Naval Officer, USF Class Deliver School Supplies to Afghan Children

Waiting for a table to open at a busy Sarasota restaurant, all Greg Para could do is find humor in the situation, as another man hassled the host.

“I gladly would have waited a long time,” said Para, a naval officer who’s home in Sarasota between deployments to Afghanistan.

No kidding. With a recent Koran-burning incident in Afghanistan, Para had to wait until the middle of the night to be flown out with cover, just to leave the country safely.

“Waiting 15 minutes isn’t an inconvenience after living out of a tent, walking through mud and snow just to go to the bathroom,” he said. “Over there, you’re at Level One of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.”

Para, 49, is doing his part to satisfy basic school needs for children in Afghanistan, with the help of some special friends in Sarasota and at the University of South Florida Honors College in Temple Terrace, where Liisa Hyvarinen Temple leads a class called Social Media for Social Change.

The students in her class are using social media to help nonprofit causes — specifically one called School Supplies for Afghan Children. The class also raises money for American Veterans with Brain Injuries and the Bob Woodruff Foundation.

Temple’s husband, retired Senior Master Sgt. Rex Temple, started this cause and maintained a blog Afghanistan: My Last Tour, about his efforts during his final deployment. The cause has volunteers everywhere, and she routinely receives requests in her inbox.

Six weeks ago she received a request from Para. Who knew that one of the many soldiers delivering those school supplies would be from Sarasota?

“They never get to meet the soldiers,” the South Tampa resident said about her students. “These are just names on the shipping label. Now they will put Greg’s name on the shipping label and customs form.”

The school effort in Afghanistan is a natural for Para. He runs his own business, called The Goat Program, with his wife Pearl Para. The business includes educational programs. Previously, he taught life skills courses for , which actively collects donations for the mission. A public drop-off has been established at outside the dining hall.

His wife is also a doctoral student at USF where he will speak to her International Education class Monday night.

Student Phoebe Chang of New Tampa said she’s excited to meet Para and didn’t realize the planning and intelligence needed to go on a humanitarian mission.

“You can’t just go somewhere because you want to,” Chang said. “It’s just so much effort and danger, too, because anything can happen in that path. It puts things in perspective when you see what they go through.”

For these humanitarian efforts, the risk is real, Para said. Security forces accompany each mission.

“We were working in an orphanage last year, delivering supplies and were attacked,” Para said. “On top of that, the adults running the orphanage took the supplies and kept the money for them. It’s more of surviving on need than corruption.”

But that incident isn’t representative of your average Afghan, he said.

“The majority of the people that I met all through Afghanistan, they’re just like secular Catholics, Methodists or Baptists. They do what they can do to provide for their families,” Para said. “Family is the centerpiece of their lives. They have faith, they work, they provide for their children.”

The conditions that the children go to school in the Hindu Kush Mountains are deplorable. Kids are in their winter jackets as they sit and go through class.

Everything is built with sand and mud. There’s no electricity, maybe not even a complete wall or roof, with gaping holes in ceilings. “The school, up where we are, is like walking in the Old Testament,” Para said. “There are no trees, no grass."

Afghan boys and girls go to school together until they are 8 years old, and at that point the genders go to school in shifts, he said. About 1,691 students go through the school serving 8 to 12 year olds in a year, Para said.

The kids are in need of pencils, paper, notebooks, and rulers — the absolute necessities. Para has seen kids even break pencils in two so they can share and have more supplies.

The immediate need is money to ship all the supplies.

One volunteer in California has an entire shipping container of boxes to send, Temple said. With a flat rate, via the Army Post Office to Afghanistan, each box costs about $13.45 to send. Donations can be made through the Tampa-based Holland & Knight Charitable Foundation.

“Most of the places we send packages to, it’s not Kabul, and not one of the big bases,” Temple said. “They’re out to combat outposts, most of the time in the Taliban area.”

When Para arrives to see these children, they are thankful and feel close to the soldiers.

“One day when I walked out and was getting ready to leave at our entry control point, a group of eight middle school kids literally walked miles to come and asked if their teacher would be able to get out of the hospital to come teach them English,” he said.

From miles to months, the donation drive will not end “until the troops come home,” Temple said.

“If you’re saying, 'I’m against the war, I don’t believe in the war,' you can still support the troops and support the leadership of the [Afghanistan], so we don’t have another 9/11,” she said.

Para returns to Afghanistan March 21 for his second deployment. He’ll be waiting to see your name and familiar ZIP code on those packages.

How To Donate

Tax-deductible contributions for the Afghan School Supplies Fund can be made through the Holland & Knight Charitable Foundation.

Online donations can be made through this link:  http://foundation.hklaw.com/contributions/index.asp 

Type Afghan kids under description

Send checks payable to The Holland & Knight Charitable Foundation, Inc. 

Write in the memo: Afghan School Supplies Fund. 

Mail checks to:

Holland & Knight Charitable Foundation, Inc

Care of Brian JordanHolland & Knight LLP

201 N. Franklin Street – 12th Floor

Tampa, FL 33602

Drop off school supplies at USF Sarasota-Manatee outside of the dining area. 

For additional drop-off locations for supplies, e-mail TRexinAfghanistan@gmail.com.

This article corrects an out of date address for Holland & Knight.