Three Years in Afghanistan: An American Family's Story of Faith, Endurance, and Love - Softcover

Collins, Matthew

Softcover

ISBN 10: 153338942X ISBN 13: 9781533389428

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2016

Synopsis

Afghanistan is a land of conflict and massive human needs, but it is much more than that. A place of veiled beauty, its people are resilient with deeply held traditions, generous hospitality, and a sense of leeriness toward the West. In the summer of 2004, humanitarian aid worker Matthew Collins, his wife Christine, and their one-year-old daughter Ellie moved to Afghanistan. This memoir describes their first three years trying to make a difference in this incredible country. From harrowing moments of danger, to light-hearted and heartbreaking cultural encounters, they learn to overcome the challenges of fear and culture shock through faith, endurance, and love.

About this title

About the Author

Matthew Collins is the pen name for a Christian aid worker originally from Texas. He has a master’s degree in intercultural studies and extensive experience in international development work. Matthew has traveled in more than 70 countries, but fell in love with the Afghan people.

Review

As a military veteran of multiple tours in Afghanistan, I whole-heartedly recommend Three Years in Afghanistan. In 2003, the coalition presence provided Matt Collins and his team of aid workers a window of relative stability in Afghanistan to help those impoverished by years of war and Taliban oppression. Not one to sit by the side and just offer ideas, Matt leveraged his years of experience serving in difficult places to move his family to a remote region of Afghanistan so that they could live amongst the Afghan people to provide desperately needed humanitarian aid and community health development. I encourage everyone to read this true story of an American family making a difference and standing in the gap that many of us held open so that they could meet the personal needs of the Afghan people.

For those considering such a mission as Matt's, this book marks the trail for you to follow. Matt and Christine are people of action who demonstrate how to exhibit cultural sensitivity and humility enabling them to live among and serve a people the outside world knows very little about. I also lived amongst the Afghan people, but did so with guns, helicopters and HESCO barriers... with my family safely back in the USA.  Matt, Christine and their young daughter and son did it with nothing more than faith and a desire to serve others more than self. This book will inspire you to action.
- Brig. General Robert Armfield, USAF

Riveting! Heartrending! Challenging! I haven't read a more compelling story in years. This book is a story of compassion, courage, faithfulness and grace in the most difficult of circumstances. It stimulated my faith to grow as I was reminded what God can do if you totally surrender to Him.  I devoured this book. You have to read it!- David Stevens, MD, M.A. (Ethics), CEO, Christian Medical & Dental Associations

Matthew Collins is a vivid storyteller who weaves candidness and truth into his life experiences and then openly shares them with us. Three Years in Afghanistan is his and his family's journey and presents a great read for anyone contemplating cross-cultural service. It strips away the romanticism and idealism of working overseas, looks at the struggles and joys in an objective way, and challenges the reader to look beyond the surface and count the cost to follow Christ to the ends of the earth.
- Jeff Palmer, Executive Director, Baptist Global Response 


What would it look like to move into a remote, war-torn setting to do development work with a longer-term mentality? What would it look like to bring along young children and to create a home in the midst of terrorist threats, military coups, harsh conditions, and extreme poverty?

Three Years in Afghanistan provides a humorous but honest answer to what, for many, would be an unthinkable challenge. Matthew Collins (pen name for an American Christian aid worker) details his personal journey from a well-situated life in his home country to the highs and lows of living among and working with the war-torn communities of Afghanistan. Beginning with a survey trip just one month before 9/11, this narrative account walks with a young family through the process of discerning their calling, counting the cost, uprooting their lives, learning a new language and culture, setting up a very different sort of home, and settling in as endangered but beloved members of an Islamic community. 

Far from the saintly picture that such biographies tend to paint, Matt Collins treats his readers to an endearingly honest portrayal of his struggles to navigate a foreign and often perplexing culture, to figure out approaches to sustainable development that actually help more than hurt, to hold together the tension of sheltering his own precious children while engaging the desperate situations of myriad children all around them, and to overcome his own feelings of frustration, pride, inadequacy, and fear. Through rock-bottom lows and pinnacles of exhilarating success, Collins's demonstrates what authentic Christian faith looks like when put to the test.

My favorite chapter is the one in which Matt gets roped into teaching Cultural Anthropology to a group of Muslim women at the local University. I laughed out loud at his bumbling, indelicate attempts to build bridges between their veiled, tightly restricted world and the vast diversity of peoples and cultures they had never been allowed to encounter. But as this macho Texan learned to see the world through the intelligent comments and sensitive questions of a class full of gender-oppressed survivors, neither walked away unchanged.

Another highlight of the book for me was the night Matt sat up swapping tall tales as a guest in the home of a tribal warlord. This humorously recounted event captures the complexity of building relationships with people that transcend cultural, ideological, and national loyalties. In Matt's case, humbly accepting hospitality and creatively finding points of shared interest resulted in an open invitation (and promised protection) for community health workers to bring tuberculosis treatment to a vastly underserved population. 

Though the story of the Collins's life in Afghanistan goes beyond the end of this book, Three Years in Afghanistan: An American Family's Story of Faith, Endurance, and Love captures what life can look like for someone seriously committed to making the world a better place. It ends with a snapshot of this family's life in their new community. Having survived cultural faux pas, development fails, anti-Western mob violence, and their own bouts of uncertainty, illness, isolation, and burnout, the Collins family celebrate the birth of their son with their whole Afghan neighborhood. For a blessed evening, music and dancing, good food and shared laughter bind their hearts to the people they have come to see not just as a project, but as their own. - Tiffany C., Cross-Cultural Worker

Edition details

• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 153338942X
• ISBN 13: 9781533389428
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 316