Several people have pinged to ask what is with the name. I did not come up with it but I can tell you my take on it. The name is kind of a joke name and kind of an intentional name. It's bad enough that nobody is going to try to take over our name (which has happened), it sounds just official enough to appear legit to non-native English speakers and pretty aptly describes what we do. We spend a lot of time identifying problems and then finding the right people to solve them. When the most of the aid organizations are bound to their safe houses for security reasons they need people like us. We are outside the barbwire connecting the people who need help with the people who want to provide it. So we identify a problem and strike it with synergy to come up with solutions. We work with just about anyone on the ground in the country who is willing to work with us to solve problems and improve the lives of the Afghan people.
We could keep the network alive indefinitely for probably $2K-$3K per month. This network provides free and open internet to dozens of sites all over east Afghanistan including hospitals and schools. This is way down from just two years ago when bandwidth was $5K per month for 1Mbps.
I can only speak for myself and this is where I am at with this right now.
I don't know if you have ever done fund raising but it is very time consuming and frankly unpleasant. Also, if you start including pay for yourself in the cost not only does the amount needed go up drastically, but people start questioning your motives. That makes it even harder to raise funds. So between working jobs and spending our free time trying to make a difference in a very difficult situation, I just don't have the cycles to spend raising funds.
I think it boils down to the fact that I am an engineer and want to spend my time solving problems over there, not in endless meetings and hoping for little bits of money here and there. That is what we have been doing and for me personally it's starting to burn me out. At this point what we really need is bandwidth costs and a small salary for the Afghans keeping it running. And we need the money to be painless for us. It's a hard to find a sponsor like that.
I must step away from the computer for a while. My email is above and I will be happy to continue discussing as much as I can here when I return in a few hours. I appreciate people's feedback thoughts on this.
I hope you can appreciate that this is a little too public of a forum for discussing current operational details of our operation over there. I can say that we are still engaged and intend to stay that way. Hoever, with Mehrab's assassination everything has changed. On a personal note, his death is one of the hardest blows of my life.
The group was founded by Dr. Dave Warner. He was hired by to go over there and help start several schools* in the area. While over there he ended up finding the Taj Mahal, taking over the lease one it and founding the Synergy Strike Force. SSF grew into much more then just schools and has been involved in many different humanitarian projects. We are all just freelancers trying to dodge the bureaucracy that get's in everyone else's way and make a difference for the people over there.
* The schools have nothing to do with cups of tea in case anyone is curious about that.
So I'm not the author of that but I am the SSF engineer in charge of that network and was present while that story was unfolding. Funding is in fact one of our biggest issue these days. We've discussed doing various fund raising efforts including Indiegogo but it does not solve the real needs.
The problem is that our expenses for that network are all recurring. We can get occasional injections of money for things like gear and generators, but it is hard to find someone who is willing to pay for the bandwidth or Afghan salaries on an ongoing basis.
All of us in SSF have no income from our work over there but we all continue to support our friends in Jalalabad in every way we can. For an indiegogo campaign to be successful it actually takes a fair amount of effort and is only a stop gap solution to the problem. So we are all focused on trying to sustain ourselves while actually solving problems. I can't speak for everyone in our crew but most of us don't have the time, energy or heart to do a full fund raising campaign that we know is only a temporary solution. What we really need is a sponsor to take over bandwidth costs and the salary of our fantastic Afghan crew who works on the ground over there.
So on the off chance anyone reads that and knows of someone who might be interested in becoming a sponsor, I can be reached at [email protected] Feel free to direct any inquiries my way.
If there is any question of my identity and involvement in Synergy Strike Force, I have ways of authenticating I am who I say I am. Also, I would not ask for any money directly. There is a large, well known, non-profit that everyone knows that would be the entity dealing with any financial transactions.
Also, if you just want to nerd out over a cool network we run outside the barbwire in afghanistan hit me up.