Today’s Good People, Good Works will be presented in Dari and English, with subtitles in Arabic, Aulacese (Vietnamese), Chinese, English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Mongolian, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Thai.

Auntie Andeisha is a very good woman who accepts all the kids in the orphanage, as her own and never differentiates between her own kids and those of here. And whatever demand or request that we might have had, she has provided it for us…

Halo, benevolent viewers, and welcome to Good People, Good Works on Supreme Master Television. This week’s show is the conclusion of a two-part series highlighting the Afghan Child Education and Care Organization (AFCECO), a non-profit entity based in Kabul, Afghanistan that seeks to nurture and shelter vulnerable Afghan children by providing a safe environment with all basic necessities, including proper education, health care and love.

AFCECO strives to develop the young ones into the country’s next generation of leaders.

Well, I aspire to build an orphanage such as this and this way, the children who are disadvantaged, (I would be able to) provide them with education and lessons…

We have 11 orphanages, so this is one of the orphanages for the girls; only girls live here. We have five orphanages in Kabul, and two in Herat, two in Jalalabad, and we still have two orphanages for Afghan children in Pakistan. So there are 67 girls living in this orphanage.

The organization was founded in 2001 by Ms. Andeisha Farid, an Afghan social entrepreneur who has spent almost her whole childhood and adolescence living in refugee camps.

This 27-year-old woman has gained international recognition for her work and was invited to the April 2010 “Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship” in America, an event hosted by US President Barack Obama to deepen ties between business leaders, foundations, and entrepreneurs in the United States and Muslim communities around the world.

During the Summit, President Obama praised Ms. Farid’s work in a speech saying that "… Andeisha Farid, [is] an extraordinary woman from Afghanistan who's taken great risks to educate the next generation, one girl at a time. Together, they point the way to a future where progress is shared and prosperity is sustainable.”

Some of the teachers in the AFCECO orphanages are volunteers. Their backgrounds are diverse, with several being students from Kabul University, Afghanistan while others are from abroad, like North America or Europe.

So, this is Ian Pounds, our volunteer from the United States, who has been with us since last year. So it's almost one year and a half he is with us teaching the kids English, computer, art, and recently he managed our leadership training and the leadership academy which was the first experience for us and it was really amazing for all the girls.

Half of all people in Afghanistan are under the age of 18. So when people want to talk about the future of Afghanistan, it’s right here, it's very close. These children will be adults in a very short time.

If they’re given freedom of their minds, given an education, given love, given security, given health, it can’t help but change the future of Afghanistan. It's very simple math in my view. It's not a leap of faith, it's not a guess, it's not a hope, it’s a simple fact. And so that's why I’m here.

Mr. Pounds is tremendously impressed by the children’s love of learning and has a touching story that clearly demonstrates their thirst for knowledge.

I was very tired, I had been teaching all day long, and I looked at my watch and it was five minutes to 6 o'clock at night, and I said: “Okay, girls, you may go.” And they looked at me with the most astonishing look. “What, Gee.” and I said, “It's time, you may go.” And they said, “What time is it?” I said, “It's five minutes to six”. They said, “We want our five minutes.”

I have never experienced students who asked for their five minutes when they were being let out of the class early. So it’s a little tiny example of what kind of students I encounter here, you know. They're like kids everywhere, they're like students everywhere, but in this respect they are not like students everywhere.

Each orphanage has one to two managers who live there with the children and act as surrogate parents.

We first were refugees in Pakistan, then returned. We didn’t have work or job, then I was informed that there is an orphanage here. I was pleased and wanted to come here and work and do nursing of children and help them in their lessons.

The orphanage is a safe haven for the children, with an atmosphere of peace, love, tolerance, and harmony.

This is one of the bedrooms that the girls live in. So each child has a bed here. So we have 22 girls living in this room, because we have 11 bunk beds here and every child takes one bed. It’s their bedroom, they sleep here, and they study in their library.

They use this open space to study and lay down and do their homework. So they are all studying together, two of them for instance, and helping each other, but this is basically their bedroom where they sleep at night. And during the day they take a nap after coming from school.

Mehan I is one of the largest orphanages in the AFCECO network. The children, whose ages range from 3 to 12, are taught to respect each other regardless of gender, language, religion, race, or color.

We have so many good friends and also they talk to us kindly and We are very close friends…. We don’t fight with each other… Helay is my best friend. She… with the lessons… she helps me (with them) and when she is in trouble I help her… if I am at school, we go and eat the meal together.

In the orphanage we are friends… All the girls are our friends and we treat all of them nicely … those who are my best friends are Helay (who) helps me, Manila also helps me in the lessons because her level is one year higher than mine, they help me, with the lessons. When they have a problem at school, I ask them about it.

AFCECO orphanages also train the children to be responsible and the residents are expected to become productive members of society in the future.

And other thing we would like them to learn something, not be very dependent on others, this is very important for us. We want them to help the cook, to help the house cleaner, to help the woman who does the laundry for them, so that they learn some skills in the orphanage, not be dependent on someone else to do their laundry, because everybody has to take a part to keep themselves clean and keep their facility clean.

The basic daily routine in all AFCECO orphanages is very similar.

Now you have exams. You have to wake up at 4 o’clock, apart from that, when you don’t have exams, how are the rest of the days?

Now we have exams. Once the exams are finished, the wake up time is 6 o’clock for us. We get up, get prepared, and have breakfast. Once breakfast is ready, the person who is on duty prepares the breakfast. We go to school from 7:30 AM up until 11:30 AM. After returning home, from 11:30 AM to 12:30 PM we eat our lunch.

After lunch, if we have classes, we go until 4:00 PM. At 4:00 PM when we return, we rest and then evening arrives. Then we eat dinner. From 6:00 PM to 7:30 PM, we watch TV. When the meal is prepared we eat the meal and then return to studying. Football, yes! We have classes daily, and twice a week we play football.

Andeisha Farid wants each child to be healthy and full of energy and thus the menu at the orphanages feature a variety of seasonal fruits and vegetables.

We cook them rice with beans or rice with vegetables. And during the night, they usually take the seasonal vegetables for instance, cauliflowers, eggplant, lady’s finger (okra) and other available vegetables in the market. In the meantime they also have fruits like apples, bananas, pomegranate, watermelon, and melons, and the other fruits available in the market according to the season.

Besides providing them with nutritious food, the health of the orphanage residents is also protected by furnishing the children with readily accessible medical care.

This is the clinic for the orphanage. We have four more orphanages that share the same clinic or health care facility here in Mehan Orphanage. We have a physician that comes three times a week and do a check-up for all the kids in the orphanages.

And we have a first aid class for some of the oldest girls and boys in the orphanages that help others when they need them. We have two students who act as the pharmacists. And they are actually working here and they give the medicine for the prescription written by the physician, and then the physician approves once they give the medicine.

We have learned many things here. Like here we (learned) first aid for injuries. We go to (the other) orphanages and give them medication for ordinary diseases.

AFCECO’s Mehan II orphanage in Kabul shelters around 40 girls ranging in age from 16 to 18.

They have a study room and now we will go and see their computer lab. They have a computer facility here to learn some computer skills as well. This is the computer facility for Mehan Orphanage for all the girls. So they do their homework over here and in the meantime they learn some computer skills. And now, some of them, they have exams, and they are getting prepared by working on the computers.

The problems we have, we can solve them all with this computer and things like… homework from the school, we come and solve them all with the computer.

In conclusion, as we have seen in this two-part series that Andeisha Farid and the AFCECO staff have accomplished much on behalf of Afghan children in need in a very short amount of time. With love and admiration, Supreme Master Ching Hai is honoring Andeisha Farid with the Shining World Compassion Award, along with US$20,000 to further her noble work.

For more details on the Afghan Child Education and Care Organization, please visit www.AFCECO.org

Thank you for your company on today’s program. Coming up next is The World Around Us after Noteworthy News. May we always care for one another as brothers and sisters.