US forces are withdrawing after 20 years, but the story of Christian aid work goes far beyond military conflict.
Like so many, Arley Loewen knows exactly where he was when 9/11 happened.
He was in Islamabad, Pakistan, working with Afghan refugees as an educator, and he had to evacuate the area for safety.
But as a foreign aid worker, there are also other dates he thinks about, memorializing other deaths. Those who spent time on humanitarian work in Afghanistan in the past 20 years get emotional remembering the Afghan and foreign friends, coworkers, and neighbors who died.
On March 27, 2003, a Red Cross engineer was executed by unknown gunmen.
On June 2, 2004, five Médecins Sans Frontières staff were killed on the road between Khair Khana and Qala-i-Naw.
On January 14, 2008, an attack on the Serena Hotel in Kabul killed six.
On July 24, 2014, two Finnish women with International Assistance Mission were shot and killed.
On October 3, 2015, a US airstrike hit a Médecins Sans Frontières hospital and killed 42.
On November 24, 2019, a roadside bomb killed a California man with the UN Development Program and wounded five others.
There are other dark dates, and Loewen, who currently lives in Manitoba and teaches Bible and Muslim-Christian relations at a small Christian college, regularly checks his phone to see if his friends in Afghanistan are okay.
“We tend to sit in the story of violence, and it’s so real with the Taliban taking one district after another,” Loewen said. “But then the other story of civil society—I love that story.”
According to a recent report from the US Agency for International Development, there are about 140 nongovernment charity organizations, many of them Christian, doing aid work in Afghanistan. There are also another dozen UN organizations. They are providing ...
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