Photo: Dallas Kilponen
SYDNEY MORNING HERALD SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 20
A letter from a doctor in a refugee camp inspired an Afghan woman to start a charity, writes Erin O'Dwyer.
A 12-year-old Afghan boy with a humpback and dressed in the bottle-green uniform of Marsden High answers the door of Mahboba Rawi's housing commission unit in Sydney's western suburbs. In Ahmed's shining eyes is the spirit of a wise old man. He moves like one, too. He lets me in, then eases his broken body back on to the carpeted living room floor where he is pressing stamps onto envelopes.
"He had tuberculosis when he was a baby," says Rawi, emerging from the garage-cum-office that is the headquarters to her charity, Mahboba's Promise. "He's one of my orphan children but he's part of my family right now.
"He even helps me with the mail-outs. The doctors want to watch him to see that the TB will go off his bones. He might stay for another couple of months - then he will go home."
What awaits Ahmed is a country racked by three generations of war. Afghanistan has among the highest numbers of widows and orphans in the world, and UNICEF estimates that more than 100,000 women and children have been displaced by conflict and drought.
"You go four steps in the Afghanistan markets and you see 10 or 15 or 20 children begging," says Rawi.
"You see children selling plastic bags and chewing gum or washing cars with their tiny, tiny hands."
Infrastructure such as schools and hospitals has been destroyed and 22 million Afghanis - 70 per cent of the country - live in poverty. Half the population is under 15 and one in two children under five are stunted.
Few politicians talk about the war on terrorism any more. It is a tainted term, and one that will most likely leave the lexicon with the US President, George Bush.
In Australia the Rudd Government made good its promise to withdraw troops from Iraq. Indeed Rawi became Kevin Rudd's biggest fan when she met him as a delegate to the 2020 summit. Yet she is concerned that the community believes the issue is done and dusted, that the story has fallen off the front page.
"There were 90 civilians killed in Kabul last month and 60 of them were children," she says of a story that made page 13 of this newspaper. "We know it's more but we don't know how many. There is so much happening that people don't know about."
Rawi arrived in Australia from a refugee camp in Pakistan 26 years ago. She was 14 and in high school when Russian tanks rolled into her native Kabul. She spent 20 days hiding under houses before she fled Afghanistan with her uncle. "I walked from my country to Pakistan by foot," she says. "My family stayed in Kabul because we couldn't afford for all of us to go. There were 40 other Afghan families. So many people didn't make it."
During that journey and in the refugee camps, Rawi saw death and despair in every hideous guise. But it was the death of her seven-year-old son Arash - drowned with six friends and family members at the Kiama blowhole in 1992 - that touched her most profoundly.
None of the people killed at Kiama - including Arash - could swim. She fought her devastation by keeping busy. She enrolled in TAFE and completed her HSC. She studied welfare, then began teaching English at a migrant centre in Parramatta.
She organised swimming lessons for the women, with funding from Parramatta City Council. She was turning lemons into lemonade.
Rawi does not like to talk about Arash, although a photo of him hangs above her desk. She also moves quickly over her humble beginnings as a charity worker.
It was a letter written by a female doctor in Peshawar and sent to an Australian friend that was the catalyst for the charity. The doctor talked of starvation in the camps and the impossibility of treating the children.
Rawi read the letter to her class of immigrant women. They collected $120 on the spot and sent it to the doctor. A year later Rawi had built an orphanage in Peshawar, with the help of the doctor and her uncle.
"I started with 25 orphans and I feed them," Rawi says. "Then I said: 'What kind of future I give them without education?' So I built one school and, 10 years passed, about 800 children have graduated from year 12 there."
Mahboba's Promise now has 90 projects in Pakistan and Afghanistan. She estimates she has helped 4000 orphans and hundreds of young widows. There are orphanages and community centres in Kabul, the remote Panjshir Valley and in Jaghori, in Ghazni province, where literacy rates for women are 10 per cent - among the highest in the country.
Her uncle Haji Fazal Ahmad, now 65 and living in Kabul, runs one orphanage with 45 children. The rest are staffed by widows and the orphaned children who grew up in them.
"At first I used to worry about where the money would go," says Rawi, 42, who travels to Afghanistan once a year.
"But I know how much is a kilo of potatoes so it's really hard for people to do wrong by me. When I was there last time the boy I was with went to 20 different places looking for the best and cheapest grapes. I said: 'Come on, just buy something.' "
In its first year, Mahboba's Promise raised $2000. Then in 2001, ABC-TV's 7.30 Report ran a story on it. Money poured in and hundreds of Australian women pledged their support. The following year Rawi took some of those women, and a television crew, to Afghanistan with her. The journey aired on Australian Story.
"She just rattled a tin at functions until then," says the ABC journalist Deb Masters, who produced the Australian Story episode and the 7.30 Report story. "She's passionate and has a clear vision and commitment. She's a real ambassador and that resonates with people."
Rawi estimates she has raised more than $1 million over 10 years. She expects to raise $600,000 this year. Still, tough economic times have been hard on charities and Mahboba's Promise is no exception.
Most donations come from garage sales organised by a band of 50-odd supporters. Those who can afford it give $50 a month. It is five times what a woman earns begging, and enough to buy flour, rice, oil, sugar and tea, but not enough for them to afford somewhere to live.
Rawi recently had a call from a young mother of four. Her husband had died and she was eight months pregnant. "She said, 'I have nowhere to live,' " Rawi says. "I didn't have a room but you can't say no. If you do you can't go to sleep."
So Rawi keeps rattling the tin.
She works seven days a week and is preparing for the winter appeal. She wants people to know that 100,000 children will die this northern winter from malnutrition, preventable diseases and freezing to death, and does not care how often she has to say it.
"I go to schools, I go to churches," she says. "If there is five people I go; if there is 2000 or 3000 I go. I don't care how bad I speak or how professional I am or not. I just have these 4000 children calling me mother.
"When you have so many children, you'll do anything for them."
http://www.mahbobaspromise.org
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