Afghanistan on my mind and in my deeds : Paula Claycomb

Partly through personal interest and partly through coincidence, I spent all of 2023 focused on Afghanistan. Having served with the UNICEF Afghanistan Country Office in 1998 and 1999, under Louis-Georges Arsenault, the country is close to my heart. I remain in touch with several colleagues from those days, including Niloufar Pourzand, Ellen van Kalmthout, Anoja Wijeysekera,Hafiza Rasouli, Suraya Dalil and Rafi Mohammad.

The first effort was working with a small group of Taoseños on a fundraising effort for the families of Afghans who served with the US military during its 20-year war in Afghanistan. A friend in Taos served in the US military, as a civilian, charged with mapping the power structures in several villages in Kandahar province. Like his military counterparts, he relied on Afghan interpreters in both Dari and Pashto. He stayed in touch with several interpreters, some of whom made it to the US prior to its chaotic departure from Afghanistan in August 2021.

Afghans who did not make it out during that tumultuous period remained behind and at great risk to arrest, detention and possible beatings and torture.

I joined with eight residents who were horrified by the US government’s shoddy implementation of the special immigrant visa programme, which has been in place since 2009. We identified personal connections to four Afghans linked to the US government who had come to the US but had to leave close family members behind. These three men and one woman now live in California and New Mexico. They have been working two and three jobs to send money to their families.

One of the interpreters is the son of UNICEF national staff member Hafiza Rasouli. Thanks to efforts by her son and several of us from the period when the ACO was based in Islamabad, Hafiza and her husband were able to leave Kabul early this year. They now live in California with their son and his family. The Taos group supported their remaining daughter in Kabul, who has a son with health issues.

Another family of 23 members (several adult siblings of the interpreter and their children) made their way to Pakistan at the beginning of 2023 but have been living in Karachi “under the radar screen”. Like millions of other Afghans in the global diaspora, the families have applied for visas to the US but are in limbo as the bureaucratic wheels grind slowly onward.

The four photos below show the “Karachi” family during an evening outing to a local park. While most of the money has been used for rent and medical expenses, they treated the children to an evening of fun.



These are 13 of the 15 children in one family.


We raised enough money to send a set amount to each family group for six months, based on the number of individuals in each group. I provided updates to all the donors, who gave between $50 and $250 each. When that initial chunk of money ran out, we were going to end the financial support, having failed to build sustainability into the lives of the Afghans living in the US.

However, thanks to a few individuals who have become personally attached to the families, we have managed to keep funding flowing to two families. One is a new one – one Afghan interpreter has done well enough in the US to be able to support his family and was sending our money (unbeknownst to us for 3 months) to a fellow Afghan who served as a de-miner and was injured in a mine blast.

Nasir is with his five children.

(We have permission to use the photos and first names.)

Support to these families is a drop in the ocean of Afghans whose lives this winter will be even more precarious than they already are.

The second way I have been involved in Afghanistan was as team lead on a contract that Rain Barrel Communications had with the Country Office’s polio programme. You may be familiar with Rain Barrel, as Robert Cohen was one of its two co-founders 15 years ago. In December 2022, Rain Barrel submitted its proposal to the ACO despite misgivings around the dilemma of whether or not to support the Taliban regime in any way at all. I would welcome your thoughts on that thorny issue.

We won the contract and in April, began a Needs Assessment for a unified package to train facilitators in the 8,000+ Immunisation Communication Network. The Needs Assessment clarified what information and knowledge would be most useful to frontline workers who have rarely been exposed to anything other than knocking on doors to discuss with caregivers about vaccination. We also wanted to know what theories about behaviour and group change might be most appropriate for the Afghan context, using the new Social and Behaviour Change approach currently being used by UNICEF.

The team (with me working remotely and three individuals, all men, working on the ground) developed a 5-day Training of Trainers package, including sessions on change theory, community engagement, interpersonal communication, facilitation skills and, of course, the polio virus and vaccines. Also included were quotes from the Koran about children’s health.

We provided the first course in Kabul in September, with over 40 participants. Of those, 20 were selected as master trainers.


They developed two-day workshops that were organized in October, one on community influencers that was delivered in Kandahar and the other on social mobilisers that was delivered in Jalalabad.

The health sector is the only sector in which women can work. Our impressions are that women involved in the polio programme, at least, are very courageous. Today’s highly restrictive regime is even harsher than it was during the first Taliban regime, from 1996 to 2001, despite their rhetoric to the contrary. The Taliban presence is everywhere and felt by everyone, including national staff and international staff alike.

The final package, accepted by the ACO on 27 December, consists of session-by-session PowerPoint presentations, manuals, handouts and worksheets for all three workshops and each piece in Dari, Pashto and English. It comprises some 2,000 pages, the largest package any of us can recall having worked on. All materials can be adapted to local conditions, with core content remaining similar across different settings. UNICEF and its partners now have an integrated training package that we hope will contribute to polio eradication in the coming years.

For the many of you who served in Afghanistan, you will no doubt appreciate the challenges we faced. These include everything from security issues to competing priorities on the ground to the unfortunate collapse of the banking system and equally disastrous sanctions imposed by the US, both of which greatly complicated payment to our local partner.

I welcome any thoughts you may have for supporting Afghans both inside and outside their country – including, of course, donating to UNICEF. With the terrible assault on Palestinians, the relentless war in Ukraine and over 40 other humanitarian situations around our precious and fragile planet, I have to keep telling my 71-year-old self that I cannot “save the world” the way I once thought I could and to focus where my interests seem to lie.

Paula Claycomb