By Linda Taaffe
 Photo Courtesy of Laila Petty |
LAH resident works among Afghan refugees in Pakistan
A call to help
Petty’s journey begins last May in Los Altos Hills, where she has lived for the past 18 years. The former cost analyst said she felt compelled to travel to Jalozai after reading a small, insignificant article, not more than two paragraphs long, at the bottom of a page in the San Francisco Chronicle, describing conditions in the camp. Twenty-five Afghan refugee children in the Jalozai Camp had died from heatstroke in 113-degree weather and others were suffering from poor sanitation conditions and dehydration, according to the article.
“I felt I had to go. I believe in hands-on donations … going there myself, not sending money … I’ve learned one thing over the years - money cannot buy good health, happiness or sincere friends. If you have compassion, a little helping hand does so much,” Petty said.
Not everyone shared Petty’s views.
“All of my friends and my family said, ‘You can’t do that. It will be too emotional, too dangerous to go alone,’” she said.
“I like challenges. When I get something in my head, I do it … with the grace of God,” she added with a smile.
The trip to Pakistan was not Petty’s first journey overseas to help those struggling in poverty. Grief over the death of her husband nearly five years ago fueled an inner desire in Petty to help others. She has dedicated most of her time as widow traveling the world helping others while healing herself.
“I was devastated when I lost my husband,” Petty said about Carlisle, a former colonel in the U.S. Army. “Life had no meaning. I felt totally lost. I didn’t know where to start. I would wake up and still be alive … I wondered, ‘Why am I here?’”
“Finally, I thought, ‘Laila, you better do something worthwhile if you’re going to be living.’”
Petty had worked with displaced people in Bangladesh, as well as the poor in Burma and Thailand, and had visited the poor in Pakistan while working in the Middle East for a large American corporation, but she admits she had been ignorant of the Afghan refugees’ plight.
Petty said nothing could have prepared her for the conditions she found at the camp.
“I thought I was going there to dig ditches for a water system,” she said. When Petty arrived, she discovered differently.
A road less traveled
The month after Petty read about the refugees, she boarded a plane for Pakistan in search of Jalozai, traveling with God as her only companion. She carried the name of a contact that a friend had given to her before she left.
It was three days before Petty reached the Pakistani town of Peshawar, about 25 miles from the Jalozai Camp near the northeastern border along Afghanistan. When Petty arrived in Peshawar at midnight, the temperature was so high that blood began gushing from her nose, down the front of her clothes, the moment she stepped off the plane.
Petty would not return home for another four months, weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania.
Inside Jalozai
Jalozai was a makeshift camp where approximately 58,000 Afghan refugees fleeing war and drought in their own country had settled. Conditions there had made it one of the most infamous of all refugee camps. Media have called it a living cemetery, deplorable and inhuman.
The United Nations High Commission for Reguees (UNHCR) and a few nongovernment organizations provided the only relief at the camp because it was located in an area dangerously close to the Afghanistan border. Long-term solutions were prohibited since Jalozai was an unofficial site.
The Medecins Sans Frontiere was the only medical international nongovernmental organization present at the camp from its opening in September 2000 until it closed in February this year, when refugees were moved to other camps.
The temperature hovered at around 120 degrees. There were no trees, no water, no buildings or firebreaks and little sanitation.
Tents or plastic sheets and blankets stretched over wood poles served as shelter, though “many slept on the dirt without any kind of covering,” Petty said.
Dehydration, tuberculosis and other illnesses were rife, claiming several lives daily.
Petty said young mothers didn’t have adequate nourishment. They wouldn’t survive and their babies were left with no one to feed them. The refugees would sometimes dilute powdered milk for the infants. This gave the babies diarrhea, which led to dehydration and death, she said.
“I saw people dying. We couldn’t help. We were too late to help some of the babies. No medicine would have worked … to sit and watch a baby die and you can’t help or do anything … it makes you feel so helpless,” Petty said.
“Every day someone dies. It’s a dream if there is a day with no deaths,” she added. “I didn’t think I had any more tears left after my husband died, but I cried. There was so much suffering.”
The dead lay in tents all around the camp, waiting for burial. Each morning, coffins of various sizes were stacked about two miles away from the camp. In the evenings, the coffins would be gone. Every one would be used.
Many others wandered the camp crippled and missing limbs from land mines that had exploded while they were collecting wood, leaves and other kindling to build a fire for cooking, Petty said.
Some walked two miles each day to collect water rations in a bucket. Those who had lost their hands would tie a scarf around the bucket’s handle, slip their stumps through the cloth and dangle the bucket during the journey home.
Women who had once held careers or came from respected families found themselves hiding behind their traditional chadari, a cloth wrap that covered most of their bodies, including their faces.
They told Petty, “Look at us. Look at our condition. We haven’t bathed or showered in months or changed our clothes. We are so filthy, how can we show our faces? We wear this to hide our own shame.”
Distributing food
Well aware of the perils surrounding her, Laila Petty traverses a seemingly endless and barren, war-scarred region in Pakistan searching for the area’s most notorious Afghan refugee camp, which she learned about in a newspaper from her Los Altos Hills home a month earlier.
The journey is long, the temperature soars close to 125 degrees, and danger hovers nearby for the American woman traveling alone.
Petty is unsure which direction she is headed in or what lies ahead. The only certainty is her determination to help the approximately 58,000 destitute and dying people at the Jalozai Camp.
No woman has ever worked in the Afghan refugee camps alone, independent of any organization.
Petty is about to change that.
Petty wandered through each of the camp’s 36 blocks visiting the 12,000 families living there, holding the hands of the sick, comforting the dying and trying to find the best way to improve camp conditions.
“I know I can’t change (everything) but a little help can go a long way and did make a small difference,” she said.
Families told her that they needed lanterns. After scouring the country for 12,000 lanterns, Petty returned empty-handed, but not defeated. She reorganized her efforts and was able to collect 11,500 cans of cooking oil - the camp’s second greatest need, according to the families, who had lived with virtually no fat in their diets. The oil would last each family about one month.
“By the power of God, I did it,” Petty said.
The oil had to be distributed carefully. Food distributions often gave rise to crowd control problems. Many of the refugees didn’t have the proper documentation to obtain the UNHCR-issued identity cards needed to collect rations.
Those refugees relied on relatives to share their rations, which often fell short.
Petty hired a dozen refugees to work with her setting up a distribution process.
She described most of the workers as doctors and educated professionals before they came to the camp.
They were happy to be needed and productive, she said. Though they were starving and without many necessities, the workers initially refused Petty’s money.
They told Petty, “I can’t take your money. These are our people.”
She told them, “You have to take it. You have families. You need it. You are helping me.”
Petty and her assistants conducted their own head count. They printed coupons, distributed them to each family and set pickup times for each block. This was followed with oil can and coupon counts to assure that the numbers matched.
Approximately 800, mostly men, arrived to pick up oil on the first day’s scheduled appointment.
“I didn’t know what to expect. I hoped they wouldn’t start throwing rocks at me” because she wasn’t wearing a headpiece, Petty said.
She told them, “I am not Afghan, I am not Pakistani. I have heard about your suffering and have come to help. I am lucky. I am able to come. Those who are not as fortunate and cannot come to help are at home praying for you.”
Petty asked women from each block to speak in front of the men and help with the distributions in order to make the men realize that the women were part of the community, too.
Women had been treated like animals and property during the Taliban rule before fleeing. Much of that attitude has remained in the camps, she added.
Many Afghan women, already unaccustomed to appearing in public places, avoided regular food distributions, fearing violence.
As a result, many widowed women were left without assistance, Petty said.
Petty said both men and women were hospitable to her in the camp. “As long as you are humble, people will try to understand you … I am no different than them.”
Word of Petty’s aid spread throughout the region, drawing media to the camp, for she was the only woman traveling alone to bring assistance to the camps. Petty refused any interviews, saying her work was between her and God.
She came forward with her story last month hoping to bring attention to her next trip to Pakistan this month.
Petty hopes to raise enough funds to distribute solar stoves to refugees and teach them how to become self-sufficient.
Petty said she plans to stay as long as needed for her to teach the refugees how to effectively cook using the solar stoves.
She knows this journey will be more difficult and dangerous, coming after the Sept. 11 attacks. But when Petty gets something in her head, she does it - with the grace of God.
