By Joe Vanderbilt | Project Manager
We are pleased to announce that we recently wired 2K to Afghanistan to pay for the winter survival costs of the 10 orphaned children and fifty impoverished families we support in Baharak, Afghanistan (including the 50 children who are fed by the Baharak Children's Garden and hen house project).
We had difficulty keeping in touch with our local manager in Baharak due to Internet and telephone connectivity issues. First of all, there is no Internet service in Baharak so our manager must travel several hours to Faizabad to collect and send messages. We are working hard to resolve this problem. Our Executive Director met with Roshan, Afghanistan's largest ISP (and the country's number one tax payer) last spring in Kabul to learn how we can connect our project in Baharak to the World Wide Web. We learned in meetings with Roshan that there is a high speed line from a hospital in Faizabad to a hospital in Pakistan and that we may be able to tap into this line for humanitarian purposes.
We also had difficulty in mid 2013 getting our bank wires to Baharak. Global Roots normally sends $1,685 per month to finance the BCG and our bourgening Foster Care program in Badakshan. Due to disruptions in service, we had to delay sending our wires until we were certain they were arriving on target in a bank account set up by our local partner to receive donations expressly and exclusively from Global Roots. The matter was finally resolved when an intermediary bank in Gemany finally figured out that the beneficiary name on the account in question was not correct. Funds were finally wired when the mistake was rectfied.
All expenditures have been carefully accounted for by our local manager Janagha.
We decided to explain the above administrative bureuacracy because it is very important for all donors to understand how careful we are with the constant monitoring of this project. Our partner promised us 100% transparency and oversight from the very beginning and, with the exception of the afforemetioned connectivity delays, he has never let us down.
We are now ready to plant our 2014 garden and provide more funds for the purchase of 20 new chickens inside our hen house. As you may know, the produce from our garden and the eggs from our hen house go to feed the ten orphaned children we support as well as the families who see to the other 50 children in this program. Because of our close relationship with the community (our exeutive director Rick Montgomery traveled to Kabul to meet with the project manager and a key village elder) last spring we are now in a position to demand more metrics so that we can measure our future success. We were able to do this with our new garden in Kenya (the Matulani Children's Garden) but is is a more difficult task in an orthodox Muslim community where there is great fear of the outside world.
Our manager Janagha will start to use proven Global Roots methodology to measure the results. How is the food we're giving the children and the tranquil, after-school moments they are having in THEIR garden affecting their lives?
We know the answer beacuse we see it in the oversight photos and videos provided every month by Janagha but we also must be able to prove it scientifically. We have done this in East Africa -- now we must accomplish this in Afghanistan.
New developments: we are happy to announce that the mullah of another town as asked to duplicate our project in his community. The mullah is studying our demands for transparency and oversight and we expect to break ground in June. A major US company is hoping to pay for the entire cost of the project so that we can continue to finance our successful garden (the Baharak Children Garden or BCG) with generous Global Giving donations.
We are about to connect American school children with children in Afghanistan by taped video sessions. We are so thrilled that the mullah of Baharak approved such video contact. The sessions will not be scripted. It is our goal to connect children without any political or religious filter so that they can throw out any incorrect or unnecessary preconceptions they might have about an unfamiliar culture.
Our Children's Gardens persist
Our garden in Baharak will continue to feed 60 children and give the children special time to spend in a garden of their own.
We are hoping that our new garden and foster care program will serve 50 orphaned children and another 200 who are very poor.
Thank you for believing in this program and we thank you for your donation!
Global Roots
By Richard Montgomery | Executive Director
By Richard Montgomery | Executive Director
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