Trick or Treat

You can’t help but form bonds with kids you meet around here. My predecessors and my staff know of these local street merchant kids. " I wish I could"…(fill in the blank)…….they would say, but this is their world and they are doing what their families have asked them to do.  Over here, their culture is not about the individual, but rather about family, clan, tribe and maybe somewhere further down, national identity.  Kids toil for the betterment of the family, regardless of circumstances.  Most westerners would not think twice about buying the little girl a new pair of shoes or a jacket for the boy, only to find out later these have been sold. For us to intervene directly into a child’s life is to bypass the family.  This is unacceptable.  My contractor staff, who live just off Camp, now give them Redbulls and snacks when they commute back and forth to their residence halls. Anything else and the handlers take it away.  Halloween came with mountains of candy in the care packages for us.  So we packed them into bags and tasked them with distributing them to the kids.  Afghans don’t have or even understand Halloween, but kids know candy.  They were happy and so were we.