Long-time Saskatoon MLA helping former colleagues in Afghanistan

Former Saskatchewan MLA Pat Atkinson has had some trouble sleeping.

She’s been working day and night, looking to provide relief for former colleagues overseas in the chaos and the carnage in Afghanistan. Atkinson worked in the country from 2013 to 2015 as the senior resident director at a Canadian-funded operation focused on increasing women’s political participation in Afghanistan.

“I’m now in the process of trying to get people who worked on our project to Canada. I’ve written dozens of letters, and I have three cases — there were three families — that received a letter of passage to the Kabul airport,” she told 650 CKOM Thursday.

Atkinson explained what the families had to go through getting to the Kabul airport, including one family trudging through a sewage canal. They’ve now made it to Kuwait, Atkinson said.

The other two families are still in their homes in Kabul. One of the individuals actually went to the gates near the airport before being “badly beaten” by the Taliban, right in front of his wife and four-month-old daughter, according to Atkinson.

Now that Canada has stopped its evacuation flights, Atkinson said she is looking to bring her people overland if the Canadian embassy’s in Pakistan and India accept her e-letters, which offers passage to the airport.

“We’re in a bit of a muddle right now. We’re desperately trying to find out from the Canadian officials — hopeful the e-letters will work,” she said, before explaining more on her current situation in Afghanistan.

“I have not really slept much because there’s four of us trying to help our colleagues get out.”

She said herself, along with individuals from the U.S., Mexico and the Ukraine, are all in contact on Signal, an encrypted social media platform.

If they aren’t able to make it to the airport, Atkinson said they are working to possibly get buses to transport them out of the country. She added that time is of the essence.

“These people really, really are in danger because they worked on democracy-making programs and there is no democracy at the moment in Afghanistan,” Atkinson explained.

She said she’s felt discouraged by the developments over the summer in the country. When she was there in 2015, you still had to be careful when traveling around. They heard bombings from the office, but their organization did not lose any colleagues.

Atkinson said she isn’t sure if her colleagues were impacted by the bombings Thursday morning.