Unfortunately, there seems to be only one direction in Afghanistan at the moment – down. Since coming to power, the Taliban have devoted themselves almost exclusively to women, it seems, and have devised ways and means to further restrict their rights.
Despite assurances that everything is under control and the country is safe, regular suicide bombings paint a different picture.
So far, there have been hardly any efforts to address what is actually important – the reconstruction of the country, the creation of infrastructure, a functioning economy, and care for the people in the country.
We have reached a point with the distribution of food packages where we need to rethink. The big organizations distribute food on a large scale.
Millions of food packages have to be distributed, there are few employees on the ground, no way to manage this distribution in an orderly fashion.
Of course, there are no lists of needy families; those who bring their ID cards get food. In the meantime, a procedure has been established in which an ever-growing group of people (mainly younger, stronger men) canvass the food distribution points, present their ID, collect the food, sometimes gather it somewhere and then resell it.
These people also visited our distribution campaign last month and demanded food.
They claimed that they were entitled to it, since they had shown their IDs. They were not interested in the fact that we have lists.
Our distribution had already taken place that day in the morning in the locked courtyard to our selected families. Thus, these troublemakers went away empty-handed.
In order not to cause any turmoil or even riots in front of our center in Kabul, we have decided to make a central distribution for the time being only in Nejrab, in a village and orderly environment. In Kabul, we will target the needy families by car and bring the food packages to them.
We will mainly support our former students, their families, and our employees.
Alternatively, we will start a new project where the families will receive chickens instead of food. In the long term, this is certainly a more sustainable solution than constant food deliveries, to which people have already become accustomed. This way the families can either use the eggs from the chickens themselves or sell them and use the money to buy other food.
We will test this approach on selected families within the next 2-3 months and if the concept proves successful, we will expand the whole thing to a larger area of impact.
