About The Healthy Afghan Community Programs

The Healthy Afghan Community program conducts literacy classes for women in Bamyan Province in central Afghanistan.

Rural families in Afghanistan are attempting to recover from decades of war with sparse help from the outside. Few families have escaped trauma, death, or tragedy as a result of the war, drought, and degradation of their environment or dissolution of their communities.

Today, six years after the fall of the Taliban, people in rural areas still have barely passable roads, little infrastructure and an exhausted populace. Traditional agricultural knowledge was lost when the populace fled to Iran or Pakistan. Now most farmer’s grow basic crops such as wheat, selling the entire crop in the large cities and buying expensive imported vegetables fruit, cloth, tools, household items stagnating the economic recovery and insuring a subsistence level of living.

Poor communities recovering from the war have a disproportionate number of war victims, developmentally disabled, widow’s and orphans to try to take care of with very little in the way of resources. Traditionally Afghan’s have a strong family safety net for vulnerable family members but this tradition has been overwhelmed by the devastation of the war creating intolerable conditions for vulnerable people within the Afghan family structure.

Family violence is endemic, exploitation of widows and their children for financial gain, and neglect and abuse of the disabled and aged is prevalent. Subjugation of women and children is driven by poverty as much as religious or cultural traditions.

Marnie Gustavson, a friend to Afghan women and children, talks with women villagers in Jawzareen (the "Village of Golden Oats").

PARSA has worked in rural communities for the last eight years with a three-year residence in Panjab in southern Bamyan. We have learned over the years that large amounts of money are not the solution to this problem in these rural areas. In fact, unschooled donors can further destabilize communities and create dependency through unskilled development.

We work on the premise that small scale personalized development support; village-by-village is the best way to assist the Afghans as they recover their communities and economies. Our Healthy Afghan Community programs provide measured support and target the most vulnerable for support taking economic pressure off of the village community but holding the leaders of the village to account for providing support to their vulnerable people, primarily women.