Supporter: Scott Heidler

He comes from a place called Sheen Kallay, or green village, but after fours years of drought there are only small patches of green near the southern Afghanistan hometown of Dr. Mohammad Khan Kharoti.

Kharoti, who has lived in Portland since 1989, has spent the last six weeks in the province of Helmand assisting Mercy Corps by meeting with government officials, assessing medical facilities and evaluating programs.

Giving back to his community in Afghanistan and helping the Mercy Corps programs there is not new to Kharoti. He has visited Mercy Corps program sites over the past several years on his trips home and provided findings and observations to Mercy Corps headquarters upon his return.

But the trip home this year was special for several reasons. It was Kharoti’s first trip back to Afghanistan since September 11th and the first opportunity for him to visit a school that he and his brother Gul Habeb started one year ago this month.

The Sheen Kallay School sits just next to the Kharoti family compound in the agricultural area of Nad-e Ali district west of the Helmand capital of Lashkar Gah. With special permission from the then Taliban leaders, Sheen Kallay School was the only school in the area allowed to teach girls.

When the school first opened, it only had 10 boys and 6 girls. Last week the school population was near 200 and received school supplies donated by Mercy Corps and transported to Afghanistan on an Evergreen humanitarian flight in February.

In addition to basic curriculum taught in the mornings, Sheen Kallay School conducts English classes in the afternoons and students received new English lesson books during Kharoti's visit this month.

Kharoti is very pleased with the growth and progress of the school despite being shut down by the Taliban for two and a half months during the early days of the bombing in October. As soon as Taliban rule fell, the school was reopened.

He has big plans for the school. Looking over a field behind the main mud brick building, he extends his arm to map out the site where he wants to build another building to house classrooms for girls and an area for the teachers.

Born into a nomadic life that his family maintained until age seven and illiterate until 12, Kharoti is a classic example of local boy making it big. While working as a nurse at Lashkar Gah Hospital, his dedication and drive were recognized by an American doctor.

It was the help of Dr. Roberts that lead Kharoti on the path to fulfilling his father’s dream of him learning to read and write. Roberts helped him gain acceptance to a high school in Lebanon and then later to a college in Iowa where he received his bachelor’s in medical science.

After college, Kharoti returned to his country and attended medical school in Jalalabad in northeastern Afghanistan before returning to Lashkar Gah Hospital. This time he entered the hospital as a doctor.

He will never forget the trust and support that Roberts showed him. While taking a tour of Lashkar Gah, pointing out Roberts' house was just as important to Kharoti as the Governor’s house. As he stood in the operating room of Lashkar Gah Hospital, Kharoti fondly remembers Roberts finding him scrubbing the operating room walls at one in the morning. Roberts' reaction, "Why don't you go home and see your family."

At the hospital it’s impossible for Kharoti to walk down a corridor or poke his head in a room without running into someone he worked with as a nurse, doctor or both.

This hospital is as much his hometown as Sheen Kallay. As the hospital’s assistant administrator Dr. Nassar Barak put it "Dr. Kharoti knows every corner of the hospital and the pain of the people."

Kharoti's family, with four children ranging from one to 10, fled Helmand for Quetta, Pakistan during the war with the Russians in 1987. This is where he was introduced to the Mercy Corps family. He was hired by Mercy Corps to train and teach paramedic techniques to medical staff who transported Afghans to Quetta with injuries or illnesses that required specialized treatment not available in Afghanistan.

After a year with Mercy Corps he joined the US Consulate in Karachi where he learned the process of how he could take his family to America. Kharoti’s family immigrated to Portland in 1989 as refugees and he now works in nuclear medicine for Kaiser Permanente.

Kharoti is the only member of his family in Sheen Kallay to live outside of Afghanistan. He appreciates all that America has to offer, but he feels the pull of his homeland. "In a perfect world I could spend the days in Afghanistan helping the people and the nights with my family in Portland."

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Abdul Qayyoum took on the role of administrator of the Mercy Corps-run Hazarjuft Hospital in the southern Afghanistan Helmand province just three months after it opened its doors in 1999.

A native of Lashkar Gah, about a two-hour drive north from the hospital, Abdul was hired by Mercy Corps while working in Quetta, Pakistan for the Saudi Red Cross. He fled his home in Lashkar Gah during the war with the Russians and lived in Quetta for 10 years before returning home for his posting with Mercy Corps.

He enjoys his work with Mercy Corps in Helmand because of the long-term commitment it has shown the people of the region.

He adds: "I'm happy working in a loyal and honest environment. That’s why the people here are happy with the work Mercy Corps is doing."

In addition to the Hazarjuft Hospital, Mercy Corps has a network of rural basic health units that were kept operational during the coalition bombing last year. Just three days after the Taliban surrendered Kandahar and Helmand in December, Mercy Corps delivered medical supplies to the Hazarjuft Hospital.

The work is rewarding to Abdul, but he admits there are many aspects of the medical system in southern Afghanistan that makes his job a challenge. Particularly when patients are in need of specialized treatment and care.

"We need more equipment and doctors. The nearest large hospitals in Lashkar Gah and Kandahar don’t have the staff or equipment to help complicated cases," he said. "We have to send them by road to Quetta and that is a very long trip. A lot of the patients die on the way there, almost 50 percent."

But not all cases have tragic endings. Earlier this month a gunshot patient was brought to the Hazarjuft Hospital. He was the victim of a robbery, a trend that has become more frequent over the past few months.

The quick action of the staff in stabilizing the patient and an available ambulance to transport him to Lashkar Gah Hospital saved his life. The usual two-hour trip took four, but the patient arrived in time. He was operated on that night and was recovering the next day.

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KANDAHAR CITY, Afghanistan - This week the markets and bazaars of Kandahar are open and there appears to be a feeling of hope. The dusty streets are congested with motorized rickshaws, pick-up trucks and old Russian made four-wheelers. Video stores and music shops have even opened, businesses illegal under Taliban rule.

Kandahar City is a six-hour drive from Quetta, Pakistan with the last two hours on a dirt road that would be almost impossible to navigate at night. It is a city that has bared witness to two decades of fighting and it shows the scars. For a first-timer in Kandahar one needs a guide to figure out which destroyed buildings and blown up military vehicles on the side of the road are “old” or “new” - from the Mujaheddin war or from the last three months.

Mercy Corps reentered Kandahar City just a week after the surrender of the anti-Taliban forces earlier this month and this week received the first material aid shipment to reach Kandahar City.

On December 26 Mercy Corps began a rapid assessment of Kandahar City to get a clear idea of the needs of the internally displaced persons (IDP) and the vulnerable population in the urban area. Three teams of Mercy Corps surveyors visited a total of 23 community groups representing over 850 IDPs and vulnerable people.

One such group met at the Imambra Mosque in District One, Sector One of Kandahar City – a community primarily of Persian-speaking Shaia people.

Here are the greatest needs for four families in Kandahar:

• Mohammed Gafor, 60, lost his son when the Mujahedeen was fighting against the then-Soviet army. He now supports five members of his family with children ranging from one to eight. His family stayed in Kandahar during the recent bombings, because in Mohammed Gafor’s words, “We are from this ground and are not leaving.” To make ends meet over the last few months he has had to barrow money. His family’s biggest need right now is food – rice, flour, sugar and oil.
• Salam Baba, 50, says this his most critical need right now is also food. He has not been able to support his family of five because of the problems he has been having with his eyes.
• Mohammed Zahir’s, 60, family of six was until recently supported by his 25 year old son who worked in a Kandahar City factory. A few months ago a piece of machinery fell on him breaking his leg, thus leaving the family without a means of income.
• Ali Ahmad, 54, has been the custodian of the Imambra Mosque for two years and has relied on donations from the mosque community to support his family of five. His family’s greatest needs at the moment are blankets.

The Mercy Corps teams in Kandahar will continue the surveys will for another 4 days. So far the results are providing a clearer picture of how many IDPs and vulnerable people there are in the urban area.

In comparison, the people in Kandahar City are better off than those in neighboring rural areas. A Mercy Corps assessment team sent to Helmand, the province just west of Kandahar, reports that approximately 60% of the 13,500 people surveyed are without adequate shelter.

The Helmand team described the situation as “appalling, due to lack of food, shelter and the most basic medical services.”

Mercy Corps is working to get the needed shelter, food and medical care as quickly as possible to Helmand and Kandahar.

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QUETTA, Pakistan - Taghnesa, 40, fled her village in the northern Afghanistan province of Kunduz nearly three months ago when the fighting between Northern Alliance troops and the Taliban escalated.

She joined a group of fellow villagers that decided leaving their home was necessary for the survival of their families.

“I left all things there and came here to save our lives,” she said sitting in the compound of the Mercy Corps Killi Kamalo basic health unit (BHU).

It took her family four days to travel to the Killi Kamalo refugee village across the Pakistani border near the southern city of Quetta.

Killi Kamalo, in the dusty foothills outside the city, is a refugee village that was established two decades ago during the then-Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Lined with mud houses and storefronts, the narrow dirt roads of the village were constructed with donkey carts in mind, not cars. It looks much more like Afghanistan than Pakistan.

Tanghesa’s husband died a year ago and now it’s just her, her husband’s other wife and four children, two of them hers – Ganagena, 6 and Fateema, 10. Like most of those who have recently fled the fighting in Afghanistan, Tanghesa is staying with relatives.

Just a few days ago the BHU distributed a one-time food ration of flour, cooking oil and beans to help alleviate the added financial strain the new refugees are putting on their hosts.

On the day of her interview, Tanghesa brought Ganagena and Fateema to the BHU for Tuberculosis vaccinations. Every month the BHU provides 500 children vaccinations to the approximately 100 “new” refugee families that have come to Killi Kamalo in the last three months.

Mercy Corps has four refugee village BHUs around Quetta that provide the Afghan refugee population with outpatient care, mother-child care, reproductive health, vaccinations, and medicine. If the patients require secondary care, they are referred to the Christian Hospital in Quetta city. Before the BHUs opened, there were no medical services in the villages.

The BHUs are run in partnership with local Pakistani non-governmental organizations dedicated to helping Afghan refugees. To make sure that the new refugees are aware of the BHU services, each unit deploys a group of community volunteers that educate the newcomers on the services provided and good hygiene practices.

The refugee population in Pakistan is still growing, but like many other refugees, Taghnesa is thinking about returning to her home in Afghanistan. But she’s not sure how soon it will happen.

“I don’t have anyone to take me back to Afghanistan. If I could go, I would,” she said.

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