we're home!!!

Hey Everyone,
Well after a week of travelling, including a couple of days to relax in England, we have arrived and are now back home. Thank you all for keeping up with our blog this summer; it has proven to be quite the experience at the end of which 435 families have a home, a village now has 5 bridges, the famlies have been trained in Health and Hygiene, and Carrie and I were able to experience it all. Here are a couple of pictures from the summer that Carrie and I really have enjoyed:

orphan family

dancing lessons from Nafisa

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

hanging out on our front stoop


No, I am not pregnant, my shirt is just funny
sorry all those hoping

girls school

Visited an Afghan girls school that has 2,000 students. Many classrooms were just tents, others just had chalkboards, some with rugs, some without. All the same, it was wonderful to see so many girls with the freedom and desire to learn.

This is why I married this man

Health and Hygiene Program

This class is taught in one of the shelters that just needs some last touches before the refugee family moves in. The teacher has become a good friend of mine. She is about my age, bilingual, and is in med-school to be a surgeon. Quite the modern Afghan lady, yet still holds traditions, ie., asks her father before coming to our place for lunch, wears a burka in public.
The class is going quite well. Many women thank us for coming. We go to all the villages where we have built shelters and then teach health and hygiene classes. We teach about personal hygiene,basic sanitation,Pre-Intra-Postnatal care, diseses, and nutrition, to sum it up.
(the women hide even though I had their and their husbands permission to take photo's for modesty, honor, shyness, ect.)

hubby with beard

As requested a pic of my beautiful hubby with his new look. Also check out the wooden beamed roof.

One of the shelters for the refugees

Afghan women & kids

These pics were taken at a women's NGO that was running a fish farm. The fish farm consisted of one 4 ft by 2 ft murky "pond". They are one of the many women NGO's we have been checking out. The women were very poor, but even still offered to kill their only chicken in my honor for coming to visit and taking interest.

Bonhoeffer

If we do not give thanks daily in which we have been placed, even where there is no great experience, no discoverable riches, but much weakness, small faith and difficulty; if on the contrary, we only keep complaining to God that everything is so paltry…then we hinder God from letting us grow. –Dietrich Bonhoeffer (with my small revisions)

In Afghanistan I have discovered Bonhoeffer. I have read him before, but never really had the energies and time to meditate on his words. The past few years I have been stuffing and reserving much brain space for things such as EKG rhythms and signs and symptoms of different types of shock, ect. It is quite refreshing to have the brain power to be able to handle Bonhoeffer.
For me the above passage (which with my revisions I may have massacred-sorry Mr. D.B.), has been so helpful. My expectations sometimes far exceed my reality. Sometimes this causes me to be scared to hope, expect the worse, and if it turns out better I’ll be even more excited. But life without hope is dull and depressing. Sometimes I take the opposite approach, get so so so excited and when reality comes to pass, I complain that it has not lived up to all I have hoped for.
What I think big Mr. D.B. was getting at was we should take neither approach I am usually accustomed to choose between. Instead, we should be thankful to God for every good in every situation. BUT we should also not accept mediocracy and overlook the changes that need to be made. “We should work for change and improvement, but we will only do this effectively if we are thankful for the good that is already there.”

Soraya-jon

Hey Everyone!
Josh and I miss you all so much! We are so blessed to have such wonderful friends. Thank you for all your comments and support, it means a lot.
Today I went to the village to visit our little patient Soraya. We call her Soraya-jon. (When u add jon to the end of a name it is like “dear” or a term of endearment.) Marigold Fund has been helping this little 8-year-old pay for the removal of a tumor in her cervical spine area. Typically, this would leave her as a quadriplegic; however she has feeling from her breast line up, and has been working hard with exercise to use her hands. I have seen her hands go from being fists mostly, to today being able to blow bubbles on her own! Holding the bubbles in one hand, dipping the stick, and bringing it to her mouth. I have been treating her bedsores she got while in the hospital in Pakistan. Soraya gave me an afghan name of “Perry” which means like a fairy. Her family is poor but so kind and giving. Today they gave me a beautiful head scarf that they made; u can see it in the pic. Also there is a pic. of Soraya’s younger brother, he is so cute. Please pray for continued healing for this little girl. She wants to go back to school badly and seems very smart. So many women here are uneducated; it would be wonderful to see her grow in strength and knowledge.

Deaf School & Donkey Riding!!! Yee-haaa

I got to ride a donkey. I got to ride a donkey. donkey dance-da-da-da-dauh-uh-uh-uh-donkey. I had been telling our main translator I really wanted to ride a donkey and we just happened to be in this village where the bridge is that Michael helped build, and there were lots of lovely donkeys.

The next three pictures are from a Marigold Fund project that finished up this past fall. Some of you may recognize it as it is the bridge that Michael Greene came out here to work on. It is a very beautiful bridge that covers a river that rivels with some white water rivers I have been down.


The last two pictures are of the same bridge and overall project. This bridge is a 1 of the 4 sub-project of the overall Shelter for Life-Taloqan current project; the others are hygiene eduacation, 435 houses, 435 Latrines. 4 bridges in total are being constructed. All of the construction (houses, Latrines and Bridges) are being built by the families and villages that will be using them on a daily basis.

Sunday, July 1, 2007

Lving in Taloqan

Hey Everyone,
We have now been in Taloqan for 4 days now and it is going well. After settling into both ours and Shelter For Life's (SFL) newly construced room, we are starting to get into the swing of what we will be doing during our 2-month stent here. Carrie has been monitoring a hygiene program that is run by Care for Afghan Families (CAF) becuase they are the sub-contractors that SFL hired on to carry through the project. Yesterday I went out to a local village to look at the progress, and discuss what is going to happen, with 4 bridges that are being built. The current bridges consist of logs, mud and grass with mud filled bags on each side as supports. The new bridges will be concrete, entirely. These bridges are between 10-15' long and are generally 5' above the water.
Here are some pictures of our drive through the Hindukush moutain range, there is a more specific name however I dont know it and I much less know how to spell it.
talk to you later
-Josh

Drivng around Kabul

Hey Everyone,
Here are some pictures of Dan Terry, Carrie and I driving around Kabul.