Empathy: a mental or affective projection into the feelings or state of mind of another person.

I went on a civil affairs mission today. We visited a local village to see if we could provide some humanitarian assistance. The pictures really speak for themselves. Since I left the village this morning, I've been walking around in a fog. I am overwhelmed by what I saw.

Please try to spend some time with these pictures. Click on them to enlarge them.

Look at these beautiful children. Notice how they hold their arms close because they are so cold. They look like they could be kids just down the street from you, don't they?


No shoes. Her feet are practically blue.

Another little girl with no shoes.

This is the trash dump that is right in the middle of their village. No means to get rid of it.

What a little sweetheart. She kept playing a game with me....she would wait for me to give her a big goofy grin and then she would laugh.

This broke my heart, their livestock feeding on trash.

The kids beg for anything. Even the pen in your pocket is something amazing to them.

It's very cold.

Another sweet little girl.

Sadness.

I am just so dumbfounded by all of this. A good friend told me that I should "get over myself," because most of the world lives this way. That may be true, but it's something altogether different to see it yourself firsthand.

You probably can't grasp this concept fully by just looking at these pictures. I know that I couldn't either before I came here.

You can see a picture of a little girl barefoot and intellectually understand that it's freezing cold, but it is altogether different for me to be three feet away from her and feel the cold too. Then there's the sick feeling I got because I knew that I would soon be back in my warm room, but she'll go back to her mud hut with the collapsed roof. She'll still be cold. And she still won't have shoes tomorrow.

You can see the picture of the trash pile where the little girl plays, and you can feel bad for her. But it's something different for me to be able to smell that stench, and know that it never goes away for her.

There's this overwhelming urge to somehow save all of them. Then there's the terrible human nature to throw up your hands, to give up, to not do anything, because you know you can't save them all.

I don't have any answers. I know we are going to try and help.

A good friend told me that I would come back from Afghanistan as a different person.

I didn't believe it then.....

But I believe it now.