Afghanistan

A British woman who is now living in Afghanistan to work for orphanages came to visit our school and talk to us about what she is doing in Afghanistan.

What surprised us a lot is that Afghanistan looks a lot like Switzerland. There are a lot of mountains with snow and grass on them.

The Afghan people are very poor and the kids play war for fun because that's all they see, war. Bombs explode all the time in Afghanistan because of the Taliban. Kids played with fake guns because that's what they see in their lives but I was surprised to see children playing in the streets with plastic guns because I thought they would be poorer than that.

They are poor and very violent but to see what they are doing when they're not fighting is surprising. They kind of have normal lives. People help kids to learn, they go out on the streets just hanging out. It's nothing too weird but to see and hear something g different than what you hear on the news is very shocking. You rely on the news and you listen to it for new events but there is a big difference between the first hand news and second hand news.

We saw a lot of photos of the Afghan countryside. We were all surprised because there were mountains with snow. We asked how come Afghanistan has mountains because we thought that Afghanistan was very hot.

We also saw many pictures with kids at nursery school, where they learn and on the streets. It was very sad and moving.

A lot of the problems in Afghanistan were for girls and women. About 20 years ago, girls could not go to school because people thought that men should do better things than women and that women where only to work in the house so they didn't get proper education.