In 1987, during the Russian War with Afghanistan, I spent my 3 month medical student elective doing Obstetrics in the tribal areas of The North West Frontier Province of Pakistan. I returned the following year with a team of British surgeons who gave up their holidays every year to operate on the war wounded from Afghanistan. They sent me to run clinics from a Mujahideen camp on the border with Afghanistan. Whilst I was running these clinics for women and children, I heard tragic stories of their lives and saw first hand the devastating effects of the war.

I returned to Afghanistan in 2001 when it was in the grip of the Taliban regime to visit a clinic in the Panjshir Valley. I  found a country devastated by 23 years of war. I saw no hope for the people there. All of the infrastructure had been destroyed, villages had been razed to the ground and millions had fled across the borders as refugees. Millions more were in camps for internally displaced persons, where there was no running water, sanitation, proper food, shelter or medical aid. The schools and hospitals had been destroyed. I found doctors operating without anaesthetics on the injured from the front-line, with saws, needles and thread from the bazaar.

When I returned home, I decided to set up Afghan Connection, in the hope that even if we could change one life for the better, our work would be worthwhile.