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Wednesday, May 9, 2007
Atlanta JAG carries out aid mission for Afghan refugee village
By Meredith Hobbs, Staff Reporter
On Friday, U.S. soldiers distributed two 7-ton trucks’ worth of clothes, shoes and supplies to a refugee village near Kabul Military Training Center in Afghanistan. Atlanta solo plaintiffs’ attorney Scott Delius, serving in Afghanistan as an Army National Guard JAG since November 2006, organized the relief effort.
SCOTT D. DELIUS is ordinarily a solo plaintiffs’ attorney in Atlanta but has been serving in Afghanistan as an Army National Guard member since November 2006. He is stationed at the country’s largest military training base as a judge advocate general helping to train the Afghan National Army.
In late February, appalled and frustrated by the desperate poverty he’d seen in a refugee village near his base at the Kabul Military Training Center, he organized a clothing drive for the villagers.
The response was enthusiastic and generous. Within a few weeks, Delius had received more than 200 boxes of clothes, shoes and supplies at Camp Alamo, the American base at KMTC—all labeled and sorted by size and gender.
The contributions from colleagues and friends in Atlanta, Tennessee, New York and elsewhere were enough to fill a 7-ton truck. Boxes collected by Camp Alamo’s commander, Col. Jim Lyman, filled another 7-ton truck.
On Friday more than 50 soldiers at Delius’ base volunteered to help him transport the donations to a nearby village and distribute them to the Afghans. Since Friday is a Muslim holiday, it is the soldiers’ day off at the base.
Delius wrote on the blog that he’s keeping of his tour, Afghanistan JAG, that it took him about two weeks to plan the trip. He checked out the village three times, then planned the route and organized the personnel before Friday’s expedition off the base.
Crowd control was the soldiers’ biggest task; the villagers jockeyed for better spots in line for the clothing and shoes. Delius writes that there were no women or girls in the line because the men and boys kept pushing them aside—so the soldiers moved the girls to the front of the line, where they received all the clothes they could carry.
“We were able to put shoes, pants, shirts and jackets on over 500 people and size them correctly. That is a massive undertaking,” he said on his blog, where he also has posted pictures of the humanitarian mission. Delius, who was promoted to captain in April, is due to return to Atlanta later this month. He and his colleagues and family are working with a humanitarian organization to keep the aid effort going after his return and send shoes and clothes to Afghans in other villages.