School’s just about over, and so the kids had an Olympics.
Immediately following which I flew to Maimana to assist in an evaluation. From 3000ft, the countryside around Faizabad is quite beautiful – if treeless.
In Maimana I am looking at the sustainability and management practices of one of our projects, the orthopaedic workshop, and the community based rehabilitation project.
Each of these prostheses tells a hard story of marginalisation and loneliness.
In Afghanistan, if you are disabled, you are barely a person. People with disabilities are routinely tied up, locked in dark rooms. Our worker there has endless case studies of people found in locked rooms in villages, never bathed or cared for, with long hair, long fingernails, caked-on dirt, thrown scraps of food.
Slowly, through our advocacy, treatment and encouragement, some of these people find lives, work, a place in the community. Some of them. Ours is one project, in one province, working in three valley systems, in about 18 villages.
I would like this work to grow.
itinerant and indigent 
Thank you for genuinely caring about this country and its people, particularly those who don’t seem to have many caring about them at all. It’s an inspiration, and a personal challenge.
Again I am humbled both both your response to your situation and the situation itself. I am continually humbled by the stories of dignity in the middle of degradation and the change that can be brought about by the influence of those such as yourself; change that might be overlooked by those of us who live in a luxury and security that others can not even begin to imagine but we take for granted. Likewise, lives are changed for good to a degree that is as equally unimagined or appreciated by us who think we have everything to live with yet so often we have nothing to live for.
I am immeasurably saddened as I consider you return from Afghanistan. I am aware that I really have no idea what it means to you apart from what you have shared on your blog. None the less, for whatever reason and from whatever empathy I have I feel a sadness. I know that no words can really make a difference; if I were there I would simply sit with you or join you silently in the packing up of your belongings and your lives as you prepare to return.
The image, and the significance, of the suffering servant comes to my mind as write. If that fits I hope it brings you some solace. If it fits I know that heaven is also sad in your circumsatance but honouring you as you follow your mater.
Enough from me,
Brian
There is nowhere like Faizabad in the spring.
Peace be with you.