Thank you.
I visited villages outside of Kandahar. I visited informal refugee camps around Kandahar, in Panjwai. I think you're familiar with it; that's where most of the fighting has been.
It is on the outskirts of Kandahar. Just where Kandahar City ends, you turn south and drive out to Panjwai. It's about 15 minutes. I visited informal refugee camps inside Kandahar City--I'm living there. Every day, day after day, week after week, they had never had a foreigner visit them, and they had never had any aid from anybody.
I did not see any evidence of CIDA projects in those villages and informal camps where the poorest people are.
When we went there, we would open the door of the vehicle, and the men would come to us and say, “Do you have any food? There are children starving here,” so we started taking food with us. They asked us to bring them food, and they asked us to bring them doctors, because there were very sick babies, very sick children, and very sick elderly people there. We started doing that, continuing our research and taking the videos.
I think you saw some of the people in the videos with bread in their hands. We would arrive with bread, and they would immediately come to the bread. They would pick up a piece of bread.... A grown man would pick up a piece of bread and put it in his mouth. They're hungry.
We started doing food aid there, and that's the first food aid. We started doing food aid because we wanted to do our research, and just as you would, we could take food, so we took food. We could take doctors, so we organized to take doctors and medicine. My staff is still there; they're still visiting those camps--and there still is no aid.