by: Hayley Smith, LHI Founder/Director
For every distribution of aid that leaves our warehouse, we get a report and distribution photos from our partner orgs. You can imagine our surprise when we came upon the image above while looking through the latest batch from our partner org in Afghanistan. Our jaws dropped to the floor.
We were totally convinced that the picture had been taken by a professional photographer, and we wanted to know more about the story behind it.
As it turns out, this photo is actually a quick snapshot, like the other photos in the batch (see more of them below). But this particular image really stood out to us—you can really feel the connection between the person taking the photo and the men waiting for aid distribution to start. It should come as no surprise that the photographer is not an outsider, but also from Afghanistan.
This particular camp hosts internally-displaced persons in the Kandahar province of Afghanistan. They’ve been forced to flee Taliban-led violence and its soul-crushing laws preventing any sort of upward mobility and education.
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In this region, like in many of the poorest countries around the world, COVID-19 has brought with it widespread economic devastation. The material needs of families living in such extremely vulnerable circumstances is more substantial than ever. Then there's the health risks associated with living in overcrowded conditions during a pandemic.
Afghanistan has been sent enough COVID-19 vaccination doses to innoculate just above 1% of its population of 38 million people. Due to current supply delays, the UN fears that the country won’t get any additional doses until 2022 at the earliest. And with the highly-contagious Indian variant making its way west to Afghanistan and other poverty-stricken countries, refugees and internally-displaced people there are more vulnerable than ever.
‘Vaccine inequality’ is alive and well, and while LHI can’t send vaccines to Afghanistan, we can most definitely provide hygiene supplies and other material aid to help meet the current needs of refugee and internally-displaced families there.
You can help us get much needed aid supplies to refugee families in Afghanistan and around the world by supporting our We Keep Going campaign. Click on the the button below to learn more.