A big helping hand for women in Afghanistan
If the growth of Irene Macdonald’s annual dinner to raise money for women in Afghanistan were a company’s bottom line, she’d grace the cover of every business magazine in North America.
Back in 2004, the since retired junior high teacher with the Calgary Separate School Board, held a Breaking Bread potluck dinner at her northwest Calgary home that included nine other women. Each of the women — including Macdonald — were asked to write a cheque for at least $75 to raise a total of $750 to pay the salary of an Afghan female teacher for an entire year.
Without doing any advertising and only through word of mouth, Macdonald’s annual event will host more than 500 people tonight, with 100 per cent of the proceeds going to the projects that the Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan (Cw4waf-ghan) support. That’s a whopping growth rate of 4,900 per cent in nine years!
Needless to say, this annual event is no longer being held at the home Macdonald shares with her husband, Colin, a lawyer and partner at Borden Ladner Gervais, and the volunteer board chair of Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame.
Macdonald says she decided to hold her first dinner after she heard a news report on CBC radio about the innovative, small-scale fundraising dinner to support Afghan women.
“That report really moved me,” Macdonald says. “I couldn’t believe how little a teacher in Afghanistan makes and the number really struck me because when I started teaching in Montreal in 1973, my salary was $7,500 a year,” she adds.
After raising that first bit of money, Macdonald contacted Janice Eisenhauer, who runs the Calgary chapter of Cw4wafghan and is the executive director of the national organization.
Macdonald says she was so impressed with Eisenhauer, who has never been paid a cent for her tireless work over 15 years, that she decided to start volunteering for the charity and is on its volunteer board.
“That first year we raised enough money for one teacher and a half and we decided right then and there to hold another dinner the next year,” recalls Irene.
But then things started to snowball. Much of the success of the event can be attributed, not just to a great team of friends and volunteers who help put on the dinner, but to the compelling speakers Macdonald gets to speak for free at her dinners. Speakers have included journalist and author Sally Armstrong, who has travelled many times to Afghanistan and has written about her experience; Timothy Goddard, the father of Capt. Nichola Goddard, the first female Canadian soldier ever killed in combat; former televi-
The only thing that’s going to change that kind of thinking is more education
IRENE MACDONALD
sion war correspondent Arthur Kent, and Lauryn Oates, a humanrights activist and occasional Herald columnist, who started up a chapter of Cw4wafghan in 1996 when she was just 14, and who still oversees the 14 projects that the charity funds, through frequent trips to Afghanistan.
Tonight’s speaker is CBC television reporter Mellissa Fung, who was kidnapped at knifepoint and stabbed by a gang of thugs seeking ransom near a refugee camp outside of Kabul on Oct. 12, 2008.
Fung was held for 28 days in a coffin-like hole in the ground, before being released. She subsequently wrote a gripping, bestselling book about her ordeal titled Under an Afghan Sky: A Memoir of Captivity.
Eisenhauer says of the 1,000 Breaking Bread dinners held across Canada since they started one decade ago, Macdonald’s is the largest. Overall, the dinners have raised $2 million but the effect has been priceless.
Since the Cw4wafghan started in 1996, the registered charity’s programs educate more than 50,000 girls every year. More than 2,200 teachers have been trained since 2008, thousands of Afghan men and women have been taught how to read and write and community libraries have been opened in cities and remote villages thanks to this volunteer- driven organization. The charity also funds several schools for street kids and orphans, who are also provided with a warm lunch, medical care, clothing and some loving kindness and hope.
Eisenhauer says there are countless touching stories of how the money raised in Canada improves lives and transforms communities.
“There’s a really common phrase many of the women over there have said to me and to others. They say, ‘I was blind, until I learned to read.’ They say that until they could read they didn’t know what the world was really about — they couldn’t see.”
Eisenhauer adds that even rudimentary literacy — teaching women to count to 10 and write their names makes a huge difference.
Eisenhauer recalls Farida, a 28-year-old woman taught basic literacy who said it prevented her from being exploited.
“Learning literacy has made a huge difference to my personal life,” said the dark-haired beauty. “Now, no one can cheat me with my money,” she said of the money she earns by making and selling baskets.
Owing to the size of tonight’s dinner, its being held for the first time at the Thorncliff Community Centre, the most cost effective place to hold an event of this size that Macdonald could find.
Although the cost of the ticket for the dinner is only $20 (which will only cover the cost of the catered meal and the venue), every attendee is encouraged to give a donation of at least $75, but it’s hoped that most will give much more, since it’s difficult to find an organization that can make a dollar stretch further that CW4Wafghan.
“I just read the other day that an Afghan girls’ school had their drinking water poisoned, because the Taliban object to girls being educated,” says Macdonald, shaking her head in dismay.
“The only thing that’s going to change that kind of thinking is more education.”
The 61-year-old mother of two adult daughters says the dinner has grown so big, she had considered calling it quits last year.
But, it was just a fleeting thought and she’s glad she continued.
“We had to turn away a lot of people who wanted to come to this year’s dinner, but we are sold out,” she says with a big grin. “I think we’ll have to get a bigger venue again next year.”