"We want Afghanistan to heal!": Radical Joy Revealed

Radical Joy Revealed is a weekly message of inspiration about finding and making beauty in wounded places. We hope you'll enjoy these doorways into places that are both familiar and surprising, and we welcome your suggestions, stories, and photos. Click here to subscribe.

"We want Afghanistan to heal!"

Afghan Peace Volunteers Global Earth Exchange

The Afghan Peace Volunteers in their permaculture garden behind the Borderfree Nonviolence Centre, Kabul, Afghanistan. Global Earth Exchange 2016. Photo courtesy of Hakim Young

It is truly inspiring when young men and women who have never known a life free of war get together to make their home more beautiful and healthy.

When we founded Radical Joy for Hard Times, we imagined that the "wounded places" people would go to would be ecologically damaged: deserts overrun by development, clear-cut forests, mountains flatted by mining.

But from the time of the first Global Earth Exchange in 2010 we learned that our mission of "finding and making beauty in wounded places" was, thankfully, broad enough to invite acts of engagement and revitalization in many kinds of places in crisis. In 2013 a group of young people in Kabul, Afghanistan, the Afghan Peace Volunteers, joined the Global Earth Exchange by cleaning up around a bomb crater. (Click to see the video they made.)

This year the group held their event in the permaculture garden they have planted behind their center. They write:

When Australian permaculturalist Rosemary Morrow was sharing with the Afghan Peace Volunteers her permaculture knowledge and skills this past winter, a simple soil analysis in the Borderfree Nonviolence Centre's garden revealed that the soil was "exhausted", weak from years of war and destruction.

So, the Afghan Peace Volunteers have applied their permaculture skills in this very garden, mulching and planting to "repair" the soil. They have also planted tomatoes and potatoes as food for survival in a war zone. On June 18th, in solidarity with Global Earth Exchange, some Afghan Peace Volunteers worked in the Centre's garden, watering the vegetables and removing the weeds. We want the land and soil of Afghanistan to heal!

Thanks to Hakim Young, Ghulam Hussein, and all the Afghan Peace Volunteers for showing that it is possible to come together and create beauty, health, and wholeness for the place you love, no matter how desperate the conditions you face there.

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Radical Joy Revealed.

Radical Joy for Hard Times is a global community of people dedicated to finding and making beauty in wounded places. Reconnecting with these places, sharing our stories of loss, and making acts of beauty there, we transform the land, reconnect people and the places that nourish them, and empower ourselves to make a difference in the way we live on Earth.

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