OFI 1954: The Story Doesn't End When The News Cycle Changes | Caroline Clarin | Friends And Allies Project

An interesting dynamic of our world today is the news cycle.  We know about more of the most horrific events and suffering in the world than any of our predecessors.  However, it turns out that there are a lot of very bad stories out there, each of them compelling.  As such, we have the strange phenomena of hearing about something in another part of the world that causes us great consternation in the short term, but is then replaced by another horrific event that causes us to slowly withdraw concern or even forget about the first event.  And the cycle repeats itself.

Just because we experience this phenomena, does not mean that any of the problems we initially heard about have been fixed or even improved.  It just means that they are not being talked about on a large scale any longer.  But somewhere, there are people still dealing with the issue that still need help.

In 2021, the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan after being omnipresent in that country for two decades.  This created a vacuum that the Taliban quickly filled, and it put the people who worked with the U.S. in our efforts in peril.  This was a great crisis and huge news story at the time, and it compelled me to interview Caroline Clarin, a woman who I had read about that was helping families from Afghanistan that she had come to know when she was doing agricultural work there between 2009 and 2011.

On today's show we are following up with Caroline.  She is still very involved in this work, and her efforts have now evolved into a 501(c)(3) called the Friends And Allies Project where she and her team are working to support five families who made it out of Afghanistan but are stuck in Pakistan trying to get Visas that will allow them to come to the U.S.