Supporter: Bob Ham

Hundreds of fans cheer on Blind Einstein, the rock band as they perform as part of KidsRock4Kids, a benefit concert for Mercy Corps held recently at Crystal Ballroom. Photo: Anthony Georgis

It's not unusual for hundreds of people to crowd around the stage at the Crystal Ballroom, bouncing up and down on the venue's famed "floating" dance floor and cheering on a series of bands playing rock songs both old and new. It is unusual, though, for each of those four bands to be made up of kids under the age of 18.

It's even more unusual to have a thin, fast-talking 14-year-old who spent three months juggling homework and band rehearsals in his parents' basement, lining up sponsors, doing TV and radio interviews, and selling tickets to friends and family for a charity concert.

The concert was called KidsRock4Kids, and last Friday it raised more than £3,600 for Mercy Corps' efforts to provide education, shelter and food to children around the world. The young man behind it all is Eli Hirsch, a freshman at a small community school in Portland.

"This idea was inspired by seeing the movie Slumdog Millionaire," Hirsch said, hiding out backstage while dozens of people made their way into the venue. "I had spent so much of last year getting so politically involved, working for President Obama's campaign, but seeing that movie and seeing the plight of the kids in India, it got me to thinking, 'What can I do from here?'"

What he did was organise a show where all-kid rock bands — including the group Hirsch fronts, Blind Einstein — would play for their peers in an effort to not only raise funds and awareness for impoverished children but also to inspire other kids to take up an instrument or a cause of their own.

"I really want other kids to say, 'Get me in on this!'," says Hirsch, who is already formulating plans for the next KidsRock4Kids benefit. "I mean, we did it! My band has only been together like five months and we're playing the Crystal Ballroom! It's beyond exciting."

Hirsch was not alone in this campaign, though. He worked closely with David Ellman, an erstwhile software developer who helps promote Still Pending, a virtuosic rock trio that features his 13-year-old son Grant on drums. Together, Eli and David picked Mercy Corps as the event's beneficiary.

"We were looking for something that was India-specific and that worked with children, and Mercy Corps fit the bill," Ellman said, loading up his camcorder with a fresh tape. "And the fact that they are local and super efficient with their funds just helped make the decision that much easier."

Mercy Corps works to nurture and shelter children around the world, with programmes that range from rebuilding agricultural high schools in Afghanistan to running sports-as-therapy programmes that aim to heal emotional wounds of young earthquake survivors in Peru.

In addition to the nearly £3,600 the KidsRock4Kids team raised through ticket sales, they collected another £270 selling raffle tickets. The grand prize: a guitar donated by Tigard Music and signed by members of one of Portland's most famous bands, The Decemberists. They also sold a bunch of t-shirts and CDs, the proceeds of which also went to Mercy Corps.

"When we were making publicity calls, we spoke with Terry Currier at Music Millennium and he mentioned that the Decemberists were going to be in the store promoting their new CD," Ellman explained. "We contacted them and asked if they’d sign the guitar. They agreed and Eli took the guitar to the store to have it signed. It was just great timing."

As exciting as the hope of winning a prized piece of music memorabilia was for the audience, the real thrills came when each band played. The evening included a set by Social Appetite, a indie rock quartet that featured the only female performer of the evening (drummer Iris Hehn) as well as a bassist, Grant Stringer, who played while leaning on a thick cast earned in a skiing accident; The Vibrations, a band made up of four brothers, including 4-year-old Elisha Henig, who danced, played percussion and even sang lead on a pair of tunes; and Blind Einstein, who played an impassioned set featuring a politically-charged song, "Streets Of The World," inspired by Slumdog.

Like any great rock concert, the biggest response from the crowd — a more than 700-person strong mix of kids from toddlers to high school seniors, along with their parents — came for the closing act, Still Pending. The trio wowed the crowd with spot-on versions of Led Zeppelin and Thin Lizzy classics, topped off with playing that belied the tender age of the players (singer/guitarist Reed Stutz is a mere 13 years old).

As easy as it was to get caught up in the excitement of the performances, it was even easier to tap into Eli's infectious energy as he bounced around the venue making sure everything — from the merchandise booth hawking t-shirts and CDs of the bands to the screen running a slideshow of pictures of children from around the world — was in place.

"I don't know where he gets it from," says Eli's dad, Gary, who looked positively awestruck at what his young son had accomplished. "He is coming from a really good place though. He always says, 'Life's too short so you might as well help out as much as you can while you're here.'"

For all the children from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe who might see their lives improved by Eli's hard work, that's sure to be music to their ears.

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22-year-old Mehnaz Akthar is supporting her 11-member family with her skills as a seamstress, a talent she picked up at one of three sewing centers set up by Mercy Corps in Pakistan. Photo: Miguel Samper/Mercy Corps

Growing up, the chattering gears of my mother's sewing machine provided the soundtrack to weekends in our home. Her dexterity with a foot pedal translated to nifty Halloween costumes for my brother and me, never going to school with rips in our pants and the occasional new blouse for her.

The familiar chatter of the Ghari Duppatta Sewing Centre took me back to those days. But while my mother's efforts were simply to save a few dollars and express her creativity, the women sewing here are working towards a much bigger goal: putting food on their family's table.

One such woman is Mehnaz Akhtar. This 22-year-old is helping to take care of expenses for her 11-member family by using the skills that she has learned at this centre to make new salwar kameez (the tunic and trousers combination that is the national dress of Pakistan) to sell at a local boutique and by helping make alterations and repairs to already worn salwars.

She has also become something of a rising star at the sewing centre. Although she had never done any sewing before, she picked up on these new skills so quickly that she soon became a volunteer at the centre. Now, when she's not working on her own projects, she's helping other women with theirs and providing some training.

She is one of over 400 Pakistani women who are learning the highly marketable skills of hand tailoring and embroidery at this sewing centre, one of three that Mercy Corps has helped establish in areas affected by the 2005 earthquake, which resulted in the loss of over 70,000 lives. In each of the centers, the women are learning how to stitch things like wearable garments, handbags and mobile phone covers to be sold at nearby markets or at the centre itself.

Photo: Miguel Samper/Mercy Corps

On the day I visited, Mehnaz was one of a dozen women sitting on the floor of the centre, a small aluminum building just off the town's main road. The women conversed quietly as they turned the cranks on manual sewing machines. As she spoke, Mehnaz inspected a large women's shirt made from silky red fabric that she had just pulled out of plastic shopping bag. "This piece was stitched up by a local tailor," she says, inspecting the shirt's seams, "but the owner didn't like what he did. So, my neighbour brought it to me to undo the work and fix it."

Mehnaz earns about 5,000 rupees a month (around £36) for her work, all of which is going to her family. "With the prices of food going up and few people at home earning anything, it has been difficult," she says. "But we can afford food much more easily now."

Mehnaz lives with her mother, her six siblings and their spouses in a pair of tents while their house — destroyed in the quake, alongside more than 1,000 others in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir — is being rebuilt. The government is helping pay for the construction, she says, but her family is still strapped. "We have to spend whatever I'm earning," she says.

Although my mother never had to make the sort of sacrifices these women are, I couldn't help but envision a kinship between her and Mehnaz, both of them working so hard for their families. Before I left I bought a long-sleeved green blouse from Mehnaz — a present for my mum.

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Perveen and her daughter Angel attend a Positive Deviance Health Clinic, a Mercy Corps-led course helping underweight children gain some much-needed pounds. Photo: Miguel Samper/Mercy Corps

You would expect a small room of 20 young children between the ages of six months and three years to be quite a noisy affair. But in this narrow space in Pakistan's Hazara Town, it is surprisingly quiet.

The only sounds are the quiet conversations between the moms, who are sitting besides their kids in a wide circle. The children are too busy being fed heaping spoonfuls of suji - a mushy mixture of milk, oil and flour - to be able to chatter or coo.

The children and their mothers are here to take part in a Positive Deviance Health Clinic. This 12-week course, run by Mercy Corps, is meant to help dangerously underweight children put on some much-needed pounds, and help their moms learn more about healthy cooking and good nutrition by highlighting best practices in the community.

The positive deviance approach tries to "identify and optimize existing resources and solutions within the community to solve community problems," rather than try to solve problems using external resources, according to the Tufts-based Positive Deviance Initiative.

"Our staff talks with women who bring children into our free health clinics for vaccinations," says Dr. Zulfiqar Ali, Mercy Corps' regional coordinator for health programmes in the southwestern part of Pakistan. "We look for those kids that are obviously under the proper weight for their age and encourage their mothers to take them to our clinics."

These clinics focus not only on helping fill the bellies of these young ones for one day, but also on encouraging their mothers to seek out foods that are relatively inexpensive but pack a lot of nutrition into each bite.

Photo: Miguel Samper/Mercy Corps

To emphasize this idea, the health officers running the clinic tell the moms to bring in one food item — a vegetable, beans, noodles, or spices — and they all work together to cook a meal for everyone to enjoy. "This way, we can show them the best ways to prepare these different foods so they get the most nutrition out of them," says Amina, the supervisor for this health clinic.

One child who is feeling the benefits of these clinics is Angel, a 14-month-old girl who, according to her mother Perveen, was "very weak and not doing well" before she took part in this course.

Since joining the clinic, Angel has gained almost six pounds, and there are no signs of weakness in her bright smile. "She is really happy now," beams Perveen. "She is so calm during these sessions."

From the looks of the serene young children, happily enjoying spoonfuls of suji, she's not alone.

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Photo: Miguel Samper/Mercy Corps

As a first-time visitor to Afghanistan, I was immediately struck by a number of things I wasn't accustomed to seeing every day. Women covered head-to-toe in sky-blue burkas. High perimeter walls that gave every home, no matter how humble, the look of a fortified compound. Hundreds of street vendors hawking everything from butchered lambs to bootleg Bollywood soundtracks to American cigarettes.

But most of all, it was the guns.

To my Westernized eyes, they seemed to be everywhere. Imposing automatic weapons strapped to the sides of soldiers at Kabul Airport. Rifle barrels poking out of the back of military vehicles. Even the farmer in the smallest village had a gun resting up against a wall in his home. They're commonplace in a country that has been molded by a seemingly never-ending series of armed struggles in its 90 years of independence.

Over the last 30 years, especially, the fighting hasn't seemed to stop. There was the decade-long Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, when Red Army forces attempted to gain control of what they saw as the largest threat to their control of Central Asia. They withdrew defeated in 1989, which sparked a 12-year civil war as the secular government grappled for control with the Islamic fighters known as the mujahidin.

Out of this instability arose the Taliban. This radical Islamic group -- known for its terror tactics, strict religious ideology and discrimination against women -- drew to its cause frustrated former mujahidin and Afghans seeking stability at any price. They were most successful courting impoverished young people with few job prospects and no means to an education. The Taliban proved -- through their terror tactics and strict religious ideology -- to be enormously powerful, taking control of over 90 percent of the country by the year 2000.

The U.S. entered the fray after the September 11th attacks, when U.S.-led forces conducted air and ground attacks aimed at deposing the Taliban and forcing them to give up Osama Bin Laden, whom the de facto government considered a "guest" in their country. Operation "Enduring Freedom" helped the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance regain control of the country's major cities.

An old piece of Soviet munitions sits by the side of the road, a reminder of Afghanistan's troubled past. Photo: Miguel Samper/Mercy Corps

A new U.S.-supported government took power in 2002, with a new constitution and Hamid Karzai as president. It hasn't been an easy transition. Karzai has so far survived four assassination attempts, while several of his cabinet members, including vice-president Abdul Qadir, have not been as fortunate.

The fighting between U.S. forces and Afghan militants still rages on in the country's south, along the country's mountainous border with Pakistan. And violence still pervades the country. A French aid worker was kidnapped a few blocks from our Kabul office on the day I arrived, and over the next 10 days, I would hear reports of three suicide bombings in Kabul and Kunduz, the two major cities in northern Afghanistan.

Not surprisingly, the ongoing violence and instability impacted the lives of everyone I met during my trip. Syeed Masom, a yogurt maker in Kabul, told me of how his eldest son was killed when Taliban missiles struck a bazaar where he was working. Nasrin, a baker in Kabul, spoke of her struggles providing for her family after her husband suffered debilitating injuries in the civil war. A peach farmer named Daud Shah recounted the stress of uprooting his family of nine from his farm in Takhar to the safety of Pakistan, before returning five years later.

Thousands of Afghans, in fact, fled to Iran and Pakistan during the late '90s and early 2000s. It is only in the last few years that many have felt safe enough to return to their homes. And it is only in the past year or so that many of Mercy Corps' programmes have taken root.

Daud Shah's young son carries a homemade shovel to his father. Photo: Miguel Samper/Mercy Corps

During my tour of those programmes, I visited families in isolated rural areas where agriculture is essentially the only way to make a living. There, in villages around Kunduz, farmers lauded the new irrigation projects Mercy Corps helped them build to regulate the flow of water to their farmland -- markedly improving crop yields -- and to protect homes from flooding.

Many of the farmers were patiently waiting for the first harvest from peach, apricot and apple saplings that we helped them plant and cultivate. And they were preparing their sons to take over the land at agricultural high schools that Mercy Corps refurbished. In a nation where four out of every five laborers is employed in agriculture, these projects are vitally important.

While the farmers haven't yet seen the full effects of our efforts, 11,000 Afghans in the capital city of Kabul are already feeling the difference. They're the recipients of small loans, most less than £60, from a microlending institution we started called Ariana Financial Services. Most are women. I met several of these entrepreneurs -- bread bakers, yogurt makers, seamstresses -- who never before got the chance to prove their hand at running a business, but who are now on the path to financial independence.

The Afghans I met exuded hope and optimism. All those guns led me to believe I'd encounter just the opposite: a sense of fatalism. Weren't the weapons a reminder of how fleeting life could be in such a violent place? Didn't they suggest the futility of planning for a future that you or your family might never see?

Afghans would be forgiven for feeling this way, given the destruction and death they'd witnessed. Yet their attitudes dispelled my early notions. The small businesspeople in Kabul met me with huge smiles and boisterous spirits, excited about their prospects and what tomorrow had in store. The farmers living in the hills and valleys of northern Afghanistan stood tall, brimming with confidence that the next harvest would be so much better than the last.

Don’t get me wrong: Afghans are humble and realistic about their country's plight. They understand there nothing is certain, and that the stability of their homeland is constantly at risk -- realities that could upend all of their hard work. But the seeds of hope have been planted. We're helping them tend those seeds, which, with luck, will grow strong and flourish.

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Photo: Miguel Samper/Mercy Corps

Syeed Masom ushered us into the main room of his home in the heart of Kabul, motioning for us to sit on the multi-coloured carpets that lined the floors. As we settled in, his grandson brought in a metal tray carrying three empty bowls, each with a metal spoon rattling inside it, which he set in front of his three guests.

Syeed ducked outside for moment, returning with a blue plastic bucket and a white ladle. Out of the bucket, he spooned out heaping portions of thick white yogurt into our bowls, encouraging us to dig in.

Although the yogurt was plain, it had a distinctive, almost nutty flavour; entirely different from any store-bought brand I've tried. I got about one-third of the way through my bowl and picked up my notebook to start my interview, but Syeed countered by filling my bowl up to the brim again, motioning me to continue eating and beaming at every spoonful I consumed.

Photo: Miguel Samper/Mercy Corps

He has every right to be proud of his culinary efforts. The 60-year-old entrepreneur has created an amazing yogurt that is in high demand at a nearby market, and with the money he's earning, his seven-person family is getting better food and new clothes and shoes.

"Life is passing by happily now," Syeed says, his ever-present smile on his wrinkled face. "We don't have any of the troubles that we were dealing with before."

These troubles include the death of his eldest son, who was killed by a Taliban rocket attack that hit a bazaar where he was selling vegetables. Syeed still laments his son's death, but works to keep his spirit alive through the many framed pictures of him that are hung throughout the house and by taking care of his son's family as his own.

The fighting between the Afghan army and Taliban also forced Syeed and his family from Kabul for a year.

"We were living in displacement camps in Pakistan," he remembers. "Life was not good. I was working as a laborer, but we still had no food and no clothes for my family."

Photo: Miguel Samper/Mercy Corps

When they returned Syeed made a small amount of money cooking yogurt for a few shops in Kabul, but finally decided to strike out on his own in 2001.

"I was looking for a place to get a loan so I can start making yogurt," he remembers, but I couldn't find one that was willing to give me a loan with the conditions that I wanted."

Syeed found just what he was looking for in 2003, when he took out a business loan from Ariana Financial Services, an institution founded by Mercy Corps in 2003.

He heard about Ariana through a TV advertisement, and within a week, had taken out a small loan of 10,000 Afghanis (around £120) that he used to purchase a pot to cook the yogurt, some buckets for storage, as well as milk and other ingredients to get started on his first batch.

Three years later, Syeed is cooking up some 100 gallons worth of yogurt each day, which he sells in 2 gallon containers to a variety of dealers in markets throughout Kabul. And after paying expenses and picking up supplies, he's able to pocket 2,000 Afghanis (about £27) each day - a healthy sum for someone living in the fourth poorest country in the world.

On top of this, Syeed was diligent about making sure his loan was paid back on schedule. "I didn't miss out on one installment," he remembers proudly. This dogged effort earned him the chance to take out a second loan for his business and to be able to sign on as a guarantor for loans taken out by his neighbors and family.

One such loan was taken out by Syeed's cousin, Zahria. This 35-year-old mother of five began an almond-selling business, using the loan to buy bags of raw, unshelled almonds. She and her eldest daughter, Mursal, then use a hammer to crack the shells open, packing the meaty, teardrop-shaped insides into 1kg bags to be sold at a local bazaar.

Zahria, a 35-year-old mother of five, took out a loan from Afghanistan’s Mercy Corps-supported Ariana Financial Services to begin an almond-selling business. Learn more about Zahria on One Table › Photo: Miguel Samper/Mercy Corps

On the day we visited Syeed, we were able to see Zahria and Mursal hard at work (the cousins share a home in Kabul), hunched over a small piece of slate that they used to break open the almond shells. It's a lot of work for two young women, but their efforts are worth the time they are putting into it.

"I had to rely on my husband for everything," Zahria said, not looking up from her work. "Now, I’m able to buy clothes for myself and my children and household expenses without having to go to him for money.

Just before we leave, Syeed begins his preparations for a new batch of yogurt. He pours about five gallons of milk into a large metal pot that is sitting on a blackened metal stand in the narrow courtyard in front of his house. He and his son stuff a batch of old cardboard and wood underneath the stand, and Syeed sets it alight with a wooden match.

"I start this process every day at 1 p.m.," he says, stirring the quickly boiling milk with a large, long wooden spatula. "After it has cooked for a while, I add artificial milk and other additives, and I leave it to set overnight."

Syeed says he learned this trade as a young man, during his time living in Iran. He marvels at how long ago that was and how he is on his own now, with signed contracts with 40 sellers in Kabul.

And with help from Ariana and Mercy Corps, he's ready to take his business even further. "I'm ready to take out another loan," says Syeed. "I know that things will be even better after that."

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