Meet Marzia – a widowed woman and a beneficiary of LFT’s mental health training programme

Marzia is one of the mental health project beneficiaries living with her three children in a small room that only serves them as a shelter at a time when she desperately needs it. “If it weren’t for this room, we would have remained homeless. I have no other option but to live here despite its unfavorable condition. I cannot afford to rent a bigger and better room”, Marzia said to us. Like thousands of other Afghan women, Marzia’s husband was addicted and had been missing for almost two years until now. In the past couple of years, they have lived without him with herself struggling to provide for her family.

Now, she is a beneficiary of LFT’s mental health and well-being support to whom we reached out to find out about her life and help her. Specifically, the DM’s mental well-being trainer(s) have visited her and conducted mental health sessions, providing her with mental and emotional health awareness and information. With all hardships that she has gone through, this project has psychologically helped her on a significant scale. For example, she reported that her husband’s behavior had been very aggressive towards her and her children inasmuch as most of the time he used to beat them without any reason; he barely spoke with them quietly and properly.

Thus, given the said bitter experiences and economic difficulties she has been through, her mental health condition was seriously affected and had been deteriorating since her husband’s breakup. So, the trainers met her to hear her problems and use mental health aid and recovery techniques to relieve her pains by practicing some skills. Due to poverty, she had been working at people’s houses to earn some money to feed her children. “Most of the time we had nothing at home to eat, so I resorted to cleaning the people’s homes to prevent my children from starving. Indeed, I was suffering in silence with no one helping me,” she went on to say.

All of these pains caused her a lot of mental disorders and pressures which even sometimes make breathing difficult for her. “I have been enduring both physical and emotional pain and couldn’t imagine getting this pain relieved or at least reduced but the female coaches who came to me made it possible. The trainers helped me a lot by giving me helpful information and sharing good relaxation practices,” Marzia expressed

“I wished I could enjoy the training earlier as I never heard about mental health and well-being before. It is very uncommon for most women to receive such training. This was a turning point in my life,” the 35-year-old woman stated with great excitement. In addition, Marzia’s 12-year-old daughter, Hadia, has joined the LFT’s education programme for orphaned children at our partner school as sixth grader this year which has doubled her happiness and joy. “I wish my daughter can finish her studies and not experience the painful and tragic life like me, she concluded.