Story number 1 for 22 May 2003

(Afghanistan)–We begin today’s newscast with word of increasingly bold tribal warfare in western Afghanistan. The trouble mounts more hardship on a people already struggling with poverty and years of devastating drought. We spoke with World Vision Afghanistan’s Operations Director, Graham Strong, from their Badghis Province worksite. He outlines their response. “We’re focusing on food security, and livelihood, and also looking at water and sanitation and then health programs, as well as education. We’ve been able to construct numerous schools and also we’ve connected numerous food distributions in the area that World Vision has targeted.” Strong says their teams are primarily concerned with meeting the physical needs, adding that overt evangelism now is not the right approach. “We have developed a style, where we have, as a team decided that we were going to demonstrate our faith through actions. We’re just very concerned about if we were to demonstrate our faith through word, we would not only put ourselves at risk, but we would also put our national staff at risk.”