting until I had some good news to tell you before I sent off the third Newsletter. Now it’s May, and after six and a half months of waiting on officials’ responses Afzenda is now on the working track. We will be partnering with Karima and her newly-registered local NGO, Afghan Women’s Educational and Vocational Organization (AWEVSO). Karima has had experience with taking out loans from banks in Kabul – which of course, entails paying them back with interest – and since Embassy and USAID take so long to process applications and make decisions, a loan will get the sewing center going. There are groups of women who are eagerly waiting for a chance to work. The beneficiaries, at first, will be the families displaced by the fighting around Kandahar now existing in tents at Charayee Qumbar, below Qargha Dam. Karima has also started literacy classes in Paghman so I can spend more time out of the city’s noise and pollution and in a healthier environment.  

       USAID has done a great job at the Ministry of Agriculture. For one, the vast experimental gardens at Badam Bagh are restored to useful field trials; a productive, underground greenhouse fostering broccoli and staked tomato plants is the forerunner of many more to come in the provinces; thousands of strawberry plants await farmers and gardeners to take them and prosper; many thousands more of fruit tree saplings have already been taken to home gardens and farms around Kabul Province; and spreading the word to herders and Kuchis throughout the country about the wealth of cashmere wool on their goats is expanding a tiny Herati business into a potential country-wide benefit. Ministry expectations put Afghanistan second only to China in tons of top quality cashmere wool to be produced annually. It is now a small third after Mongolia . Afzenda aided the fruit tree distribution after Nau Roz by getting apple, peach and plum saplings for Sharifullah’s uncle in Charikar, and Fereba’s father in Paghman.

At this moment in time I am very happy to be telling you all of this – Spring has this ability to inspire hope and love - of life, of gardening, of people – and also because the political situation of Afghanistan and Pakistan has finally become public knowledge – the fact of Pakistan’s duplicity, known to Afghans and many foreigners working in the area for decades – has been revealed in its full, shameful depths to our State Department and President Obama and to the world. It is now clear what Afghans have been trying to tell the Americans for years, that their real enemy is Pakistan, that Pakistan has never wanted Afghanistan to be a free and sovereign state, that it has wanted full control over Afghanistan’s political and economic life – and is still trying to obtain control, through negotiations with the Taliban. One must be on the watch all the time – awake and aware of what’s going on!

To keep this window of information on Afghanistan open and operating, and to assist with Afzenda’s and AWEVSO’s programs in self sufficiency and literacy for women and girls in Afghanistan please send your check to:

Afzenda, P.O.Box  1064, Bisbee, Arizona 85603  

Thank You!

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