53-year-old Benny Werge from Sorø in Denmark is new Country Director for Mission East’s biggest country programme, Afghanistan.

Being close to the people we help is part of the vision of Mission East. Our newly-opened office in Nepal will help us taking care of our assistance to the extremely poor population in the mountainous north of the country.
 

The winter cold will soon be coming to Afghanistan. To a lot of schoolchildren, temperatures below 10 degrees means daily discomfort and the risk of getting seriously ill. They have to sit on the cold floor for several hours during classes.
 

Both Sohaila Khan, 25, and Maa Begum, 50, lived in extreme poverty in northern Afghanistan. It was a constant struggle to feed themselves and their children. "There was no light at the end of the tunnel," says Sohaila.
Until July 2006.
 

"We didn't even have a small piece of land where we could grow food for ourselves," says Maa Begum (bottom picture). For years her eldest son tried in vain to provide for nine family members with a monthly income of merely 54 dollars. He was the only one who was lucky enough to be able to find a job.

The Cultural House in Armavir, Armenia, was filled with joy and happy faces on the 3rd of December. Disabled children linked to the Mission East project "A Healthy Start" had been invited to the theatre on the International Day of Disabled Persons. For many of them this was their first time at the theatre – even though it was only a puppet show.
 

Afghanistan has dropped one place in a UN study that ranks the population’s development in 178 countries worldwide. "Human Development Index" is based on values like income, life expectancy and literacy.
The report was released on November 18th and shows that only four other countries (all of them located in Africa) ranks lower than Afghanistan. This makes Afghanistan the fifth least developed country in the world and the poorest in all of Asia.