Chapter ends

The Chapter of Afghanistan ends.
I will be travelling more
the next chapter is the "Stories of Mild Seven Lights"
http://storiesofmildsevenlights.blogspot.com/

Somalia

15 of my favourite photos of my time in Mogadishu Sept 2009

mild seven lights

mild seven lights, originally uploaded by Mild Seven Lights.

I once prayed and cried to God as a kid asking why all these terrible things happened.

It came to me, this was the fault of man, these wars, rape, faminine, HIV/AIDS, disease and so with my own two hands I decided I would change this the only way I knew how. With a camera. I am not the best of photographers but my camera captures the truth. Even if I reach one person, I have made a difference.

I would go into the Hearts of Darkness and find that light with the Dark.
No longer am I confine to Afghanistan. The world is now mine to explore and expose the troubles of man.

thus a new blog will begin.

Danciban

Now for something completely different.
My housemate decided we needed to compete in a dancing competition
called the Ugly Dance Championships.
The winners compete in Hamburg in a live Dance Off

Friend of Humanity Kabul Clinic

Friend of Humanity Kabul Clinic, originally uploaded by Mild Seven Lights.

Being newly appointed as a Deputy Country Director of an Afghan NGO called Friends of Humanity is the latest in my story.

It will be interesting times but I get a chance to realise a few dreams
and hopefully tend to a few orphanages in Afghanistan
and hopefully a mobile clinic is the eastern region.

The clinic in Kabul is on its way and there is a clinic in Jalalabad
already set up and running.
In the coming days I will try to get to Logar to see an orphanage and Jalalabad.

Skateistan - Land of Skate

Skateistan is a humanitarian group made up of dreamers. Dreamers who dreamt of a land where children could throw away their problems and just skateboard. But they are dreamers who put away their own procrastinations and just followed it.

In a place like Afghanistan where the majority of the population is under twenty, a majority are unable to have access to facilities like schools, playgrounds and sport groups. Government school education can be around one and half hours for a child due to the lack of overpopulation and overcrowded classroom.

Poverty forces a child from an early age to grow up and take responsibilities of an adult and they walk the streets begging for money down the overcrowded streets. But between four pm and six pm they can be a child again.



Children settle their differences of race or class. Afghanistan is filled with three major races, the Pashtuns, Tajiks and Hazaras who have conflicted over the control for years. But only laughter fill the empty and heavily cracked water fountain in which they play in. Even girls are involved in skateboarding at old fountain who are fast and just as competitive as the boys.

Skateistan started with only three skateboards in Kabul, with Ollie "Ollie" Percovich following his girlfriend at the time, Sharna Nolan, a humanitarian worker into Afghanistan. Wandering around with a skateboard he began lending out the skateboard for kids to try. After time he began to realise it could be more than this. Now Skateistan has an almost completed skatepark, a van filled with skateboards, several staff and volunteers all over the world helping to fundraise, who believe that dreams can happen.



But Skateistan has become more than just skateboarding and began to listen to the children and solving their problems. Faizila, a refugee from the fighting zones of Kunduz was forced by her parents to beg beside cars trying to wash windows but with almost a dollar a day she is able to go to school and get an education that would otherwise be lost.

Skateboarding has even reached the children of the major orphanages relieving them of living in their enclosed environment. As long as there is concrete, a skate board can ride it.

Medical research and vaccinations have been giving to children to help prevent them against water parasites and other infectious diseases and also to access the medical needs of Afghan children. Asheesh Bhalla, a volunteer realised he could use his small NGO, Friends of Humanity to be able to facilitate children with medical treatment they would normally never get.

And though dreams are being realized, children have an outlet to be themselves, to be kids. Through the upcoming programs Skateistan will be able to facilitate internet and educational programs at the centre. The centre in near completion and will look to being the highest state of the art sports facility in Afghanistan.





Four Professional Skateboarders, Cairo Foster, Maysam Faraj, Kenny Reed, Louisa Henke from around the world came to Kabul to see for themselves, Skateistan in practise and will always remember their time here. Everything they believed Afghanistan was like was shattered and the fun they had in Kabul is incomparable to most countries.

The future of Afghanistan is uncertain with the elections and the security, but more so when foreign aid runs out here in Afghanistan but Skateistan will live on with its skatepark but most of all the children who could manage to be who they are, children.



Girls like Faizila will face the pressure of womenhood and by the time she become fourteen, it is possible for her to be married off. But she is so hopeful of being more than a housewife with dreams she never thought could be open to her. Even the boys look forward to a good education and to get off the streets.

Channel 4 Report on Mirwais Hospital, Kandahar with Nima Elbagir

Nima Elbagir guest blogs from Kandahar hospital, Afghanistan. The pictures are taken by and copyrighted to Jacob Simkin.



When the Obama administrations’ then nominee for the top job in Afghanistan General Stanley McChrystal faced the Senate Armed Services committee in early June his message was unequivocal – civilian casualties were the major operational issue.

“This is a critical point. It may be the critical point. This is a struggle for the support of the Afghan people.”

Just under a fortnight later the British launched Operation Panther’s Claw in the North of Helmand, quickly followed by the US’s Operation Strike of the Sword to the south. Both designed to clean out the Taliban stronghold that Helmand had become.

A month into Panther’s claw we travelled to Mirwais Hospital in Kandahar City.

With only 350 beds it serves Afghanistan’s five southern regions - a population of nearly four million. It’s the only hospital in the South with the Surgical facilities to treat trauma victims. And it’s where those caught in the operations against the Taliban in Helmand have been coming.

My cameraman Jake and I are both based in Kabul so we’re used to hearing the figures on civilian casualties. We went into Mirwais knowing the figures keep rising, we knew this was looking to be the deadliest summer for civilian’s since the conflict began.

But what the statistics conspire to obscure are the numbers of civilians who die because of the war but aren’t felled by a bullet or a bomb.

Although whether McChrystal and the coalition like it, nearly two months after that Senate hearing, most of the patients operated on at Mirwais were there because of bullets and bombs.



On our first day we were taken round by a man who’d lost his grand-daughter in a coalition air strike on his village. Lying next to his bereaved son was another man, naked with his exposed back covered in shrapnel scars. He’d lost his cousin and nephew in another aerial strike on the same night.

And then there was the young man who’d lost his whole family in a US mortar strike.

We spent our first few days in a daze filming a litany of coalition casualties.

None believed they were the unfortunate victims of mistakes or miscalculations - one man told us, “the Americans do not recognise their friends from their enemies.”

But what was unexpected was the children, the dozens and dozens of children, who came in every day.

Unicef rates Afghanistan as having the second highest infant mortality rate in the world and the insecurity plays an ever greater role.

Staff and parents at Mirwais both told us the choice is simple – wait, praying for a window of calm or risk the journey to the hospital through the violence. Wait and risk your child’s life. Go and risk everything.

We stayed in Kandahar with the International Committee of the Red Cross who support Mirwais. They have the largest expatriate post in Kandahar, an incredibly lonely position to be in. The work they do is incredible.

Unlike many other Hospital’s in Afghanistan the generator’s never run out of fuel and the medicines are to international standard.



The ICRC trained surgeons are running at capacity, they carry out 700 surgeries a month, of which 600 are on war wounded. And over the next few weeks they are erecting operating theatre tents on the hospital’s grounds to deal with the continuing influx.

Even coming from Kabul, believing that you know a little of the situation on the ground, that you’ve heard the stories elsewhere. You are still unprepared for what you see here.

Victims of aerial bombardment and cross fire, victims of living too near coalition bases or walking down roads the Taliban don’t want built.

Victims of living their life in the middle of a war.