PARSA's trip to Bamyan and Jawzjareen..

This is our dining room in our offices and residence in Bamyan. Our PARSA team was lucky enough to be joined by Camilla Barry, her son Nicholas (reading) and photojournalist Ginna Fleming. Camilla is a San Francisco based science teacher that routinely travels to Afghanistan to teach teachers scientific inquiry and working with simple experiments she teaches people to think. She and Nicholas have been working on PARSA projects for the last two weeks and we are very appreciative of all they have done. Ginna is the genius behind the pictures shown here and generously is letting us use them. Cheryl Campbell, a physiotherapist from New Zealand, has been visiting for two months helping in our physiotherapy clinic. She will work with Yasin to formulate a project for developing physiotherapists in Bamyan as there are no physiotherapy services currently.

Thank you to our Northwest group of teachers who are sponsoring this project!!!!!

Program Update for the Jawzareen Funding Team;
Yasin, PARSA national director ,traveled to Bamyan last week to begin the process of setting up the school. We begin the process with one of our senior staff members meeting with the village “shura” or elders. They recommended villagers to be hired by PARSA to teach the literacy courses and Early Childhood Development Courses. Yasin took up testing materials for the teachers so we can select appropriately. Many of the candidates are quite young and have been schooled in Pakistan. We have an excellent candidate for the literacy course for women.
The village elders selected a home to start the literacy courses in for the women. We will be using that until summer when we can negotiate with the villagers for land that will be donated to the project and then we will work with them to build a two room school house in a central location. We are being careful to include everyone interested to insure that the villagers develop “ownership” of the project and contribute as much as they can to the process.
Next Steps:
In this next month I will be traveling to Jawzareen with our teacher trainer, Naheed and our economic director, Palwasha to hire and train the teachers and to set up our economic program. We will select 28 women to be in our program and over 60 children in two locations for our Early Childhood Program. Classes will start as soon as we hire the teachers and distribute the school supplies.
We already have some women quilting for us, and doing a great job but we will be taking up a number of projects for the women in the program to work on as a start to the economic component.

May/June we will have land donated and begin work on our school and women’s Garden.