…that you can help with. For those of you who didn’t hear the news elsewhere [at Christian's Ghosts of Alexander, for example], I would like to do my bit to raise awareness for Jennifer McCarthy’s drive to raise funds for a village in Faryab province in the Chahar Wiloyat. She has decided to raise awareness and funds by living on an actual Afghanistan budget of $1/day for one month. The blog she started is basically her day-to-day diary of cooking, recipes, and how her new diet is intersecting with her work in the region. Her monetary goal, currently, is to raise $3000 to dig a 30-meter well and repair culverts lost to flooding. The water situation as it stands now requires women and children walking an hour with buckets and containers for water that still has to be boiled before it can be used.
Ms. McCarthy is a Canadian PhD student studying and living in Afghanistan, and I can’t think of a worthier cause. Her site has an easy to see link that makes it easy and painless to give a $10, $50, or $0.50, if you like. The economic crisis might be hitting us all hard, but I think $5 isn’t too much to ask. I am putting my wallet where my mouth is, of course, and also giving. With so much money given with so little oversight, when a ‘real’ project with an attainable, simple goal comes along, I think it behooves us to regard it as legitimate and do all we can.
And, in other news, Happy International Women’s Day! Good luck, Jennifer!
This post was written by...
Michael Hancock-Parmer – author of 158 posts on Registan.net.
Michael earned an MA in Central Eurasian Studies in 2011 and remains a student at Indiana University pursuing a dual PhD in Russian History and Central Eurasian Studies. He served 6 months in the Peace Corps in Uzbekistan in 2005. After the events in Andijan and the subsequent closure of the program, he served 2 years in southern Kazakhstan, returning to the Midwest in 2007. His general area of interest is on post-Timur Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, centered on the Syr Darya river valley.
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