Hi Everyone!!
I just returned back from Bamyan again and let me tell you what a trip it was.
The UN flight up to Bamyan was completely booked so we ended up having to drive over 10 hours from Kabul to Bamyan. For someone who gets car sick easily (especially where nine and half hours of the way there is no proper road) it was quite the experience. The mountains were absolutely stunning; we saw everything from chickens to camels to
lambs to donkeys and tons of friendly children who were very excited at the site of foreigners. We arrived in Bamyan late Thursday and stayed again at the Silk Route, which overlooks the Buddhas.
Just to put the healthcare system into into perspective for you Bamyan has many health care 
challenges – the population is estimated at over 500,000 and they have some of the highest levels of maternal and child mortality rates in Afghanistan. For every 22,500 births, there are 382 maternal deaths and 3,937 infant deaths. The hospital is located in the city, so many of the patients travel (usually walking on foot for at least two days) to seek medical attention. The hospital has expanded since Aga Khan Health Services took over in 2004. The hospital compound doesn’t have a formal waiting room, so often you see people just sitting outside waiting to see a doctor, children with IV attached to them sitting on the dirt ground and a lot of chaos. They have about 300 people come in each day. It's heartbreaking to watch!
We spent all day Friday at the hospital putting up the tent for the event, printing materials, going through scheduling and running errands. I got a chance to visit the Midwifery School, which is a new project developed by AKHS. They just began the fourth session a couple of weeks ago. The women get hands-on training at the school; there are lots of mock labs set up for them to practice. The course runs 18 months and the women have to perform a number of deliveries on their own to graduate from the program. It was really interesting to meet with women there, many of whom only had grade ten education and were no older than 23. When the women found out that I was Ismali they got rather excited and started telling me about when His Highness visited the hospital and school in 2006.
Saturday I was back at the hospital and close to losing my mind. Things were very chaotic and I needed to breathe. My co-worker Evan who came with me to Bamyan decided we should sneak off for a bit and climb the Buddhas. I’ll be completely honest, I was quite scared 
about climbing them. It’s quite steep and slippery and the last thing I needed was to fall and break something the day before the event. We managed to make it all the way up the small Buddha and the view from the top was spectacular. We ended up going back to the hospital to finalize everything for the next day and then had a quiet evening at the hotel with some yummy Indian food made by the Japanese-Afghan owner of the hotel.
I woke up Sunday with an insane amount of adrenaline. We were at the hospital at 6am ready to go. The difficult thing about this event is we had two locations to plan for (Bamyan and Kabul) and my team had to manage the 15 VIPs flying in on a chartered flight that morning. We had some very high-profile guests attend and you have to guarantee their security and make sure everything follows diplomatic protocol. My tipping point that morning was after we had everyone arrive and seated having our security representative pull me aside to tell me that their was an intelligence report of a suicide bomber disguised as a journalist trying to get into the event (at this point I had 12 journalists in the tent with all the VIPs). Last minute, we had to put additional security representatives to watch carefully each of the media.
The thing that really surprised me was how the Minister of Public Health and Governor of Bamyan both thanked His Highness in their speeches. They regarded him very highly and it was really nice to see how much they value the work of the Network.
Our MC for the event was this beautiful Hazara girl who had never done anything like this before. I had coached her leading up to the event; we had a few small hiccups but otherwise it was okay. Our translator for the event turned out to be awful, so last minute one of our Legal guys (who thank god we had put last minute on the plane) stepped in to manage the show.
Once the event finished the VIPs were taken on a tour of the hospital and then a lunch was hosted by the Governor at the Silk Route. In between this the Minister of Public Health decided he wanted to hold a totally unexpected press conference. We finally just had to cut it off and send the VIPs for lunch overlooking the Buddhas. Lunch went smoothly except for the fact that I had the Minister of Public Health’s Secretary throw a complete fit because I had one of the guys ask him his name. He stormed out of the event and caused a bit of a show, none of which fazed the Minister.
We escorted the VIPs back to the airport and the rest of us Roshan staff who were there jumped on the plane back to Kabul. We landed and were back in the office by 4pm. Yesterday and today I have been completely out of it. I’m just mentally so exhausted from the last three weeks – it’s been endless hours of preparation, late nights and weekends at the offices, countless phone calls, SMS, and e-mails. It is honestly such a sigh of relief.
Having to be a key lead on something like this pushed me beyond my limits. It’s probably been the toughest three weeks in my role at Roshan. I’m happy to say overall it went well and that after planning an event in the middle of nowhere in Bamyan I can probably plan an event anywhere in the world haha.
My apologizes for the super long blog entry. I hope you find it interesting. My mom had sent out a video a couple weeks ago – this should give you a better idea of Bamyan if you haven't seen it http://www.globalhealthtv.com/news/the_cost_of_war_to_a_health_system/ I’ll post some more pictures later this week.
Note – the pictures in this entry are a mix between ones from my last trip two weeks ago and this trip.
Ministry of Communication and the United States International Development Agency. Last March, we celebrated the official launch with 400 laptops being distributed in Jalalabad and in Kabul they will distribute 2,000 laptops between four high schools.
This time I was very fortunate to attend the ceremony in Kabul at one of the local schools. I was one of the few women in attendance, which was really interesting. We got a tour of the classrooms and met with some of the students. The girls were especially excited to meet with me. They kept trying to speak with me in English and take pictures of me with the webcam on their laptops. 
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