The author

 

We are back in Afghanistan. Despite many misgivings of many people, we arrived back in Kabul in August, 2010.

It is our fourth posting to Afghanistan, and our seventh year here. We are volunteers again, sent to work here by  TEAR Australia. We are working with the agency* that we have worked with before, this time though I am in the role of Development Support, assisting all our development type projects to get their work done better. ‘Better’ meaning more sustainable, more Afghan leadership, more depth, more community engagement, more thoughtful, long term work. The longer I work with this agency, the more I am convinced we do development well. I have lost count of the hundreds of projects implemented by other ‘development’ agencies, that a short six months after completion are in disrepair. Poor consultation, poor design, poor execution, poor follow-up characterise these projects and such agencies.

We aim to be different, and by and large, we are.

I feel quite good about all that.

Leaving Australia was hard. There is no getting around the sorrow and grief we feel at leaving ones we love.
It is, however, a relief to get back into the dust and chaos again.

We don’t generally make all the big changes here we would like, but we continue to hold out a hope for this country.

* for security reasons, I need to keep some details out of the open public.

aid worker. author. artist. academic. apostle. consultant. critic. doodler. dad. dissident. epicurean. emancipist. husband. humanitarian. intellectual. internationalist. itinerant. father. philosopher. photographer. phil sparrow. peripatetic. pioneer. polyglot. reader. writer. ruminator. runner (sort of).

not so big on sport…

contact me directly if you need: sparrowp at gmail dot com