Aid for Afghanistan - First time at 57 and ever since

By Yas Mamemachi

Nara, Japan

Karako (center) and children of the orphanage she has provided aid for (Photo provided by Mayumi Karako)

wo years ago President Barack Obama of the United States stated that Afghanistan was the next battle ground for the war on terrorism after Iraq. Upon hearing the news, Mayumi Karako, a 63-year old housewife from Nara, became grim.

“That would make us nervous about going over there,” she murmurs. “Well, politics is politics. We have to get many things done, anyway.”

Karako has been leading a volunteer group, the Lala Association, which is not registered as a NPO, to support orphanages in Herat, Afghanistan, since 2003. The group, which was started by a couple of local friends, is supported by about 600 members today.

“We will not formulate an annual budget. In fact, we are not required to do that because our organization is not a registered NPO. We do not want to engage actively in aid for no one but for survival of our organization,” says Karako.

“I hear that some aid organizations have become very conscious of setting goals and results-oriented activities,” she continues. “In the end, they realize that they keep a distance from those to whom they provide aid. That should not be the story of our organization.”

The reality is that the Lala Association has been sufficiently funded with a growing number of members and more corporate donations, though the Japanese economy is not as strong as it used to be.

“Maybe the fund is sufficient enough because we are just doing what we can do in our physical and financial capacities,” says Karako with smile.

The name of the association, Lala, means tulip in Dari, one of the local languages in Afghanistan. “The name comes after our wish: Someday thousands of tulips, which are the national flower of Afghanistan, will fully bloom in a wracked by war for the last 23 years,” she says.

Karako is not a daughter of some famous Japanese diplomat, nor has she been raised in an internationally active environment for years in her youth.

She is a baptized Catholic but is not deeply religious. Other than that, she is an average Japanese woman. She went to a local college and then married. She has a happy family with three children. She joined a government-sponsored overseas volunteer activity program for two years right after college, though.

Yet, she has been back-and-forth between Japan and Afghanistan 11 times with the volunteer group.

New chapters of life

In 2002, her three children were grown and she had been taking care of her mother-in-law for several years when the mother-in-law died. She thought that it might be the right time to move ahead into a new chapter of her life, which was to try to do whatever she wanted to do while taking a break from being a full-time mother and housewife. Then, a local NGO’s small recruitment ad in the newspaper changed her life.

The ad wanted anyone interested in delivering prosthetic legs to Afghanistan.

“I thought ‘this is it,’’” She says.

She had volunteered to work for a support group for children with disabilities for about 10 years, starting when she was 35 years old. Her third child had some disabilities, a reality that encouraged her to take part in such activities. During this period she finished the required university courses to receive a nursing teacher’s license.

However, the more time she devoted to the activity, the less she was able to maintain her family tie, which was the most important thing to her. She gave up the activity and pledged that she would not participate in any kind of volunteer activity for a while after that. About 14 years passed, and she finally allowed herself to work for others.

“My husband was surprised to hear that I was going to Afghanistan and worried about me, saying, ‘You had better get a divorce before going to Afghanistan,’” says Karako. “So, I said, ‘I will not take care of you even when you get older, unless you let me go to Afghanistan this time.’”

In December 2002, as a member of the NGO with several college students from her hometown region, Karako at age 57, then went to Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan via Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan. She was fully supported by all her family members, including her husband.

They stayed in Kabul to help supply prosthetic legs and arms to locals who needed them because of the legacy of the long-time war, bringing such legs out to the city from Japan.

“I remembered I instinctively realized ‘this is the place where I will work,’ when I witnessed the social environment of Afghanistan,” she says.

Yet, she was wondering if a person such as her, a middle-aged woman with no technical skills could contribute to social development in a war-torn country. Her answer was motherhood.

“I thought I would be able to support orphans, most of whom were suffrering, based on my experience and knowledge of being a mother as well as a licensed nursing teacher,” she says.

During her second trip to Afghanistan in June 2003 she visited Herat and decided to work at some orphanages there, since she witnessed the reality that abundant supplies from by many countries were piled up in orphanages in Kabul.

After returning to Japan, the Lala Association was spontaneously established after discussions about her first and second trips to Afghanistan with friends.

All working for Afghanistan’s future (Photo provided by Mayumi Karako)

Since then, the Lala Association had been providing physical supplies such as buying school buses for orphanages in Herat. In recent years Karako and the association have been working on upbringing and sanitary education for early age children as well as computer and English education for teenagers, while locally hiring early childhood educators and computer and English instructors, thus providing a few extra job opportunities for locals.

She has also been tackling changes in the consciousness of teachers working for the orphanages. When they started supporting the orphanages, many of the teachers lined up children for lunch while brandishing a whip and tried to work less while making extra money on the side because teachers’ salaries are limited.

As for the teachers’ behavior, “hopefully the situation will be better. But, to be honest, I have no confidence,” says Karako. “Getting out of poverty is the number one priority for most people, including many teachers here. But who could blame them? A foreigner visiting here once or twice a year like me should not be judgmental. The better the socioeconomic situation is, the better they will be able to take care of others. That’s all I believe.”

Working until 70

Kakaro believes that the Moslem society in Herat will become more open soon. In such an open society the orphanages will have to survive, requiring them to make their own decisions with different kinds of information. English and computer skills will be prerequisites in such a competitive world.

“That’s why we introduced English and computer education for selected teenagers in 2005,” says Karako.

However, not all the locals welcomed her thoughts and actions. “Moslem teenagers in some orphanages supported by a Christian Japanese listen to BBC and talk with foreigners in English, learning Christian values in the name of studying English.” The story had wings and she was once disrespected behind her back by some locals

“Later we realized the rumor was circulated by a few locals in order to get money out of us. This kind of story was dangerous,” says Karako. “The good thing is that a director of the orphanage was actively working to cool down such a dangerous and negative campaign, talking to locals about the true situation of the orphanages and our activities.”

“Children of wealthy families can learn English, but orphans cannot. That is not a matter of faith but of equal opportunity,” she adds. “Then, we proudly announce that four of our orphanages, the ones who had such English and computer courses here, have been accepted by Herat University.”

In addition to supporting the orphanages, Karako and the Lala Association started a carpet production business in cooperation with a local NGO, employing 19 paid workers for five months in 2008. In spring 2009, they established Lala Craft Center for Afghan Women, which was based on the production business.

The center aims to support local women’s independent living and preservation of the country’s traditional craft work, Gilim textiles (a type of flat tapestry-woven carpet or rug produced from the Balkans to Turkey to Pakistan).

Karako and the association have done one thing after another for orphans in Herat and the communities of the area for the last seven years. She says she will continue to work on the projects until she turns 70.

Asked how Afghanistan will have changed positively by the time she is 70, “Well, it might be not much. Hopefully, the country will move ahead one step out of poverty,” she says.

Then, asked how she will be able to continue to work for such small changes in a country with no foreseeably bright future, “I think I just want to live by my own values,” says Karako.

Asked again what that would be, “Well, --a sense of justice, maybe,“ she adds.