In November 2004 I sent my CV to a UK charity seeking short-term employment - and 7 weeks later I was on a plane to Afghanistan for 4 months!

Tearfund
The charity was Tearfund, one of the UK's largest Christian relief and development agencies, with a budget this year of over £50 million.   It operates overseas in 2 ways.   In most developing countries it works with local partner organisations, funding them and giving team development and specialist technical assistance as required.  But there is also a Disaster Management Team working in particularly difficult parts of the world and implementing its own projects.  The programme in Central Asia (Afghanistan and Western Pakistan) is in the latter category.  This operates in 4 locations with 5 British nationals, a Singaporean, an Indian, and about 45 local staff, and my role was personnel and administration for the programme.   Accommodation for the international staff is above the offices.

Tearfund operations outside the Afghanistan borders
Tearfund has been working in Afghanistan for nearly a decade, although for a while under the Taliban it had to transfer its operations to Pakistan, working with Afghan refugees, and this continues.  There is therefore a Tearfund office in Pakistan in Quetta, the old British garrison town of the North West Frontier, where Tearfund provides public health education and water and sanitation for Afghan refugee schools.  When I visited these I was impressed not just by what the children had learned, but that the child-centred teaching methods used by the Tearfund facilitators (some of them refugees themselves), had been adopted by the teachers of other subjects.  One headmaster spoke of it as a miracle, and said the approach had completely changed the environment in the school turning it away from an attitude of beating facts into the children.

…and within the country
Over the border in Afghanistan Tearfund is again involved in education, renovating classrooms for a school of 1600 pupils in Spin Boldak.  The buildings had been taken over as a military base during the fighting, and even though it had been de-mined, explosive devices were still being discovered while digging foundations.  In the villages outside the town Tearfund had set up small compounds with two tents, where the boys and the girls from displaced families come each day to be taught.  One of the facilitators had written public health messages as local Pashtun poetry and these had been adopted by the government education department in the area.  Tearfund also provides water and sanitation for the villagers in this incredibly barren area.

Disaster preparedness
One reason for the barrenness is the 15-year drought across the whole region.  This year there has been some rain and snow, so conditions have improved, but in places the arrival of surface water after so long has resulted in flash floods.  Several hundred people have died and there has been much loss of property.  In Kabul we ran a workshop for workers from other development agencies on helping their communities prepare for possible floods.  Tearfund sees this as an important aspect of its future operations; -  supporting local communities to develop coping strategies against natural disasters.  To this end it is developing radio programmes to help local people come together to work to make themselves less vulnerable.

Living in Afghanistan
For me, being in Afghanistan in winter was probably easier than some other times of year, and the surrounding snow-covered mountains could look stunningly beautiful in the frequent sunshine.  There were less pests and sickness, but it could be cold at night - down to -14oC.  My window had slightly loose single panes of glass in ill-fitting frames!  We had to drain all the water down from the tank on the roof every night when it was likely to freeze.  When the snow melted the roads were deep mud in places, and the driving was unbelievable, though I never heard of anyone being injured.  Crossing from Pakistan which drives on the left to Afghanistan which drives on the right, I failed to see where the changeover took place, even though I was looking out for it!  We had a back-up battery system, as the electrical mains was off more than on, and on one occasion we measured the voltage (officially 220V) as down to 49V.  One night I heard a loud bang and the mains had exploded.  This was not really surprising, as it was raining hard and the water had filled a hole in the street outside to above the level where there was a twisted join in the supply cable.

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