Bring on the cold...they're ready!

Welcome to Afghanistan...where the days are a balmy 59 degrees and the nights are a chilly 41 degrees this time of year.

But it's never too warm to wear a NEW COAT!!!

The ANA helped hand out all the coats to the little Afghani children in the Tag Ab Valley, East of Kabul. They named this mission...Operation Golden Spike. Will said it was a great success and that he has been given 900 pictures which were taken by others helping on this mission.

It took Will almost an hour to download these few pictures to me...so he's mailing the rest of them to me on a disk. The rest of these pictures are pretty self explanatory. Will did mention that there was one little boy with a pink coat, which I noticed there was a picture of. I'm sure he thinks it's wonderful...whatever the color!

Some kids, you may notice have a coat, and others don't. I'm not sure why that is, unless some of their mothers are like me and immediately took the coat away from the child to protect it and make sure it didn't get lost.

new coat...bare feet!

I'm sure that this coat is a girls' coat too, but hey...I'm absolutely POSITIVE that he has never seen or heard anything for him to even know that...or for that matter...care!

It goes so nice with his hat, though!

Will said this man received a coat AND a pair of shoes too. I am so glad that EVERYONE who needed a coat seemed to have gotten one. (Hey, Brady...there's one of your boxes!!!)

Major Filoso and Will getting some scripture studying in.

I didn't know that they also transported people in 'jingle trucks'.

Public transportation at its best in Afghanistan...I wonder what they would think about Trax!!

I have looked and looked at these few pictures, and expanded them so that I could see ALL the details of their faces and the condition of their clothes. What a humbling project this has been for me. I have my choice of AT LEAST 11 coats!! (I just counted in my head, so I'm sure there's more!) and I don't even want to try to count how many pairs of shoes I have. I bought an armoir cabinet to hold SOME of my blankets...and you could hide 3 adults in all of the clothes in my laundry room!


I'm sure that some of these kids will be wearing these same coats for YEARS, even when they can barely squeeze into them because that's all they have!

To prove how much I've learned from this project...I will NOT attend the Norstrom half-yearly sale this week! OHHH, the will-power! Piece of cake!!


Good job Braden...thanks to all of you, my family and friends, for your support!


I'll update you on the next HA mission. They're going to deliver blankets and school supplies to a village near Kabul very soon. I'll also post more pictures of this HA mission when Will gets them to me.