Barek Aub

Sozo aims for self-sustaining community at Barek Aub IDP camp

Afghan girls wait in line for warm winter clothing. This was their first winter at Barek Aub, a new settlement created by the Afghan government in 2007 for internally displaced people.

Photos by Sozo International

Handouts that really help
            Sozo International has worked with internally displaced people, or IDPs, since 2002, when they began streaming back to Kabul after the fall of the Taliban. IDPs are refugees in their own country.

            In May, 2007, the Afghan government relocated about 600 IDP families from Kabul to an isolated desert wasteland about an hour and a half outside of the city. Left with little more than plastic tarps for shelter, these families depended on relief trucks for water, food and all their other needs.

            The camp site offered no work opportunities and no healthcare. A mother and her baby died in childbirth on the day a Sozo team went to assess the crisis at here in the spring of 2007. Two young boys died over the summer when they wandered into the area outside the camp looking for stones for building houses and stumbled into landmines instead.

            In June, 2007, Sozo began work in the new refugee community, now called Barek Aub. Sozo started by distributing basic medical/hygiene kits and food. With the help of The Vine, a group from Louisville, Kentucky, Sozo provided school supplies, tents and student desks for use as a temporary elementary school for the children in the camp.

            In October, Sozo provided dinner for the families in Barek Aub.

            Then, volunteers and Sozo staff followed a December distribution of quilts and coats with two January, 2008, distributions of food and charcoal.

     There is little work in the area. The land has been reduced to dust by decades of war.

     The people spent a year building their homes in this desert and relied on Sozo for help with food and firewood throughout the rainy fall and cold, snowy winter. But without jobs in place, they continue to depend on help from outside the community to bring their provisions.

     Sozo is working to help the community establish some source of income. Sozo is also providing for the education of the hundreds of children there and for the medical needs of the people

Big projects begin

           Sozo’s first major project in the camp was to provide a water supply system. Two generous grants from the International Disaster Emergency Service and Flatirons Community Church, of Lafayette, Colorado, in the summer of 2007 enabled Sozo to begin drilling a well. The water system was nearly complete by the end of 2007.

          Able-bodied camp residents provided their own labor and baked thousands of handmade bricks during the summer and fall of 2007. They built their own small houses and received doors, windows and roofs from the UNHCR.

          Sozo plans to begin construction in 2008 on 50 houses for the most vulnerable families at Barek Aub—widows and the disabled, as soon as government land surveys are completed and the ground thaws.

Community buy-in

          Sozo leaders and volunteers met with camp leaders in December, 2007, to develop a Community Development Education plan including healthcare, education and economic initiatives.

            “I’m excited about our progress with the refugees of the camp now called Barek Aub, or ‘Fragile Water,’” said Bob Drane, Sozo Chief Operations Officer. “Despite all the work yet to be done, I remain hopeful now for these people, and for the other communities where Sozo has identified needs and possibilities for partnerships.”

IDPs continue to return to Afghanistan despite hardships

In 2007, an estimated 3,600 refugees lived in camps or settlements in bombed out buildings in Kabul, Afghanistan. Refugees are designated as internally displaced persons, or IDPs, by the government. An estimated 136,000 people across Afghanistan have no homes, according to the United Nations High Commissions on Refugees (UNHCR). The government began relocating IDPs from Kabul to outlying areas in order to deal with the increasing problem of sanitation and disease brought on by camps within the city.

Sozo continues to bring relief to families who live in these camps.

The families have come from all over Afghanistan, where their homes were destroyed by fighting. They have no jobs and no money to return or rebuild.

Sozo aims to reach the most impoverished people in identifiable communities where war and natural disaster have wreaked havoc. Sozo aims to provide emergency and ongoing relief for internally displaced people (IDP) and to encourage development with education, health and economic initiatives aimed at changing the day-to-day existence of people in need as well as providing for their future.

Thanks for your help.