BY ELENI HIMARAS
reporter@ltview.com
Maybe building an 8,000-mile long bridge isn’t so hard after all. Area residents learned last week that they can do it simply by caring to do it.

 Several speakers at last week’s “Afghanistan: Building Bridges Between Cultures,” held by Lake Travis Reads, detailed how they were making a difference in the lives of students a third of the world away.
“We’re all very energized by people like you that are interested,” Chris Hamilton told the crowd gathered at Emmaus Catholic Church last Wednesday.
The program followed the three-library coalition’s “One Book, One Community Program” that had featured “Three Cups of Tea” by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. The book detailed his work in building schools in Afghanistan and the recent program featured local people who had chosen to do the same.
The most well known speaker of the night was Karen Hughes, former Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs and Department of State Ambassador.
She laid the foundation for a social bridge between Texas and Afghanistan when she brought the Afghan Women’s Council to Austin in 2003.
“The World Bank did a study. When you invest in women’s education, every other aspect of society evolves,” Huber told the crowd.
Shortly before she brought the council to Austin for a dinner Chris Hamilton was sitting at home worrying about her two children who had recently left the nest. One was in Boston for school and the other was traveling through Europe. She expalined how she began watching the news constantly and learning about all of the issues facing the world today.
“I thought, if I could know everything that was going on, I could somehow keep them safe,” she said of the venture that got her interested in Afghanistan.
Through mutual connections, she ended up at the luncheon hosted by Hughes.
“I decided that day, I was going to do whatever I could to do help,” she said.
Hamilton formed a small committee, which soon found “Journey with an Afghan School” sponsored by the American Friendship Foundation. The program is led by Julia Bolz, a human rights lawyer and social justice advocate who splits her time between the United States and Afghanistan, raising funds, creating awareness and building schools.
“We’ve been working together for about five years to support students in Northern Afghanistan,” she said.
They’ve collected money for clean water, new facilities and school supplies. They even got the opportunity to visit the school in 2006.
Hughes’ husband, Jerry, also spoke at the event on his work helping education in Afghanistan.
“Afghanistan has about 25 million people and a federal budget of seven billion dollars,” he said. “Iraq has the same population and a federal budget of 49 billion dollars.”
He shared the claustrophobia of driving around the crowded city streets and the barren walls of one school he visited, aside from one poster warning about landmines and bombs.
Recently retired local fourth grade teacher, Patty Praytor, did not work directly with Afghanistan but, with her fourth grade class, raised more than $32,000 to train a mine-sniffing dog to be sent to Eastern Europe.
“We’re not powerless to help with some of the situations going on globally,” she said.
One of her projects involved trading a stuffed animal with a school in Iran. Each week, one of her students would take home Dinga the cat and write a journal entry for him to be sent to Iran. The Iranian students did the same with the stuffed dog her class sent them. She said she hoped that it would plant the seeds for peace and friendships when the students inevitably grew up to work in a global economy.
For more information on the aforementioned programs visit www.ikat.org, www.penniesforpeace.org, and www.affhope.org.