The threat of the normal looms, but much aid will be needed even to regain that level in an unforgiving land.

Children have time on their hands as few villages have schools.

Following in the furrows of their forefathers, farmers prepare for winter with an ancient wooden plow. Millennium has provided wheat seed and fertilizer.

Donations from Millennium supporters have provided wheat seed and fertilizer to farmers in Northern Afghanistan. MRDS is seeking donations to advance the work. Donations can be made by cash, credit card or stock transfer, either by mail or electronically. Also needed are experts in agriculture, including irrigation and water management, soil rehabilitation and sheep and dairy cow multiplication programs. Experts willing to contribute their skills on either a short- or long-term basis are needed.

In Dawlatabad province in Northern Afghanistan, villagers take firewood to market to trade for food.

In Northern Afghanistan, this city of stick and old cloth is home to many. For how long?

Abduvahob Salomov has eight children. When his son Rustam, then 9 years old, was run over by a car in 1998 and left a quadriplegic, the family had no money for ongoing medical care. With his $600 loan, Salomov has established a business selling paint and building materials imported from Russia and Dubai. He makes enough to provide medicine for Rustam, who lives on a pallet on the floor of the family’s home in a nearby village.

Abduvahob makes enough to buy medicine for his son.

A cafe started on $200 spawns a second location.

A fresh batch of sambusa cooks at the tandoor.

Before he applied for his first loan, Ergash Obloberdiev was among the 80 percent of the people of Tajikistan who live in poverty. With the $200 he borrowed, he built a tandoor, the traditional clay oven of the region, and equipment for dispensing soft drinks. He opened a café across the street from the main bazaar in his city, Kurganteppa.

The featured item on his menu, sambusa – a small pie of meat and onion – proved so popular that within five months he had opened a second location and hired a total of nine employees. His loan repaid, he took out another and bought five tons of onions. With produce prices about to soar as winter set in, he was controlling costs.

The micro-enterprise program operated by a Millennium implementing partner in Tajikistan teaches that and other business principles to its loan recipients. It brings in experts from abroad to coach the new entrepreneurs in a former Soviet republic where even the concept of free enterprise was unknown until 1991.

Biomina Hotamova borrowed $600 and found a way to leverage her cash. She sells cloth at her booth in the bazaar. Because she must make the two-day trip to Khokand in neighboring Uzbekistan to replenish her inventory, she decided to make it a weekly visit. In that way, she’s able to buy for other merchants in the bazaar and charge them for delivery.

Follow the Teaching Track to Yemen

MRDS-Yemen has undertaken to accelerate sustainable development through a partnership with the country’s largest university.

Country Director Dennis Cox, an engineer who has worked in the Middle East since 1978, has signed a contract with Sana’a University, which has an enrollment of more than 70,000 students on its main campus in the capital and satellite campuses. It performs a critical role in the nation’s development by training students in engineering, medicine, finance, agriculture and education.

Under the agreement, MRDS will launch the Visiting Expert Program to bring in university professors and professionals for one to two weeks of lectures and lab work plus a week devoted to tourist and cultural activities. MRDS will also make available research opportunities for post-graduate students and short-term conversational English instruction and curriculum development in addition to gathering books, technical journals and equipment for the university’s libraries.

Millennium is seeking professors and professionals interested in participating in the program. For more information contact Millennium Field Services at 713-961-5645 or by e-mail at millennium@mrds.org, and note Yemen in the subject line.

MRDS is building on a program under which visiting physicians lectured medical students and faculty at the university in spring, 2001. MRDS-Yemen operates under a broad-based contract that emphasizes environmental programs that benefit the economy.

One of the most gratifying aspects of our work at Millennium Relief and Development involves seeing a metamorphosis from relief to development. Indeed, many of the most cleverly devised relief programs have the capacity to do just that built into them at the outset.

Relief is the grim and necessary part of this job. A starving man doesn’t need a nutrition survey and a girl bleeding from a bullet wound has no use for a textbook.

Development is the creative and rewarding side of the work. Once basic needs have been met, many can benefit from programs designed to guide them away from dependence on charity from abroad and toward a fulfilling, self-sustaining life.

We’ve been privileged to see the program launched in Turkey following the devastating earthquake of 1999 to address the trauma of the survivors grow into a continuing initiative to treat people still trying to reassemble shattered lives.

Now in Northern Afghanistan another such transition is in process. Workers who began by surveying food shortages in remote villages have moved past delivery of emergency provisions to beginning agricultural programs.

In the nation’s most fertile area, crop production was devastated when the Taliban cut off the water supply to punish those ethnic groups toward whom they were hostile.

Millennium’s implementing partner has already distributed wheat seed and fertilizer to farmers and is now studying irrigation and other measures to rehabilitate the land. Slowly, the work progresses from relief to development, from desperation to redemption.