AS the senior orthopaedic physiotherapist at Great Ormond Street hospital in London, Jeanne Hartley is used to getting all manner of scribbled thank you notes from grateful patients. But until she went to Afghanistan she had never received a letter from a patient asking for help in finding a husband.

Hartley is one of three senior health practitioners from Britain who give up their time twice a year to travel to Afghanistan to treat people under the auspices of Sandy Gall’s Afghanistan Appeal (SGAA).

“I am completely hooked,” said the 58-year-old mother of three. “There is something so special about the people, while medical resources here are so limited that we can make a real difference.”

The 18-year-old who wrote the letter represents the dark underside of Afghanistan. Her back was injured when she threw herself down stairs to escape a beating from her brother — all too common in a society brutalised by war.

But most of the people lining up on a typical day at Kabul Orthopaedic Centre, one of three SGAA clinics in Afghanistan, are victims of war and poverty. Afghanistan probably has the world’s highest percentage of amputees and disabled men, women and children. They are everywhere, resting in parks, hurtling along in specially made trolleys or praying in mosques with their artificial legs laid out beside them.

The Kabul centre makes and fits limbs and provides physiotherapy to about 600 patients a month, most of them children. It manages to do all this on £50,000 a year. Staff have sometimes worked for nothing when funds have run short.

Yet the centre would have closed had it not been for the generosity of readers who gave £315,108 to a Sunday Times appeal last Christmas. The money was shared between SGAA and another British charity, Afghan Connection.

An Oxfordshire businessman, John Gladwin, gave £100,000, children organised sales of cakes and toys and one woman donated money she had intended to spend on a kitchen.

The European Union had withdrawn funding from SGAA, although it is hard to imagine how EU money could have been spent on a more worthy cause. Afghanistan is littered with mines and other explosives that kill or maim at least six people a day. But there is no health service to provide artificial limbs, wheelchairs or physiotherapy.

The smile that lights up 17-year-old Fariba’s face as she is fitted with an artificial leg by John Lamb, a specialist from Perth Royal Infirmary, would amply reward anybody who gave up Christmas treats or presents to contribute to the appeal, as many readers did.

Fariba lost her leg eight years ago when she was playing and stepped on a mine. “I thought my life was over — I would just have to sit at home and nobody would ever marry me,” she said.

Then somebody told her about the centre and she returns once a year to replace the leg she has outgrown. She walks so well that when she is wearing her salwar kameez you would never spot that she is disabled.

The fall of the Taliban meant that Fariba could go back to school and she is hoping to train as a physiotherapist. “I have been given back my chance at life,” she smiled.

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