Helping Afghanistan - Jake Parent

For the past year and some months I have been the Public Relations Officer for Omeid International, a non-profit working to open an orphanage, school, and clinic in Kabul, Afghanistan. I get asked all the time why I want to help people in Afghanistan. Why not help Americans or people anywhere else in the world for that matter? The simple truth is that when I think of all the hardship the people of Afghanistan have been put through. All the suffering and pain that goes beyond just the physical, to the point of destroying a people’s ability to have an identity. When I think of that, I can’t help but wonder how, in a world so enlightened by “progress” and given to believing so thoroughly in its own perfection, do more people not see exactly why it is I feel so drawn to this tiny country on the other side of the world.

If we slow down our lives and think about the structure of the world, we are able to begin to see how each of us, both as individuals and as societies, are interwoven together. In a very real way, to help any person, is to help yourself because if you are able to raise someone up to a level of self sustainability, you don’t have to worry about what they are going to have to do to you in order to survive. You won’t have to look over your shoulder wondering if they are going to come up and stab you in the back so that they can eat.

This world is saturated with the notion that somehow our individual happiness is mutually exclusive to that of others. We think that “if you are happy then I somehow can’t be, and if I am happy, you can’t be”. What this leads to is a philosophy that says, “In order for me to be happy, I have to make you unhappy.” This is a highly shortsighted, dangerous, and, when contemplated for any length of time, an obviously incorrect way of going about our relationships in such an interconnected world. In fact, this approach is antithetical to true happiness because the more people are oppressed, taken from, and otherwise demoralized, the more desperate they will become and, thus, the more dangerous as well. If we want our own lives to be happy, we must begin to value the quality of our connections to the people around us, whether they be next door or on the other side of the world, as much as we do the material things which currently stand as the measure of our worth.

So, more than anything, I am helping the people of Afghanistan because I see such work not only as a means of doing good but as a symbol of an effort towards the humanist empathy which is so lacking in this world; a void standing as probably the greatest roadblock in our collective quest for a peaceful existence. It is my way of building bridges that show, despite the vast many differences we have, that the common connectivity we share as human beings is all the foundation we need to live together. I truly believe that human beings are, by nature, benevolent but hard headed creatures and we must learn our lessons the hard way sometimes for them to stick and be implemented into fundamental change. In my mind, if we can do it in Afghanistan, we can do it anywhere.


Learn more about Omeid International:
On Facebook: http://apps.facebook.com/causes/25125/17435373?m=6d54c0aa
On the Web: http://www.omeid.org