Surreal” was the word used by 60 Twinkles pressman Sharyn Alfonsi and patron Ashley Velie to describe their recent trip to Afghanistan where they reported on the philanthropic extremity in the war- torn country.
The brace began working on the story following the Taliban preemption amidst the United States military pullout.
“Afghanistan is in deep extremity right now because of a number of reasons,”Velie told 60 Twinkles Overtime.” (Those reasons) primarily being lack of cash, lack of any way for people, average citizens, to pay for food, for health care, for day-to- day musts. Everything has absolutely been firmed there, shut off, nothing.”
The trip from theU.S. to Afghanistan included stops in Qatar and Pakistan before Alfonsi and Velie and their platoon boarded a United Nations flight from Islamabad to Kabul. It’s one of the many means of transportation into the landlocked nation. Since the Taliban preemption, marketable breakouts have stopped.
Velie spent months communicating with the Pakistani consulate and the Afghan charge in New York, which is unaffiliated with the Taliban and has ties to the former government. The charge told 60 Twinkles they could give visas but couldn’t guarantee safe passage or entry into Afghanistan and would need to be released of all responsibility should commodity be during the trip.
The passage wasn’t short of fraught moments in the new Afghan paradigm. Alfonsi and Velie noted that checkpoints formerly manned by American colors, transnational abettors, and the Afghan army had been taken over by the Taliban. Taliban dogfaces wore drudgeries discarded by western forces and manned Humvees left behind by the American army after nearly two decades of war. The experience at each checkpoint varied grounded on the position and the time of day.
“I can not stress enough how strange that scene is of seeing these Taliban fighters, not in their traditional dress, Afghanistan dress, that we are used to seeing, but in American dogfaces’uniforms,” said Alfonsi.”They were wearing helmets, elbow pads, kneepads, night vision goggles, effects for when you are on a copter. And they are wearing those on the side of the road … I can only imagine what it would be like to see notoriety who’d spent so important time in the service there driving up to see that. It was surreal.”
