The author

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

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 Afghanistan was hard. There is no getting around the sorrow and grief we feel at leaving ones we love.

I expect we will be in Australia for some years, though I will keep making some trips to Afghanistan and other places for work.

* 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