In all their stories, the trauma was reflected in the dark circles under their eyes and the weary rasp of their voices. There was the barefooted shoemaker from Kandahar who made me tea in his mud hut a mother who was left with just two of her five children, having lost the others and her husband in a bombing the distraught camp elder who told me he was going to have to start turning people away. Many ended their journey at the Charahi Qambar refugee camp on the outskirts of Kabul, a sprawling, tacked-together jumble of tents, shacks and anything else that offered shelter. It had been a terrible summer of fighting in the southern provinces, in Kandahar, Helmand, and Uruzgan, and in their desperation to escape, thousands of families packed up their possessions and headed north. In the fall of 2008, during the height of Canada’s military involvement in Afghanistan, I travelled to Kabul to tell a war story a story of anxious mothers, fathers and children fleeing their villages because they no longer felt safe. Today I met reporter Read her contribution to #LestWeForget exhibit: #wwi100 /zoeMeiJnwW
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