This year, The Khaled Hosseini Foundation is pleased to announce that our annual fundraising campaign will focus on providing emergency food relief programs for women and children in Afghanistan.
According to the OCHA*, "3.2 million children under 5 years old and 840,000 pregnant and lactating women are now suffering from acute malnutrition in Afghanistan." These numbers illustrate how grave the hunger crisis is in Afghanistan, making the focus of our appeal an absolute necessity.
Our 2024 Campaign:
In my last letter to you, I wrote to you about hope, both its fragility and strength. This year I find myself thinking about perseverance – the intangible strength that Afghan women find within that allows them to face each day with thoughts of how they will find a way to make it work. The “it” being sourcing enough food to feed their children for one more day, finding desperately needed medical care for an infant, or simply surviving their own malnutrition and hunger.
Afghan women possess a strength and will to survive that takes my breath away and I find myself writing and thinking, if they, who are suffering so much, can find a way to greet each new day with the will to create a better future for their families, than surely, we can find a way to help support them in their efforts.
Today, more than 23 million Afghans, a quarter of whom are women and more than half of whom are children, are in desperate need of humanitarian assistance. Nearly 16 million (28% of the population) face acute food insecurity. Imagine if one in four children in our communities were at risk of starvation; I have no doubt we would be moved to help.
The nonprofits we support organize and provide that kind of help, and do so with extraordinary compassion and efficiency. They make it easy for us to act and ensure that each of our contributions makes a difference.
They also make visible the invisible by sharing stories with us of those they serve. Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), for example, operates an inpatient therapeutic feeding center in Herat as well as at other clinics where they are providing food aid and healthcare services.
Every day, they save the lives of children like Sohaib, a six-month-old baby who arrived, as so many children do, with both malnutrition and a preventable childhood disease. MSF shared that Sohaib and his mother travelled four hours to seek care. They are among the lucky, having reached the hospital before it was too late.
Another mother, speaking to MSF about her infant son, said “when he was born, he was healthy but I didn’t have breastmilk so we started infant formula to feed him, but that made him sick.” This mother, like so many, is barely able to sustain herself, yet she managed to overcome countless obstacles to finding care for her child.
Love enables Afghan women to sustain their strength and hope. They move mountains to care for their precious children and sacrifice everything to protect them.
They exemplify everything I most admire in Afghan women – the imagination to believe a better future is possible and the will to create that future, no matter the odds against them.
Each year at this time, you and I come together to do what we can to help them. To show them they are not forgotten. To assure them they are seen and that we share their dreams for their children’s healthy futures.
This year, our goal is to raise $50,000 for:
· Emergency food relief programs and in-patient therapeutic feeding centers
· Mobile health and nutrition teams
· Stipends that enable families to purchase food and medicine
I thank you, with all my heart, for joining me today with a gift of any size. I hope that contributing as generously as you can fills you with the joy that comes from standing with others who translate their care into action.
Together we can deliver food, health and hope for the holidays.
Khaled Hosseini
P.S. For your convenience, you can give online at www.khaledhosseinifoundation.org or send a check to The Khaled Hosseini Foundation, 5655 Silver Creek Valley Road, #203, San Jose, CA 95138. Your gift is tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law and after third party fees, 100% of your donation will go directly to our grantees providing healthcare to women and children in Afghanistan.
Photo Credits: Photos 1 and 2 credit: Herat, Afghanistan 2024. Copyright Mahab Azizi
* United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA)
© The Khaled Hosseini Foundation, www.khaledhosseinifoundation.org, info@khaledhosseinifoundation.org
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