THE child’s drawing of a stick figure girl could have come from anywhere in the world except for one thing — a stick arm and a stick leg were on the ground beside her.

Afghanistan probably has the world’s highest percentage of amputees. You see them everywhere, resting in parks or praying in mosques with artificial legs laid out next to them.

The country is littered with landmines after 23 years of war, and the United Nations Mine Action Committee estimates that at least six people are killed or maimed every day. About half the victims are children collecting firewood or water. The war did not seem over to Nafisa, 12, when she stepped on a mine while gathering wood earlier this year and her leg was blown off.

Hobbling around one of Kabul’s bazaars on makeshift crutches with her father last week, she managed a beautiful smile but the life ahead of her is bleak. Even in the capital there are no buses to take a disabled child to school or hospital, no physiotherapy to help her learn to walk, no national health service to provide artificial limbs or wheelchairs.

Sandy Gall, the British broadcaster, was so shocked by all the missing limbs when he made a documentary on Afghanistan that he started an appeal to provide physiotherapy and prostheses that would transform the lives of thousands of Afghans.

Sandy Gall’s Afghanistan Appeal (SGAA) has supplied artificial limbs to more than 20,000 Afghans and physiotherapy for another 50,000. It has also trained hundreds of Afghans to make and fit limbs.

The Sunday Times has launched a Christmas appeal to support Gall’s work and that of a second charity, Afghan Connection, dedicated to saving mothers and children in the country with the highest rates of maternal and infant mortality in the world. The appeal has raised £232,000 (€330,000) in three weeks, including £100,000 from an Oxfordshire businessman.

Gall’s charity faces an enormous task. At its orthopaedic centres in Kabul and Jalalabad there are long waiting lists for limbs, particularly for children who need to be refitted at least every six months as they grow. European Union funding was halted recently and donations are desperately needed.

“In a poor country where everything has broken down, mobility is vital,” said Fiona Gall, the broadcaster’s daughter and project consultant, who is bringing up her young children in Kabul. If by having a wheelchair a disabled man can sell food in the market, he is transformed from a burden on his family to a breadwinner. If a girl can learn to walk with prosthetic limbs, she can help in household tasks and stands a better chance of marrying.”

Female mine victims have a particularly tough time. Mahpekai’s legs were blown off by a landmine when she was 13. Her family had moved to Kabul to escape the fighting and she was fetching wood for the stove when it happened.

“I used to cry and was very sad, but what is the use of crying?” she said. “It doesn’t make things better.”

Gall’s charity provided Mahpekai with artificial legs and a job as a guard, checking the bags of female patients for dangerous weapons. It also arranged for her to learn tailoring, so now she makes clothes with a sewing machine.

She lives with her mother, three sisters and two brothers. Her father was killed in the war when she was young and a brother has to carry her downstairs.

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