Afghan Orphanage Tries to Make Difference

K A B U L, Afghanistan, March 31, 2004 -- 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?"

Tragedy Yields First Orphanage

In 1995, Hakim was working as a translator at the United Nations' English Language Training Center in Kabul when civil war destroyed much of the city.

Many people were killed, and she and her husband began giving refuge to orphaned children, about 700 of them, in her family compound. The couple eventually started their own orphanage.

But when the U.N. program shut down and moved its headquarters to neighboring Pakistan later that year, Hakim moved to Southern California, where she stayed until the new Afghan government recruited her to help the country's children.

"I had a great life in America, that's true," she says, "and here I'm making almost nothing for a salary. But look at these children. They need everything."

Continued Need

Hakim is desperate for English teachers. She has drafted older orphans into teaching what they know to the younger ones.

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

Through the sheer force of her personality and her American connections, she has gotten help from the U.S. Army and various nongovernmental organizations.

A California-based charity, the Afghan Academy of Hope, is raising money to build a new library and dental clinic at the school.

Two years ago, the orphanage and this country had almost nothing. Now, through the untiring efforts of Soraya Hakim and others, they have just slightly more.

For more information or to get involved, please visit www.aaoh.org or contact Diana Haskins, the co-founder and president of Afghan Academy of Hope, at (805) 685 8634.