Spending money in Afghanistan has been difficult for many reasons, the security of our helpers out there being the biggest problem.
Over the past couple of months, we’ve been preparing a newsletter to send out to all of the people who’ve donated to us in the past year. We have taken on an intern to do this for us. Laura is a new graduate, young, bright and energetic, and interested in working for us partly because her brother Chris is in the Territorial Army. He had completed one tour in Afghanistan and was due to go out again.
He went to Helmand a couple of weeks ago and last Friday, which was Laura’s last day with us, she heard that the tank he was driving had been hit by an IED. Chris was lucky in that he suffered superficial injuries as he was at the front, driving. The other two in the tank were both killed. Such pain for their families.
Focusing on three fronts
I see that my last blog was at the end of May – well that’s the Hebrides for you. Summer is 20 hours of daytime, 20 hours of grass and weed growth, and a race to get the outside maintenance done before the driving drizzle settles herself into place for seven months.
An American friend was telling me that the best bloggers write a soundbite paragraph every few hours so their followers keep going to their site to get the latest titbit. Those followers aren’t my kind of humans. I have to feel that I have had an out of body experience before I get myself in gear, so maybe I can appeal to those who prefer something that is both stimulating and infrequent, something between Viz magazine and Thomas Hardy – plenty of scope here.
Tractor run: one of the summer’s fundraising events
Over the summer we’ve concentrated on three fronts:
- Fund raising events have been the major focus and we’ve been successful for a new charity – only because we’ve received so much support from all quarters. The majority of the events have been physical exercise challenges so clearly the summer is the busy time.
- Spending money in Afghanistan has been difficult for many reasons, the security of our helpers out there being the biggest problem. After a slow start, we made solid progress and are starting to build up good contacts among other charities working there who undertake schemes that fit in with our focus of helping women and children.
- Our third task has been to keep in contact with our donors and we’ve just completed our first newsletter which we’ll be posting and emailing out to more than 1,000 supporters this week.
We now have to formalise our accounts and prepare our annual report.
God bless you for your work. My husband and I were working in Kabul for two years 1978-80, I was there with a two year old and a baby when the Russians invaded. I worry so much about the people, particularly the women and their children as I know how hard it was even then and did what I could to help. I will send a donation, with love.