Katherine Simmons's List: Orphans/Orphanages in Afghanistan

• This year PARSA, working closely with Mazari Safa, the new Na­tion­al Orphan Di­rec­tor and with funds from Chil­dren of Af­ghan­is­tan
• strength­en­ing their ed­u­ca­tion­al op­por­tu­ni­ties, pro­vid­ing tutors to assist them in prepar­ing for yearly as­sess­ment testing and will work one on one with the girls to help them de­ter­mine a plan for their future and hap­pi­ness.

• Oh, it must have been so sad. The orphanage must be really sad.' It's not. The place, Afghanistan, Kabul, is a mess, it is dreadful. The conditions people live in is just appalling. They have nothing. But the orphanage is a really happy place. Not only is it clean and bright, the kids are funny kids. Every night we ended up singing and dancing."
• lack of funds, and the threats of closure

• Afghan soldiers living, training,   and fighting alongside our own.
• Bacha bazi is an old Afghan tradition of taking young boys, dressing   them up like girls, and making them perform for older men in tea rooms, weddings,   and other private venues. The boys are "owned" by single or married   men who trade or keep the boys as concubines. According to reports, the boys’   ages range from eight to 19, when they "age out" of the practice   and are released.
• families have   rejected them
• Attempting escape could result in severe physical punishment, or   even death. The family of a dead 15-year-old boy told Frontline that   a policeman was eventually thrown in jail in connection with his murder.
• We call it pedophilia, and most here would say is worth   an eternity of damnation for its perpetrators, not a high social rank and adulation   among the town’s elite.
• It was also their casualness with which they operated and the pride with   which they show me their boys, their friends, their world. They clearly believed   that nothing they were doing was wrong."
• Meanwhile, poor families   sell their children, and orphans are snatched off the street. They are the   meekest, preyed upon by the strongest – the kind of wealthy, powerful men who   have benefited most from the Western occupation and generous foreign aid.
• These injuries included the boy’s intestines   falling out of his body, a "sign of trauma from anal rape." The Canadian’s   testimony, in addition to other complaints, including an eyewitness account   of the rape of a boy by two Afghan military personnel at Canada’s Forward Operating   Base Wilson in 2006, formed the basis of an official investigation into whether   the brass were ignoring complaints about systematic abuse up through 2007.
• "one reason Afghan villagers prefer to deal with the   Taliban rather than the government security forces is that the latter have   a habit of seizing their sons at checkpoints and sodomizing them."
• Does it turn your stomach to think that American money went to train   the police who now stand shoulder-to-shoulder each night with Afghan men gaping   at underage boys dancing in silk with bells on their feet?
• Cockburn argued that our governments   should not put another Western soldier into Afghanistan while there is such   obvious corruption snaking through the Afghan security services, not to mention   the Karzai government.

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• For now, this war on ignorance is fought in dozens of cramped classrooms in the orphanages, where boys and girls study Persian language, arithmetic, and some basic Islamic lessons.
• ays that until more funds arrive, orphanages such as Alauddin will have no choice but to turn away the dozens of young boys who arrive every morning begging to be admitted.
• "Right now, we're trying to reunify families and stop new admissions...."

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• Normally, Afghan families look after their own, shuttling children from poorer relatives to those who can afford better homes and food. But in today's Afghanistan, nearly every family is under tremendous economic distress and unable to provide for more than their own immediate family.
• Alauddin and Tahia Maskan, the number of children enrolled has increased almost 80 percent since last January, from 700 to over 1,200 children.
• but little of this money has actually arrived.

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• Basic food is still such a luxury that she gets visibly excited when a U.N. truck arrives with bags of emergency wheat supplies.

• Children are packed into classrooms and bedrooms. The cooks still cook on open fires in the kitchen, the smoke rising out through a hole in the ceiling.
• Under Afghan law, children cannot be adopted by strangers, so the orphans stay in the system until a family member arrives to take them home. It rarely happens.

• More than two million Afghans are orphaned children -- enough to populate a huge city, all on their own
• She lives with Hosa, who wants to adopt Zarina -- but Islamic law prohibits adoption. Afghan law allows only a form of guardianship that isn't recognized by many countries.
• ut mere guardianship is insufficient to qualify as adoption in most countries. This puts Hosa and Zarina in a predicament.

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• herefore, most of them are orphans, victims of child labor and street children forced to beg.
• The children are taught and encouraged to live within these boundaries. Every effort is made for the children to acquire these basic human rights principles. The family, cook and other adults living with the children in the orphanage are strictly prohibited from using any violence but to treat them with love and care.
• This couple acts as surrogate parents to guide the children through their daily life.
• The main objective is to empower these children with some life-skills that will help their earning power in future.
• his helps them gain new skills and experiences. They produce dramas, speeches, quizzes, singing and dancing competitions and much more. Apart from fun and entertainment, such functions are good opportunities for the children to build up their capacities and talents.

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• That's your tax dollars at work -- fighting terrorism and extremism in Afghnistan by trafficking little boys for sex with cops-in-training.
• But he was only charging them with "purchasing a service from a child," which is illegal under Sharia law and the civil code. And in this case "services" is not used as a euphemism for sex; so far, no one is being held accountable for the young boys whose rapes were paid for by the U.S. taxpayers.

• This urgent need to earn ex­plains why many parents refuse to allow their chil­dren half a day of school at the As­chi­ana Foun­da­tion, which comes with a hot lunch and some basic hygiene in­struc­tion.
• his urgent need to earn ex­plains why many parents refuse to allow their chil­dren half a day of school at the As­chi­ana Foun­da­tion, which comes with a hot lunch and some basic hygiene in­struc­tion.
• at Af­ghan­is­tan's main state or­phan­age, Al­la­hod­din, are not or­phaned, but instead aban­doned by parents who believe their kids are better off without them.
• girls tend to get turned away.
• the care­givers did not know how to look after the chil­dren. Severe­ly de­prived them­selves, they did not even wait for the PARSA team to leave after its first visit before steal­ing every single item in a first do­na­tion of blan­kets and food.
• The di­rec­tor of the or­phan­age an­nounced during our visit that he is closing the or­phan­age and turning it into a daycare centre instead.

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• Agencies have come and gone, unsure how to handle the multiple and often complicated problems of poor hygiene, lack of sanitation and inadequate nutrition that have plagued the facility for years.
• "The septic system is a mess. There really isn’t any place for the waste water to go," Louise Amber, programme manager for the British NGO Children in Crisis (CIC) told IRIN. Although conditions were dirty and overcrowded, in many ways there was less activity now than there was during the Taliban, she maintained.
• Equally disturbing was a decision by the World Food Programme (WFP) earlier this year to stop providing much needed food assistance to the orphanage after monitors determined some of the food was actually going to families of staff members instead.
• One of the more promising aspects of the orphanage - the school - is also suffering. Excluding the pre-school, approximately 1,650 students, following the national curriculum of the Afghan Ministry of Education, receive 4.5 hours of classes a day, including reading, writing, maths, Dari (the national language), biology and history.
• Emphasising the importance of the family in Afghanistan, in 1998/1999, CIC ran a successful reunification programme for 347 orphans until a change in management halted the process. In an effort to jump start that effort today,

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• Uddin shares a bed and filthy blanket with a larger boy in a  small room with 38 other orphans. A putrid stench in the hallways comes from  bathrooms without running water, because the vintage generator that powers  lights and water pumps recently broke down. Medicine is too expensive, so waves  of maladies sweep through the concrete-floor wards; one child recently died of  measles. Meals consist of bread and tea for breakfast, rice for both lunch and  dinner. Dried milk once provided by a foreign charity is long gone. When asked  what the kids do to play, Mazar replied with his own question, "What's a  toy?"
• abandoned, primitive, fending for itself against numbing odds.

• In Kabul, nearly 30,000 kids are estimated to survive by  brazenly begging or scavenging through garbage and war ruins.

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