2009.07 - Remembering a Call to Prayer

Imbert Matthee.
Executive Director, Clear Path International

Remembering a Call to Prayer

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Imbert Matthee

KABUL, Afghanistan — There it was. Just as I entered the civilian post-op ward at Kabul’s military hospital where I greeted and photographed a room full of landmine accident survivors, it came back to me: The long mournful Call to Prayer from my Subud brother Salahin Thom.

“Allahu Akbar.”

It was at Menucha, the kedjiwan retreat in Oregon. It was fall and right after 9/11. The bombing of Afghanistan had just begun and Salahin led us in a heartfelt, almost tormented chant of mercy for Afghans enduring yet another war on their soil. It was deeply moving.

Barely a year earlier, a small group of us had started Clear Path International to help survivors of unexploded bomb accidents in Vietnam. We had our hands full. Yet in that moment when Salahin’s voice awoke a profound sense of compassion, I prayed and vowed to find a way to help.

Now I was in Kabul, more than seven years later, checking up on Clear Path’s biggest survivor assistance program in our portfolio of five countries. Against the odds of the post-9-11 recession, we had grown to an international organization with a $2 million annual budget, 25 employees (mostly overseas) and nearly 10,000 beneficiaries under our care.

Our newest program is in Afghanistan. Prayers were answered.

Zab from Afghanistan

I looked around the hospital room. The surgeon taking us on a tour explained that six out of the eight recovering amputees I saw were landmine accident survivors. They come into hospitals around the country at the rate of 60 per month.

I met Zab Mohammed. He was 18. Just 25 days before I greeted him, he had lost his left leg above the knee to a landmine explosion in his native Nangaher Province. His eyes were haunted. His body was still trying to figure out what hit it. His mind was trying to figure out what he would do with the rest of his life. His spirit seemed in turmoil behind his tragic gaze.

At Clear Path, our goal is to accompany landmine accident survivors like Zab on their road to recovery. What we do for him in Afghanistan we do for thousands of war victims in Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Burma with the generous support from individual donors, foundations, service clubs, relief organizations and the U.S. government.

First Zab will go to the Kabul Orthopedic Organization located on the hospital’s grounds. There he will get an above-the-knee prosthesis and learn to walk with it. The clinic, which receives most of its funding from Clear Path through a subcontract with the U.S. Department of State, served 6,000 landmine accident survivors and persons with disabilities last year. Its aim is to restore its patients’ physical mobility.

Then, Zab might be assisted by the Afghan Landmine Survivor Organization, another Clear Path partner that offers advocacy, counseling, vocational skills training, sports activities and other services to help survivors re-integrate. Some wheelchair-bound survivors even younger than Zab have benefited from the ramps CPI funded at 25 schools around Kabul.

Muhammad, an amputee from Afghanistan

Finally, some recovered landmine accident survivors are helping Clear Path generate new revenues for survivor services through the Afghan Mine Action Technology Center, a unique project where we employ them to manufacture products used by professional deminers in their country, such as safety visors, first-aid kits, mine field tape, flail hammers, shovels, trowels and probes to name a few.

After I left the tense war-like atmosphere of Kabul with its mazes of checkpoints, concrete barriers and armored patrols, I flew to Cambodia and Vietnam where it all began for us in 2000.

When Kristen Leadem, James Hathaway, Martha Hathaway and I formed Clear Path, we started with a large-scale mine clearance contract near Vietnam’s former Demilitarized Zone. Though the guns had fallen silent there long ago, the decades-long bombing and fighting had left enough unexploded ordnance – in particular cluster bombs – to cause serious accidents on a weekly basis.

An interview with an amputee

Alongside our clearance work, we launched a survivor assistance program for victims from the neighborhoods around the clearance site. It now serves 1,600 beneficiaries in 16 provinces a year with everything from emergency medical and prosthetic care to home improvement support and sports activities.

Next door in Cambodia, our focus is on socio-economic reintegration. For five years, we ran a vocational skills training center in the eastern provin how to fix electronics such as radios, televisions and Walkmans; small engines such as motos, grass cutters and water pumps; and where they picked up sewing skills to make or repairs clothing.

In 2007, we finished the construction of a rice mill training and employment center in the K-5 mine belt that runs along the arc of the Cambodian border with Thailand. We found that many landmine amputees there were farmers and wanted to improve their skills, so we set up a cooperative, a microloan arrangement, a field training program and a processing plant for their rice.

My colleague Melody Mociulski met us in Cambodia after she stopped by to check up on our activities along the Thai-Burma border where we began our assistance to landmine accident survivors in 2002. We started by funding technology improvements, training and materials at the prosthetics department of the Mae Tao Clinic in Mae Sot, a facility for ethnic Karen refugees from Burma started by Dr. Cynthia Maung, an associate of Aung San Suu Kyi whose medical work earned her a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Ed and Mask

From there, we quickly branched out to other parts of the border to set up additional fabrication shops with the young amputees we trained as prosthetics technicians at the Mae Tao Clinic. These shops on both sides of the border now serve several hundred ethnic Karen, Karenni and Shan landmine accident survivors every year. We have since added physical and psychological therapy, and just funded several income-income generating projects for amputees in two refugee camps north of Chiang Mai. They now grow mushrooms, raise fish and breed pigs.

The border project to which I feel the strongest personal connection is the Care Villa, a nursing compound in the Mae La refugee camp where we provide for the full-time care of 17 ethnic Karen landmine accident survivors who have lost their hands and eye sight. Being a closet musician myself, I know no greater bitter-sweetness than to hear them sing and play their hand-me-down instruments. Sometimes, their Christian roots spur gospel songs and sometimes they’ll sing of their homeland, which they will never see again.

Clearpath International: http://cpi.org