"The scale of what is happening here is difficult to put into words."

A few weeks ago, in Kandahar city in the south of Afghanistan, I met with a group of boys around the age of 12, who are supported by Save the Children’s child protection work. In our child friendly space, for a few hours a day, they are in a safe place, they are heard, they learn, and they can play. But their worries do not leave them.

That day, they told me about how their parents can’t afford to send them to school anymore. Instead, they have had to start working, in factories or collecting rubbish off the street in the 40 degrees Celsius heat. One young boy told us he could make 300Afs a day to help support his family -- that’s around £2 for 12 hours of hard, physical labour.

I asked the boys what they thought of when they woke up in the morning. One of the younger, quieter boys, Aziz,* spoke up.

Every day Aziz sees his father dying

Aziz looked at the floor as he started to tell his story, picking at a thread on the rug. Aziz had three younger brothers. His mother had gotten some casual work as a cleaner, but still wasn’t making enough money to feed all four of her boys. Aziz told me his father was very sick, and that his heart wasn’t working – his dad had to stay in bed. That there was no hospital they could take him too. Aziz said every day he wakes up and sees his father dying.

After ten years of working in humanitarian aid, you learn how to receive and hold pain such as this, and while your heart will always break when you witness a child carrying so much grief, you separate yourself from what you’re seeing so you can focus on the work you must do. But on that day, I couldn’t do that.

After ten years working in humanitarian aid, you learn how to receive and hold pain such as this but on that day, I couldn’t do that.

I know what it’s like to feel like you’re losing your father. Last year, my dad was diagnosed with stage III bone marrow cancer. Since his diagnosis, it has been a constant stream of tests, doctors, drugs and hospitals across London. Though my dad was getting sicker each day, he was receiving treatment and being looked after. For children in Afghanistan, that is not the case. They are forced to carry this burden themselves and watch, helpless, as they themselves, and so many around them, become sick and are unable to access healthcare. When we left the boys that day, my heart shattered.

This is why the work of Save the Children and other DEC charities in Afghanistan is so crucial. Funds from the DEC appeal enabled Save the Children to establish four additional Mobile Health Teams (MHTs) in the east of Afghanistan in Nangarhar, Kunar and Laghman.

For every child we can support and protect there are thousands more we haven’t yet reached.

With almost ten million children going hungry every day, our MHTs travel to the most remote parts of those provinces where they screen and support hundreds of malnourished children and mothers. In the places where our MHTs operate there are no other healthcare facilities available. Often the nearest hospital is a five-hour drive.

We have also reached over 70,000 adults and children with cash assistance. The families identified to receive this support were extremely vulnerable which means they had no access to cash to meet basic needs including food, water or rent. For these people, the cash we have provided is often the difference between life and death, the difference between them being able to go to a hospital or staying at home as their conditions worsens.

My father is the reason I've been in Afghanistan

After that day in Kandahar two weeks ago, it was my dad that I called, upset. We spoke about the boys and families I had met in Afghanistan, and how different my dad’s treatment had been – how privileged we were. We talked almost every day like this. I remember one day he had calculated the monthly cost of his medication; it was almost £50,000. On this particular day, he simply told me he was proud of the work I was doing and asked me what he could do.

We lost my darling dad on June 10th. By the time I made it home from Kabul, he had been placed on kidney dialysis, he had been intubated, his lungs kept breathing by a ventilator, injected adrenalin was keeping his heart beating and painkillers and sedatives were keeping him free from pain and unconscious. At 6:15pm, when his heart stopped, he was in no pain, at peace, surrounded by his children and, my mum, his wife of almost 50 years.

There was no one in my life that was more supportive of the work I had chosen to do than my dad. He was the reason I’ve been in Afghanistan for the last 18 months and he’s the reason I’m writing about this now. 

A child losing a parent is a child losing their parent no matter where they’re from or who they are. There is no justifiable reason on this earth why I should be able to take comfort in the fact that we were able to do everything we could to keep our dad with us, that I got a whole year more of time with him, while an 11 year old boy across the world like Aziz wakes up every day to witness his dad sick and getting weaker, with no hope of help.