Afghan photo exhibit in Ballston Spa

BALLSTON SPA (Jan. 14) — Connie Frisbee Houde kept getting asked to speak about Afghanistan. But she worried that her information wasn’t up to date. After all, she hadn’t been to the country since 2005.

So she decided she had to go back — and she took her camera.

The photographs she took during that trip last fall are on display at Mango Tree Imports through the end of the month.

“I went to Afghanistan first in 2003. Then I went again in 2004 and 2005,” she said. “I have friends who have been in Afghanistan for the past 30 years doing eye care.”

She said her most recent trip showed the toll the conflict has taken on the Afghan population. And this time she was only able to visit the capital of Kabul because the rest of the country was deemed unsafe.

Connie Frisbee Houde photographs schoolchildren during her trip to Afghanistan last fall.

Connie Frisbee Houde photographs schoolchildren during her trip to Afghanistan last fall.

“There’s a huge, huge number of kids who are orphans,” Houde said. Many of those children have single mothers who can not afford to raise them.

An estimated 600,000 children between 5 and 16 take to the streets, working to get by. To help them get off the streets, Aschiana operates schools offering basic educational and vocational training — but the charity is struggling to make ends meet. Houde said a recent TV news story about another children’s charity, the Afghan Child Education and Care Organization’s Mehan Orphanage, raised $100,000 in donations.

“What I see out of that is this is the kind of work people want to see in Afghanistan instead of bombing and work,” she said.

Houde added that a lot of Americans believe in stereotypes of Afghanistan and its citizens that simply aren’t true.

“Their view of Afghanistan is a dusty, dirty country,” she said. “They don’t realize how ancient the culture is.”

Jill Vickers, who lived in Afghanistan in 1969-70 as a Peace Corps volunteer, agreed the stereotypes about Afghanistan are wrong.

“The perception in the media was that Afghanistan was a string of terrorist camps,” she said. “The Afghan people by tradition are very hospitable. And they really like Americans. The U.S. at that time was held in high regard by the Muslims in Afghanistan.”

Vickers was at Mango Tree last week for two showings of her documentary, “Once in Afghanistan,” about the Peace Corps’ role in the campaign to eradicate smallpox in that country. She said at the time the country was open to Western culture and ideas — at the time, women in Kabul were wearing miniskirts.

“It wasn’t a democracy, but it was stable, safe and secure,” Vickers said.

Both Houde and Vickers worry about the current U.S. strategy in Afghanistan.

“Maybe they know something we don’t, but it seems very risky,” Vickers said. “It’s such a difficult place to figure out how to help.”

“They all did not want an escalation,” Houde said about the Afghans she talked to during her recent trip. “But they did not want the troops to leave. They want them to stay to train the police and army.”

Still, Vickers said some good has come out of the U.S. actions.

“That action did chase out the Taliban,” she said. “It did drive them out.”

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