It wasn’t part of their official mission in Afghanistan, but it was the most rewarding Col. John Gessner and his Base Engineer Team sponsored an orphanage in nearby Charikar. This humanitarian project was going on when they weren’t reconstructing the Bagram Air Base in support of Operation Enduring Freedom.
Orphans are part of the terrible cost of warfare, and in Afghanistan, this is particularly pronounced. There are more than thirty thousand orphans in the Kabul area alone.
When they arrived at the orphanage in Charikar the first time, about seventy-five children and staff hesitantly greeted these Americans in uniform.
“They were a little leery of us when we first met them but warmed to us in time,” recalled Gessner. “What I first noticed was the lack of shoes and lack of glass in the windows in the sleeping rooms.” Summer temperatures in Afghanistan reach higher than one hundred degrees but drop to the teens in the winter.
When we left the orphanage on that first day, a rather large Airborne Ranger sergeant major, nicknamed Big Jim, looked at me with tears in his eyes and asked, “What can we do to help these kids?” We decided to write a few letters home hoping that perhaps people would send us some donations.
The letters worked. The sergeant major’s contacts sent numerous pairs of shoes. Jim Powers, a friend of Gessner’s in Rockford, Illinois, mobilized his Kiwanis group to support the orphans. Powers also established a website for the orphans’ plight and landed a front page story in the local paper. After the article in the paper, the orphans’ website received more than four hundred hits the first two days. The donations began flowing in.
“In three months, we received eight thousand dollars and three hundred fifty boxes of goods,” said Gessner. “The first donation came from a friend’s grandson who volunteered up his own shoes. While his grandma convinced him he needed his own shoes, he volunteered up his change totaling fifty-seven cents.” Other significant donations included coats from J.C. Penney’s and eighty hand-sewn quilted sleeping bags from a ladies’ church group.
“I was asked by a reporter once what we had received from the orphans for our work,” Gessner remembered. “My response was: ‘A lot of hugs and the satisfaction of leaving the place a little better than we found it.’”
Lord, instill in me a desire to give to others out of the abundance with which you have blessed me.
“Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress.” (James 1:27)