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Feature Stories A promise is a promise
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CEFCOM Published On Thu Nov 25 2010
About Us
Newsroom By Corporal J.A. Wright
International
Operations In mid-October, a platoon from India Company of the 1st
Battalion, The Royal Canadian Regiment Battle Group
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went to Sardaran, a village in Panjwa’i District, with the
Program
Civil-Military Co-operation (CIMIC) team from Forward
Feature Stories Operations Base Ma’sum Ghar. We were delivering on a
Photo Gallery promise made more than 18 months before.
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Sardaran sits just southwest of Bazaar-e-Panjwa’i, the
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spiritual birthplace of the Taliban. I first saw it during my
  previous deployment in 2009, when I was a member of
Note: Links to external the Force Protection team working with the Construction Soldiers from India Company, 1
sites open in a new Management Organization (CMO), then part of the RCR Batte Group, guard the
browser window, and are highway while the rest of the patrol
indicated by this icon: Kandahar Provincial Reconstruction Team. The CMO was helps Cpl Joseph Wright unload
responsible for projects that improved local infrastructure and distribute gifts for the village.
and provided local people with paid employment and
CEFCOM RSS opportunities to learn trade skills. Our biggest project at
(What is RSS?) that time was paving the road from Panjwa’i District
Centre to Sperwan Ghar, on which much of the work was
done by hundreds of Afghan labourers with hand tools.

Day after day, we rolled out of FOB Ma’sum Ghar in our

Tracked Light Armoured Vehicles (or TLAVs), keeping the
speed below 10 km/h to accommodate the construction
vehicles the Afghan contractors used for heavy lifting.
Before work could begin, the Force Protection team
walked the entire jobsite with explosive-detection dogs, Cpl Joseph Wright of the 1 RCR
looking for signs of IEDs; then we cordoned off the area. Battle Group distributes prayer
mats donated by the congregation
For the rest of the day, we maintained the security o f the Jami Omar mosque in
cordon, which meant moving around the perimeter, Ottawa, Ontario.
watching our arcs and checking the Afghan security
guards.

The big problem was complacency, and interacting with

the villagers living around the jobsite helped us keep
sharp and aware. Most of the time we engaged with the
children, occasionally meeting their fathers, older brothers
and cousins. We quickly learned to prioritize, dividing our
attention between the open vineyards to the east and
the occasional conversation. Besides, there’s only so
much small talk you can make when you know maybe two
dozen words in Pashto. An elder distributes Canadian-
donated school supplies to village
children.
It wasn’t long before we took to bringing the occasional
personal aid package, mostly notebooks and pens (the
number-one request from Afghan children to ISAF
troops), supplemented by items such as warm gloves and
hats donated by loved ones back home.

Children were’t the only ones to benefit from these

random acts of kindness. The CMO engineers would
donate surplus construction materials to people living
near the site to improve their compounds. Some used
concrete barriers, for example, became front steps for a
store that sprang into existence to serve the hundreds of
An elder distributes Canadian-
workers brought to the area by the paving project. This donated school supplies to village
policy started me thinking about side projects that would children.
both help the locals and alleviate the boredom of walking
the same ground day after day.

The village mosque had beautifully crafted wooden

window frames, but the spaces that should have been
spanned by glass panes were filled with mud bricks. With
the help of “GQ”, our stylish interpreter, we learned that
a contractor hired to glaze the windows back in the early
’90s took the community’s money and fled during the
power struggle that followed the Soviet occupation. For

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 nearly 20 years, the bricks were the best they could do
to keep the interior safe from the elements. An elder distributes Canadian-
donated school supplies to village
children.
I talked to my section commander, Master Corporal Harry
Little, and the mosque project began. I measured every window frame and we forwarded
the information through the chain of command, along with a proposal to install a public
address system so the imam could make the call to prayer more effectively. Within a
week, a Civil-Military Co-operation (CIMIC) team arrived to assess the mosque. (CIMIC
handles quick-impact infrastructure projects such as well-drilling, installation of street
lighting and restoration of water systems.) The CIMIC team purchased the project
materials locally and made arrangements with the Afghan National Army for installation of
both the window glass and the speaker system.

These two small projects seemed to galvanize the villagers, who thanked us for our
efforts and followed up with a new security wall around the mosque grounds and the
restoration of the ablution areas where the faithful wash their face, hands and feet in
ritual fashion before prayer. With the building secure at last, they also wanted to improve
the interior, their chief complaint being that the concrete floor was miserably cold in
winter. This problem got me thinking about getting more than just notebooks and hats
from back home.

Growing up in the west end of Ottawa, I attended D.A. Moodie Intermediate School on
Moodie Drive. Many of my fellow pupils came from Muslim families and attended prayers at
the mosque across the street, Jami Omar (formally the Jamiatul Muslemeen of Ottawa-
Carleton). E-mailing them put me in contact with Jaffar Shaikh, and the Jami Omar
community soon gathered a shipment of 146 prayer mats and some other religious items.

The imam and village elders were thrilled when I told them about the donation, not only
for the sake of the high-quality prayer mats they would soon receive but also to learn of
people in Canada willing to help them. Most of them were genuinely surprised — even
shocked — that the donation would come from a mosque in Canada, and that the people
of Jami Omar are part of a large Canadian Muslim community. The very idea of a
multifaith, multiethnic nation was new to them, and it would spur many interesting
discussions later.

It was already late in my tour when I made contact with Jami Omar, and it takes at least
three weeks for a parcel from Canada to reach a soldier deployed in Afghanistan. The
shipment of prayer mats was not ready in time for me to deliver them to Sardaran before
redeploying, and I left with deep regret at not having fulfilled my promise. After all, you’re
only as good as your word.

My family kept the boxes of donated mats, and I tried and failed several times to ship
them during the months after I returned to Canada. I asked friends deploying to
Afghanistan, but their jobs would not allow them to visit a village deep in Panjwa’i. I
asked the Afghan Embassy in Ottawa how to ship 146 prayer mats to Kandahar, or how a
Canadian citizen could take such a shipment there on his own. Just when I was beginning
to think I should give the mats back to Jami Omar, an opportunity came up to return to
Kandahar with the 1 RCR Battle Group on Roto 9.

The prayer mats came too, in my unaccompanied baggage.

When we arrived in Sardaran, the people gave us a warm welcome. I saw many familiar
faces, but the village had changed in the year since I had last seen it. There were a lot
of newly built homes, and more renovation had been done on the mosque. Everyone was
ecstatic to receive the prayer mats at last — 146 proved to be more than enough to
outfit the mosque and provide each household with three.

For the children, we also brought an assortment of notebooks and pens that a village
elder distributed in a very orderly fashion, and a box of toys donated by a master-
corporal from the National Support Element and his family. When the kids saw that, they
tore into it like piranhas devouring a piece of meat.

Everyone in Sardaran that day benefited from the generosity of the donors, who gave us
a chance to show the villagers that the people of Canada want to help them, and allowed
me to fulfill an important promise.

Cpl Joseph Wright is a member of the 3rd Battalion, The Royal Canadian Regiment, from
the Petawawa garrison. He is currently deployed in Afghanistan with the 1 RCR Battle
Group.

Date Modified: 2010-11-25 Important Notices

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