Afghan Orphanage Tries to Make Difference

K A B U L, Afghanistan, March 31 -- Soraya Hakim walks through Kabul's central orphanage faster than most people jog.

In a country where years of war and oppression have taken a toll on the population's work ethic, she is a welcome relief.

She checks on the kitchen staff sweating over giant vats of soup, tours the showers where the water long ago stopped flowing, and gently pulls two young boys into her arms like the mother they no longer have.

"These are the school's leaders," she says in English. "They are Afghanistan's future."

Last year, Hakim left her comfortable life in California to take charge of Afghanistan's 2 million orphans, and she is appalled by what's she's found.

Nearly two years after the fall of the Taliban, the conditions at Kabul's main orphanage, the Wafia Education and Training Center for Orphans, remain almost medieval.

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.

Hakim came back to the country where she was born because of what she saw on Sept. 11, 2001 — Muslims who had become terrorists.

"Who are those terrorists? They were taught in an institution like this in Pakistan or Afghanistan or in Saudi Arabia. So the whole world is suffering from these groups. This is something I want to stop here," she says.

Nearly every day, more children arrive at the orphanage, sometimes brought in by their own mothers or fathers who no longer have enough money to feed them.

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.

There are more than 1,000 orphans in a place designed to hold 300.

"We just don't have enough room," Hakim said, "but what can we do? Turn them back?"