Khaliqdad School Completed
This spring has seen the completion of the Khaliqdad School buildings. The school has up to 1500 children who are now able to sit inside for classes, where previously they were taught in large tents.
To complete the project £3500 needs to be raised to fit the classrooms with desks and chairs. If you would like to donate towards this, please click here.
90 Kindergarten Kids Graduate
In March over 90 children graduated from the ASET kindergarten. The teachers then went out into the local neighbourhood looking for new students, checking their ages and financial state to ensure that those from the poorest families were given the opportunity to join. The new children have now begun and are currently being introduced to the kindergarten rules and getting to know each other. We are happy to be starting another cycle of giving hope to these children and enabling them to see further than their own little world.
New Kindergarten opens in Turkmanabad
Turkmanabad is a district in Mazar e Sharif that is home to around 550 families, most of whom are of Turkmen ethnicity. There are narrow alleys instead of streets and the community is poor, with high rates of unemployment and no school for the local children to attend. The opening of a kindergarten in this area is a real blessing to the children and local community.
When the property for the kindergarten was first rented it was in a very poor state, but renovation works have been completed by local workers using local materials and the building has now opened.
The kindergarten will run three mornings a week for 35 of the poorest children in the community, who are aged between 3-6 years old. The curriculum is going to be consistent with the main ASET kindergarten curriculum and will include educational games, knowledge based exercises, learning about the world, literacy and mathematics with basic English included for the older children. There are currently three local teachers and an assistant and the hope is that more local women can be trained to become teachers in the future, enabling the running of the kindergarten to be transferred to the local community.
“I gave opium to my baby…”
In March a midwife from London travelled out to visit the team and to see the work ASET is doing; here is a small report from her trip.
‘’My baby didn’t breastfeed very often because I gave him opium which made him sleepy. That’s why I fell pregnant again so quickly.” This was a comment made by a woman in a self-help group which I visited during my trip to Afghanistan. Although I’d read about family-wide opium use, it was quite different hearing of it firsthand. As we sat drinking tea, the women in the group were discussing family planning, and the importance of breastfeeding frequently as a means of increasing the gap between subsequent children.
Afghanistan has some of the highest maternal and infant mortality rates in the world, and it was a privilege to see ASET’s Midwifery Consultant working patiently to improve education around pregnancy, birth and family planning as she negotiated the setting-up of similar groups for women to the one that I visited.
Help to raise £40,000 for a new kindergarten
ASET has recently been asked to build a kindergarten for the children of female teachers at one of the biggest girl’s schools in Mazar e Sharif.
At present many of the teachers do not turn up as they need to be at home looking after their own children. Building a kindergarten will provide the school with more female teachers, which will drive up the standards of education for the girls. This will prove vital in a country where the current literacy rate amongst women is somewhere between 9 – 18%. In order to achieve this we need to raise £40,000 for the kindergarten building.
If you would like to donate towards this project please click here.
Help to raise £25,000 for Well Digging Projects
We are proposing to launch another water project and to do this we need to raise £25,000.
Current statistics state that 1 Afghan child dies every 23 seconds as a result of inadequate water supplies and related diseases. The aim of the project is to contribute towards a decrease in the infant mortality rate and chronic malnutrition found amongst children in the areas that we serve by providing clean drinking water, as well as basic hygiene and sanitation and well maintenance training. Five wells will be dug and training programmes provided for five neighbourhoods, which will benefit over 1500 people. We believe it will make a dramatic impact in the area.
If you would like to donate towards this project please click here.