A4T NEWSA4T students featured in the video: "Afghanistan's Children"
Please click here to see this segment of ABC 'World News' with Diane Sawyer which was aired on January 11, 2010. The interview at our A4T school starts half way through, when you see girls with white scarves exercising with jump ropes during PE.
Local jewelers work to unlock a brighter future for Afghan children
Rebuilding Afghanistan Foundation, an A4T donor, and McTeigue & McClelland present the Ariana Necklace to unlock a brighter future for the children at Ismael Mayar Primary School (A4T School #3) in Shekh Yassin, Afghanistan click here to view.
To learn more about the 'Jewels for Schools' campaign click here.
To contribute to this campaign or to place an order for this unique necklace, hand-crafted in sterling silver, please click here!
Anyone interested in donating to this campaign and being invited to their upcoming event Thursday, November 19th, 2009 in New York City, please e-mail Elizabeth Hartnett.
"Hillsdale students take stand against poverty
By Neil Gonzales
San Mateo County Times
Posted: 10/12/2009 12:00:00 AM PDT
Students at Hillsdale High School in San Mateo will join millions of people worldwide on Friday in solidarity against poverty.
The students' campaign, dubbed "Stand Up and Take Action," coincides with International Eradication of Poverty Day, established by United Nations resolution in 1992.
The students will stand up in unison and spell "HHS" on the soccer field to call attention to the issue of extreme poverty in developing countries.
The students will follow up that project with the fourth annual Kite Festival on Saturday. The fundraising festival is inspired by Khaled Hosseini's novels set in Afghanistan "The Kite Runner" and "A Thousand Splendid Suns."
All proceeds will go to sponsor a school for girls in Afghanistan established by Afghans4Tomorrow, a non-profit humanitarian organization. For the past two years, the proceeds have provided a teacher and school supplies for girls in that war-torn country. ..."
Read more HERE.
September 2009 ~ LA Times Magazine
"Kabul Lullaby: Making music in post-Taliban Afghanistan can be playing with fire
by Annie Jacobsen
Photo by Dr. Ahmad Sarmast
In 1960, at the age of 17 a comparatively late age for a budding virtuoso Richard Dobbs Hartshorne, living in Denmark while his father was a Fulbright fellow teaching Kierkegaard at Aarhus University, fell in love with and began formal training on the double bass. Three months later, he was accepted to Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio, and two years after that he began pursuing a masters degree at the Juilliard School.
Then in 1967, Dobbs did something that would change the course of his life: He bought a copy of the Bach Suites. Written in the early 1700s, the compositions are considered among the greatest classical works. My teacher at Juilliard, Stuart Sankey, told me to study all six, Dobbs recalls. He said the Bach Suites would teach me everything I needed to know about music. But the understanding was, Just don't play them in public. Conventional wisdom among the master musicians of the day was that the double bass the lowest pitched of the bowed string instruments couldn't handle Bachs notes in a way that would be pleasing to the ear, certainly not in the way a cello could. Dobbs didn't accept that.
It took me 25 years to learn how to play them. And then it took me five years to record them, says Dobbs. He performed all six in a single concert in Dublin, and in 2006, instead of touring Europe or the Americas, he headed to Afghanistan, where he would literally risk life and limb to play.
Or maybe not. Afghanistan is perfectly safe, Dobbs tells me one warm spring night. Im in my office in Los Angeles. Dobbs is in Kabulin a hut on stilts that serves as the guard shack for the guesthouse where he stays when in the capital citytalking to me on a cell phone he has borrowed from Zargul, the rifle-toting night watchman. Zargul has also prepared a statement for the American people. America and the President, he enunciates in practiced English, please let Mr. Dobbs keep coming to Afghanistan. Music brings Afghanistan from darkness to light. ....."
Read the rest of this article HERE.
Note: See photos of Dobbs performing at A4T schools here (view album #7).
"Afghanistan Unvarnished
Photographer presents images of country's promise, problems"
by Ted Holteen, Arts & Entertainment Editor, The Durango Herald
Friday, July 17, 2009
While many Americans may be aware that Afghanistan is a nation in turmoil, few have seen the country firsthand and likely are even more ignorant as to the daily life of its people. Photographer Gloriann Liu is a rare American who has spent time there, lots of it, and she's sharing myriad images of Afghanistan's people for the next month with a show that will open tonight at the Open Shutter Gallery on Main Avenue. (note: through Aug. 20)
"The Other Afghanistan" chronicles Liu's travels in the country since 2003, although she's made 15 separate trips since her first pre-9/11 visit in 2001. She taught photography and art for more than 20 years and uses that experience to try to educate through her craft. The exhibit includes 40 color and black-and-white images of people and places rarely, if ever, shown by U.S. or international news organizations.
Liu said if she were affiliated with those organizations, and by extension the U.S. military, she would never have the kind of access she's enjoyed for the last eight years. Liu primarily works with nongovernmental organizations, such as Global Exchange and Afghans4Tomorrow and has traveled to almost every region of the nation with the same guide and drivers since 2003.
Read the rest of this article, HERE.
(Note: top right photo: Playing with a new kite. Kabul 2007, by Gloriann Liu)
"Women Make Gains, but Still Struggle in Afghanistan"
Afghans4Tomorrow is featured on PBS NewsHour Report by Margaret Warner
reporting from Afghanistan - March 20, 2009
"JIM LEHRER: Margaret Warner wraps up nearly a month of reporting in Afghanistan with this story on the fate and future of Afghan women.
MARGARET WARNER: On a misty morning in southwest Kabul, girls are playing catch-up. At this "Afghans4Tomorrow" school, 15-year-olds are in first grade with 6-year-olds. It's a legacy of the Taliban era, when girls' education was forbidden through virtually all of Afghanistan.
LAILA SAIEDI, Director, "Afghans4Tomorrow" School (through translator): These girls are now learning, and that should help all Afghanistan, since most of the problems here the reason is uneducation. ..."
Read the transcript of the rest of this article, HERE.
Mill Valley teacher helps her native Afghans rebuild war-torn country
Marin Independent Journal (California USA)
Beth Ashley-01/12/2008
Asma Eschen has been in this country for 37 years, but a return trip to her native Afghanistan in 2003 turned her life upside down.
Now she is a board member and recent ex-president of the California chapter of Afghans for Tomorrow, helping build four schools and a clinic around Kabul and organizing a delegation of 10 Bay Area residents to plant 10,000 trees in the city this April.
The head teacher at Strawberry Preschool for the past 13 years, Eschen didn't plan to refocus her life on Afghanistan: "I didn't find this work; it found me."
Q. How did it happen?
A. After 9/11, I started crying, crying, crying. Every day I saw pictures of my country on TV. I took off all my jewelry, even my wedding ring. I felt so decadent. I had so much, these people had so little. I told my husband, "I need to go back right away."
Q. So you went?
A. Afghanistan was always in my life, although I was 14 when my family decided I should come to this country to be educated. In 2003, I was studying at College of Marin when I joined a Marin delegation that was going there. As soon as we arrived in Kabul, I felt I was "home."
Q. What is the Bare Roots Project you are organizing?
A. This will be our third trip. Ten of us are going, all volunteers, planting trees in the Kabul area, so barren after all the wars that have taken place there. Twenty Afghans will help us. The trees - 10,000 of them - will beautify a housing area that is being built for Afghan refugees returning from Iran and Pakistan.
Q. Who are the local volunteers?
A. The whole project began when Ash Wood of the First Presbyterian Church in San Anselmo got in touch with me. Now we have many people, helping us and raising money. .....
Marin is so beautiful - I like to think I am taking some of this beauty and giving it elsewhere in the world.
Q. Will Afghanistan remain a priority in your life?
A. Yes. I am now working on an advanced academic degree in early childhood education. I want to prepare myself to go back to Afghanistan full time in about five years and help set education policy there. Education will be the key if Afghanistan is to rebuild.
In Fremont, grassroots groups explore ways to rebuild Afghanistan
Jill Tucker, San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, December 16, 2007
As a child living under Taliban rule, Humaira Amiri, 22, learned to add and subtract in secret -homeschooled so no one would know. Educating girls in Afghanistan was a sin.
After the Taliban fell in 2001, that changed. Yet children in the war-torn country face new obstacles in obtaining education: poverty, hunger, lack of water and even bombs. "One day they go to school, the next a suicide bomb (hits) and then they don't go for another month," Amiri said Saturday. Amiri was among more than 200 people who gathered in Fremont's Centerville Presbyterian Church to share ideas and efforts to address those problems and many others in the country suffering from decades of war and conflict.
More than 20 grassroots organizations attended the fifth annual Rebuild Afghanistan Summit, many focusing on helping children, health, infrastructure and financial development.
(Afghans4Tomorrow was one of the organizations that helped organize and participated in the Summit.)
Read entire article here(pdf)
Afghans4Tomorrow
The Ark Newspaper
December 5, 2007
By Ann Mizel
How many children on your Christmas list would be moved to tears over receiving a pencil? Or a backpack full of school supplies?
This Christmas, by donating to the nonprofit, all-volunteer Afghans4Tomorrow (A4T), you can give a gift that will truly make a difference in the lives of young people deprived of a formal education during the many years of war and conflict in Afghanistan.
In the words of one 13-year-old student at a girl's school in Kabul, Afghanistan, "We are happy to know that we have the opportunity to learn like Americans."
When you give a gift honoring a child in your life, you also are teaching a lesson about the dire needs of children many thousands of miles away. Your gift will help provide education to over 675 needy Afghan students served by A4T in four schools, which offer intensive academic programs year-round in many subjects, including math, science, history, English and computers, as well as vocational training.
Read full article here (pdf)
Book inspires teens to raise funds for Afghans
Hillsdale Kite Festival to support San Francisco-based nonprofit
By Ben Malley-San Mateo County Times - California
SAN MATEO--Hillsdale High School English teacher Greg Lance had never taught a book that every one of his students liked until Khaled Hosseini's "The Kite Runner."
Inspired by that novel, and Hosseini's latest, "A Thousand Splendid Suns," the juniors in Lance's four English classes decided to hold a fundraiser to support Afghans4Tomorrow, a San Francisco-based nonprofit.
The novels, which emphasize breaking out of negative patterns and the power of education, motivated the students to help A4T, which operates four schools in Afghanistan.
Marsha MacColl, A4T vice president, visited Lance's classes recently and shared stories and photographs from her most recent trip to Afghanistan. "I was touched by the sincerity of these kids," said MacColl. "I could see it in their faces when I spoke to them. It inspired me."
The class asked questions about the treatment of ethnic minorities, cultural customs, humanitarian efforts and even tried on MacColl's burqa. She said it was hard for many of the students to understand the extent of the poverty in Afghanistan, where the average income is only $30 a month.
The class watched a slideshow of the schools A4T had built and the students who attend them. "It was very meaningful to be able to actually see the faces of the people over there," said Tanya Singh, a student in Lance's class. "It makes it more real, and it really fueled our motivation to do something."
The Hillsdale Kite Festival on Saturday aims to promote literacy as well as raise money for A4T schools in Kabul to help pay for school supplies and teacher salaries. The students have taken on the responsibility of organizing the event themselves, forming committees to work on planning, publicity, fundraising, and arts and crafts for the festival.
"The kind of things the students are doing to prepare for this event, planning and publicity, those are real life skills," Lance said. "And what this has done is make 'The Kite Runner' more than just words on a page to them."
Those attending the kite festival will be able to make and fly their own kites. There will also be story times when high school students will read to young children. Festival food will include various homemade Afghan dishes.
MacColl said she hopes that the festival and the work the Lance's class is doing can inspire their community in the same way Hosseini's novels inspired them."They are putting so much of their time into this," MacColl said. "I just hope it shows kids here in the United States how lucky they are and that they shouldn't take their education for granted."
2000-2006 ANG Newspaper
See photos in the Kite Festival Photo Album here.
Back to School in Afghanistan
With the help of volunteers in the U.S., Afghan girls return to the classroom
By Sabrina Omar | September 28 , 2007
In the principal's office of a girls' school in the heart of Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, Aisha sat with her hands clasped in her lap, eager to tell her story.
"We can learn, we are happy, and we are excited," said the 13-year-old student. "We are happy to know that we have the opportunity to learn `like Americans'.
Aisha has only been in school for four years. Before then, girls in Afghanistan were not allowed to go school. Afghanistan's government, the Taliban, imposed harsh laws for how its citizens live their lives, such as forbidding girls from formal education or even leaving the house alone. Girls who wanted to learn risked their lives.
Aisha wore a black uniform with a white chadar, or headscarf, tightly wrapped around her face, covering her hair and her forehead. It is a typical schoolgirl's uniform. But if Aisha had her way, she would change the way she dressed for school.
"I'd wear pink and white," she said. "The color pink shows love, and I have a love for this school."
AFGHANS FOR TOMORROW
Aisha's school is called A4T1, which stands for Afghans4Tomorrow, the non-profit organization that provides funding for the school. The organization believes that everyone has a basic human right to education, male or female.
Afghans who had returned to their country after years of Taliban leadership founded the organization in 1999. Since then, it has grown with the help of volunteers around the world, including many from the United States.
American students donated school supplies, clothes, and materials for everyday use. Zerger Elementary, a school in Westminster, Colorado, contributed a great deal. In 2007, Zerger students donated more than 70 items to A4T schools, including clothes, jackets, blankets, shoes, books, and toys. Some students sent letters and drew pictures so that Afghan students could add some color to the bare walls of their classrooms.
The Afghan students appreciate the consideration of kids from all over the world.
"Once you have given us the opportunity, we'll use it," promised Fahima, a 13-year-old student at A4TI. Sure enough, Afghans For Tomorrow has given them an opportunity that several years ago was only a dream.
LINK to Scholastic
Hope Grows on the Ground in Afghanistan
By Nicholas Zifcak and Mary Silver
Epoch Times Washington and Atlanta Staff
Aug 16, 2007--There's rarely any positive news about Afghanistan. What little we do hear paints a picture of a nation crippled by violence, where a resurgent Taliban is behind a booming opium trade and where there are frequent, often fatal attacks on seemingly unwanted NATO forces.
But talking to locals and aid workers on the ground tells another story.....Among dozens of non-government organizations working to help Afghanistan's people rebuilt their country is Afghans4Tomorrow (A4T), which offers humanitarian aid, healthcare, education, and assistance with agricultural development in cooperation with local leaders.....
Read the full article Here
Needs of health centers in the country
By: Ghorzank
From: Cheragh newspaper (meaning light, or lamp) in Kabul
June 21, 2007 - Several decades of war damaged nearly all things in our country. To do the rehabilitation of it all, will require hard work. One of the needs in the country are health centers for the people. Some people, even in the central provinces, cannot reach hospitals in time and have died.
Fortunately in some regions, small health services have been built; one of those is the Abdullah Omar Health Post which began health services in Shekh Yassin village in the Chack district of Wardak Province. The land has been donated by Mayar family and the building constructed by Afghans4Tomorrow -an NGO. There are medical staff in service at the HP who treat patients very well and provide good medications. Some 1200 families and the neighbor villages' families are receiving the benefits of the health service. Although it is registered with Ministry of Health, Afghans4Tomorrow runs the health post. This health service opened in the presence of elders. People are very happy for this kind of help but still need more health centers. People appreciate this and request to continue the Health service for long time.
See the article as printed in Kabul HERE
ABC7 Salutes: afghans for Afghans and Afghans4Tomorrow
May 11 - KGO - San Francisco, CA - More than five years after the overthrow of the Taliban, Afghanistan is still one of the poorest countries in the world. Rebuilding a nation ravaged by three decades of conflict is slow work. In this ABC7 Salutes, we meet Bay Area volunteers trying to make sure the Afghan people know they are not forgotten.
War-torn Afghanistan is half a world away from this San Francisco basement. But these women are trying to bridge that distance, one stitch at a time....
Read more and see the video featuring the above organizations
at San Francisco's ABC7 News;
ABC7 Salutes: Knitting Towards A More Peaceful Afghanistan.
NOTE: We at Afghans4 Tomorrow are thankful for all the wonderful work by Afghans For Afghans volunteers from across the US and around the world. Their knitted caps, mittens, blankets and sweaters are truly a work of love. Our students express their thanks in this photo. Afghans4Tomorrow will soon receive a shipment from the US, including many boxes of knitted items. We are going to use many of the baby items in our 'New Mother Kits' for the women and their new babies who are treated at our new Health Post in Wardak Province which opened for villagers on June 3rd.
'Afghans For Tomorrow' School
March 12th, 2007 -- Afghans4Tomorrow school visited by Aaron Schacter for "The World" program, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH Boston.
Afghanistan was one of the countries around the world celebrating International Women's Day this month. The pomp and circumstance of the event is overshadowed by the fact that life for women in the country is still not very good though there are improvements. The World's Aaron Schachter reports from the country's capital, Kabul.
 A fourth-grader at the 'Afghans for Tomorrow' elementary school in Kabul stands at the head of the class, writing on a white board. She stumbles slightly through a dictation exercise.
The school is designed for female students. Some of them were denied an education under the Taliban. Others were displaced by Afghanistan's numerous wars, and some were prohibited from going to school by their own families, because education for girls is frowned upon. This 4th-grader, Ainabad Turan, is 20 years old. Besides school, her day consists of about four hours cooking and cleaning alongside her mother and two hours of homework.
 Turan chuckles when asked whether her mother went to school, and says "No, I'm the first one."
Turan: "We are from the Turkmen tribe, she says, and it's not our tradition; especially in the conservative village where I came from."
With the influx of people into the capitol, some 70% of girls and young women here are now going to school, at least twice the average of the villages. Turan says she's determined to get through at least 9th grade, so she can fulfill her dream of becoming the first female television anchor on Afghanistan's Turkmani-language channel.
But it's not easy going for women here. Shakri Barzai, a female Member of the Afghan Parliament, lists some of the factors that hold women back.
Barzai: "Because poverty, lack of security, electricity and culture; the limited access to justice. Men also they don't know how to be a kind husband or father with the female members of their family."
In fact, statistics from Afghanistan`s Ministry of Women's Affairs show domestic violence here is rampant; the rate of girls in schools is dropping 5% a year; only 16% of women are literate, and the infant mortality rate is high. Even so, Mazarin Safa, Deputy Director of the Ministry, says all is not lost.
Safa: "These statistics are true, but if you compare the situation now to five years ago, things are much much better in terms of education and health facilities, for example. The government has created posters and announcements on TV to teach people that violence in the home is wrong. And there are many women in positions of power and in the Afghan parliament."
They hold 68 seats, to be exact, out of 249 in the National Assembly. Also since the fall of the ultra-conservative Taliban regime five years, two million girls have returned to school, and women are allowed to leave their homes unaccompanied.
But there are women here concerned about what progress might do to Afghanistan's culture. The proliferation of Western aid groups working on their behalf, they maintain, might force them to adopt a culture they don't accept. Having rights, they say, does not mean behaving like Britney Spears.
Ann Norton is a professor of culture at Providence College who's here visiting with a group of women. Norton says being exposed to the western values now sweeping the world doesn't necessarily mean giving up on one's culture.
Norton: "There will be a few who, around the world, who want to be global. They think it's sort of chic and all that. But I really would hope they maintain their culture and continue their traditions. If they incorporate things that are so-called modern, from the 21st century, it has to be their own way."
That said, women are adopting some of the mores of the West. Ainabad Turan, the 20-year-old in fourth grader, says marriage can wait until after her dream of being a television anchor is realized. In a country were many women are forcibly married off at 18 or earlier, this is truly revolutionary thinking.
LINK
February, 2007: Distribution of Winter Relief Aid Winter 2007
The winter of 2006 and 2007 was bitter cold in Afghanistan, with people suffering and in some cases dying due to the cold.
Afghans4Tomorrow distributed clothing and blankets thanks to generous donations (cash and items sent) from across the United States.
THANK YOU!
This Afghan girl received a new hat--one of thousands of knitted items made and donated by volunteers knitting for Afghanistan.
Photo by N. Sedeque, A4T
View Photos of Jan.-Feb. 2007 relief distributions, in Kabul by A4T representatives.
The Asian Development Bank praises A4T!
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