POVERTY: Afghanistan: Morning Star

BARBARA COTTER: January 02, 2011

  Courtesy John Albaugh

In 2009, Morning Star:
• Served about 38,000 medical patients, including 19,000 under 5 years old and 1,000 women for maternal care
• Provided education to about 1,800 literacy and English students; 324 computer training students; 514 female literacy students and 250 girls at home-based schools
• Distributed $70,000 worth of seeds and provided agricultural training
• Had 106 students graduate from its Institute for Leadership Development
• Handed out food and blankets to 1,200 families displaced by fighting in southern Afghanistan, and provided more than 100,000 pounds of winter clothing, shoes, medical kits and educational supplies in rural areas.
Morning Star Development’s focus is on economic and community development in Afghanistan’s rural areas, where about 85 percent of the population lives. To address that broad agenda, Morning Star has built four community centers that serve about 50 villages each, launched a leadership training program, distributed food and clothing to thousands of impoverished Afghan citizens, helped with agricultural development and embarked on an “Elevating Women Initiative” to improve education and literacy for women.
Morning Star also operates four medical clinics that work to combat high infant and child mortality rates and stem the spread of infectious diseases, and helps with small-business development.
“We’re not just building buildings. We’re building people’s lives,” says Batchelder.
Helping the people of Afghanistan didn’t make Batchelder’s to-do list until 1997, when a friend who had lived in the country asked if he’d help do some humanitarian work there.
“I thought I was cruising toward an early retirement,” says Batchelder, a Vermont native who worked in land-use planning and natural resource management. “I didn’t come into this with a passion for Afghanistan.”
But during his trip, he visited a refugee camp for Afghanis who had fled to Pakistan, and was struck by the number of big families crammed into pup tents.
“As far as you could see, there was nothing but these tents, and that’s when something clicked for me,” he says.
He helped start one organization, but its focus turned more toward agricultural help. So in 2002, he founded Morning Star, which has an annual budget of about $1 million — about 90 percent of which goes to programming — and employs 153 people in Afghanistan and seven in Colorado Springs. It’s a faith-based organization, but there’s no evangelical work going on in a country where Islam is the predominant religion, he said.
“Here, and in other countries where evangelism is allowed by law, we might engage in evangelism,” Batchelder says. “However, in Afghanistan it is against the law to proselytize, and we all agree to obey the laws and respect the religion of Afghanistan. All our initiatives in Afghanistan are approved by the Afghan government; they are non-religious and we do not proselytize in Afghanistan.”
Adnan R. Khan wrote a story early last year for AOL News about the Afghan village of Jegdalek , where Morning Star operates a community center with a school, computer lab, medical clinic and recreational activities. Morning Star wasn’t aware that Khan was writing the story, and the nonprofit received only a passing mention, but he wrote about the results that it’s trying to achieve: buy-in from the Afghan people to better their lives, brighten their futures and control their destiny.
“Since the fall of the Taliban regime at the end of 2001, Jegdalek has been transformed from a desolate ruin left behind after the Soviet war into a thriving community...,” wrote Khan, who also quotes one of Jegdalek’s senior elders as saying that if the Taliban tries to take over their area, “the entire village will rise up against them.”
That’s what Batchelder wants to hear. Fundamentalists “don’t like what we do at all,” he said, but the nonprofit’s emphasis on community centers with medical clinics, educational facilities, computer labs and more fosters buy-in. And it helps to have a council made up of about half-dozen villagers to help run the show.
“Our strategy is to start by connecting with the community elders. If they invite us to come, we say ‘you provide the land,’” Batchelder said.
His hope is that enough of Afghanistan’s sizable population of people 20 years old and younger will get the educational and leadership opportunities they need to work for and sustain a better life. Already, he says, they’ve been exposed to other cultures because of the influx of diplomats and NATO and U.S. troops, and Morning Star is exposing them to what could be.
“That’s what’s really going on in Afghanistan,” Batchelder says. “There’s a whole new generation coming online; they want what we have to offer.”

To learn more about Morning Star, go to www.msdev.org.

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