Posted on 06/27/2003 9:30:37 AM PDT by knighthawk
Mahboba Rawi has done her maths. She reckons the $4000 she takes to Afghanistan today will feed, clothe and educate 50 children and their widowed mothers for two months.
So she will take to the streets of Kabul, where the war-widowed mothers send children as young as three to work, and try to get the children to go to school.
Ms Rawi will go with the children to the mothers, to explain her plan: " 'We will give you money so your child will not have to work - if the child goes to school. When the school principal signs a report card, we will give the money.' "
Speaking in her Sydney home before her departure, Ms Rawi said: "Four thousand Australian dollars go a long way in Afghanistan. After two months I believe I can find Australian sponsors to keep the children at school."
The money comes from the annual award of the Jessie Street Trust, set up in memory of the Australian human rights campaigner.
It was presented to Ms Rawi's fund-raising organisation, Mahboba's Promise, at a luncheon where the Jesuit lawyer Frank Brennan said: "We need to discern new paths to peace, honouring the ancient humane principle that the child on the Baghdad school bus and the woman in the Nauru detention centre be accorded the same dignity and place in the balance of events as the child on the Rose Bay school bus and the woman in the Parramatta shopping centre."
Ms Rawi fled Afghanistan 20 years ago after leading a student protest against the Russian invasion. She lived in a refugee camp in Pakistan for two years before migrating to Australia, where her first job was cleaning toilets.
Five years ago she read a letter from a Pakistani doctor seeking help for the refugees. She began Mahboba's Promise by selling all her jewellery, crafted bedcovers and other belongings, then approaching Sydney's Afghan community and finally the general public.
The non-profit organisation now funds two schools for refugees, a widow's support scheme and a chocolate factory in Peshawar, Pakistan; a school teaching, literacy, English and computer skills to young girls in Jalalabad; and a women's employment training centre and refuge in Kabul.
The latest initiatives are a girls' school and a women's medical centre in the Panjshir Valley, north of Kabul. And the child labourers of Kabul, who Ms Rawi will call the Jessie Street Children.
There are up to 3 million war widows in Afghanistan, Ms Rawi said. Her organisation helps 4000 women and children. An uncle, Haji Fazal Ahmad, runs Mahboba's Promise in the country.
"Education is the key to Afghanistan's future," she said. "We have to switch minds from war to education."
Mahboba@mahbobaspromise.org.au
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