Church Helps Deliver Supplies to Afghanistan

From the Denver Post’s “YourHub.com”

Contributed by: Joe Howard on 5/3/2006

The New Hope Presbyterian Church Men’s Group in Castle Rock is making sure medical, educational and other supplies get to those in need in Afghanistan.

Four shipments have completed the process and been delivered to the recipients in Afghanistan. Shipment 5 was delivered to Peterson AFB on April 5 and is in the Air Force transportation system on its way to Afghanistan.

The major portion of the fifth New Hope Men’s Fellowship shipment to Afghanistan was medical equipment. Denverite Hassina Omar, an associate of KOA radio, spearheaded a drive to raise money for the buying of wheelchairs to be sent to Afghanistan for the children who can’t get around, let alone to school, unless someone carries them. Many lost limbs stepping on buried land mines left by the warring parties. Now, there will be 187 who do it on their own. Sun Medical, Inc. in Longmont stepped up and provided them at cost with some extras freely given. Friends and persons throughout Colorado contributed money for the project.

The wheelchairs and other gifts poured in. This shipment (number 5) finally weighed in at 13,802 pounds, was packed in 436 boxes and valued at $144,319. It consisted of humanitarian items -187 wheelchairs for children with limbs lost, blankets, quilts, diet supplements to help halt rampant diarrhea and toys as well as equipment for schools including seeds for survival gardens, school books (preschool to university-level reading), fabric and sewing equipment for vocational training, papers and pencils, computers, printers, as well as clothes and shoes for all ages – boys, girls, men and women.

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Thank You Letter from ADRA

2006 Trip Photos

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9News . Denver Family Helping Children in Afghanistan

Article and Interview by: Cheryl Preheim . July 7 2004

DENVER – Thousands of children have been seriously hurt in the violence in Afghanistan. Many children have lost their arms and legs in land mine explosions. A family in Denver is trying to help.

Khadija Omar, 74, and her daughter, Hassina, are raising money to buy wheelchairs for these children.

In June they delivered 70 of them to children in need. They are selling a book about the late Dr. Abdullah Omar, their husband and father. He was the minister of Public Health in Afghanistan. When the Russians invaded in the late 1970s he was taken political prisoner. The book is his memoir from his time in prison. It is $10.00 and all the proceeds go to the efforts to buy wheelchairs. If you are interested in buying a book or making donations you can send a check to:

Handicapped Children of Afghanistan

UMB Bank
707 Colorado Blvd.
Denver, CO 80206

Wall Street Journal Article

Day by Day – A roundup of good news from Afghanistan

by ARTHUR CHRENKOFF  . Monday, July 26, 2004

Afghans living in the West are likewise contributing to the reconstruction of their homeland.  Khadija Omar, 74, and her daughter, Hassina, of Denver, are meanwhile raising money to buy wheelchairs for thousands of Afghan children who have lost their limbs to land mines. In June they delivered 70 wheelchairs. .

Full Article Follows:

We are becoming hopeful day by day. We cannot develop our country, in which the fighting existed for 23 years, within two years. We had lots of problems in the past but they are being solved day by day.” So says Ghalib Shah Azizi, the head of Afghanistan’s Northern Chamber of Commerce.

If there is one place where good news is harder to come by than Iraq, it’s Afghanistan. For that we should partly blame our poor understanding of Afghan realities and our consequently unrealistic expectations. An isolated, poor, largely rural country with harsh landscapes and limited natural resources, Afghanistan has been for the past quarter century cursed with constant violence and oppression. Good news from Afghanistan will not in any foreseeable future mean mushrooming shopping malls and health clinics in every village. For the people who have suffered so much for so long, relative peace and absence of theocracy are a good start.

But, as is the case with reporting from Iraq, we shouldn’t let the media off the hook so easily, either. For all the fashionable talk about Iraq distracting the Bush Administration from the war on terror, it’s largely been the media that have ignored Afghanistan except for the occasional story about another skirmish with the Taliban remnants or the explosion in opium cultivation.

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A Note From the Children

To Khadija Omar from some Kabul locals…

2004 Afghanistan Trip

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