The Garden of Flowers is thriving, with 20 young children coming daily to their cozy Montessori school and enjoying a hearty lunch to fortify them against the most brutally cold winter in Afghanistan in ten years.
Many are not so lucky. All throughout the city of Kabul, completely destitute families have been trying to simply survive in successive days and nights of deadly cold.
In response, MEPO sent GoF staffers Hedayat and Nik Mohammad out to survey neighborhoods and find the neediest families they could. They identified 18 families immediately, about 100 adults and children, with no resources and living in inhuman conditions.
Usually such families live in a single concrete room with thin carpets on the floors, often with only plastic sheets covering the windows. An iron stove often sits in the middle of the room for heat, but without money to buy the expensive wood, families collect trash and burn the plastic in their stove. Families sit with the fumes, having to trade toxins for heat.
Some families did not even have stoves, though. They huddled numbly under blankets, on the floor. 
It can be hard for us to even imagine this kind of life. But we must. We must imagine never feeling warm, never feeling any sense of relief and comfort when walking inside from the cold. We must imagine a never-ending sensation of cold, 24 hours a day.
Fahim and Nik Mohammad secured a month’s worth of food and wood for each family (about $200 each). In doing this work, Nik Mohammad and Fahim may very possibly have saved lives: last week over 150 people froze to death in Afghanistan, and winter is not over. Nik Mohammad’s life-saving work will continue.
Thank you to all of you who donated to Lantern Project #433, which is designated for food aid and is now also being used for heat aid: for life.
All of the families pictured here have received support to get them through the worst of the winter. Pictures of them receiving food and wood can be found in pictures farther below… [Please note that there are few pictures of women in the photos because of their wish to not be photographed. But they were present.]
Below, people receiving food and wood …
