His age was impossible to tell, but I would guess this man who looked 70 years old was probably in his early forties.

Through an interpreter, he told me his wife had died giving birth to his son, that his baby boy was not born healthy, and the doctor had to perform immediate surgery.

His baby had a “pipe” sticking from his abdomen, as he put it, and would need further surgery soon, he did not have any clean bandages, and he didn’t know what to do; he was poor and now had to support his six children without his wife. Since he lived in a village a couple kilometres outside of the city, I asked him if he had visited a medical clinic, and at this he seemed happy, as he recalled there being a medical clinic in his village, and that he would go to visit it.

It was an odd reaction, I thought. Perhaps the concept of a community medical facility was foreign, perhaps he was under so much stress, his only thought was to visit the KPRT, or perhaps his mind was not all there.

I did not mention to him that the KPRT could help in any other way, as I didn’t want to raise any false hope with the already greatly suffering man. But there was something we could do thanks to the Assistance to Afghanistan Trust Fund, a fund composed of money donated by private Canadian citizens and businesses.

If you are interested in helping these small humanitarian deeds to continue, you can donate through Boomer’s Legacy, a charity named in remembrance of Corporal Andrew James Eykelenboom, a Canadian military medic from Comox who was killed by a suicide bomber in Kandahar.

We all came together because we were fed up with the shallow level of Canadian debate about the mission, and we all shared a conviction that Canadian soldiers were absolutely necessary to ensure that Canada keep its commitments to the Afghan people. We were also tired of hearing that as Canadians, we were merely "imposing our values" on the Afghan people, when the Afghan people themselves were crying out for our help.

We also share a commitment to the proposition that human rights are universal, that women's rights are human rights and that these rights are neither culture-specific nor are they negotiable. We reckon it's high time Canadians started paying closer attention to what the Afghan people themselves have to say about these things, and we hope to make room for more Afghan-Canadian voices in these debates, too.