 OK. Thank you very much. My name is Matt South, well I'm a technical adviser working with a co-act which is a technical support co-optive run by and for people who use drugs. We are dual experts in terms of being both experiential experts in terms of being people who use drugs and drug user activists and we all hold a dual professional background as well. This helps us play a function we call bridge building which is about trying to help professional services and policy makers engage and work with drug users and drug using communities. So we've been working over the last, well since 2014 with a group of drug users in Afghanistan and we've been building together an initiative called bridge hope and health organisation. Now we were hoping that Atta from the project would be able to come here and present but unfortunately he didn't get a visa. Now he was going to present about the street lawyers project they're involved in so rather than presenting his presentation I'm going to tell you the story of what's happened with bridge in terms of getting to this point so that Atta can tell his own story another time. So the concept of a group of drug users supporting another group of drug users in Afghanistan came at the Beirut time reduction conference. I've worked in Afghanistan on a couple of occasions through the international network of people who use drugs and we'd helped seed a drug user group called the Afghan drug user group that had been working as part of an MDM project. Then MDM's programme was due to leave and there had been some problems in terms of local partners in terms of the departure and it meant there was no funding support for the drug users and no professional entity hosting the drug users beyond this time. So in an incredibly high risk setting drug users had stood up and then they were left without the support to proceed. Now this is not blaming MDM for this. It was a very complex story but that's just where we were left at that moment in time. So we were coming together over drinks. We know the late night drinking we've all been doing at this conference. Well in one of those sessions we were talking about this situation with Abdul Rahim Rajah. The leader of the bridge of what was then called the Afghan drug user group. Myself Buff who's our security expert in co-act and a couple of other colleagues. Les Papas from Better World Advertising who's donated very kindly his social marketing skills to support this project and also Susie McLean from the International Aid Alliance and the Alliance has been another supporting partner in this work. So we realised that Rahim was going to be left alone. So we started in 2014 to negotiate with the Afghan government that we would be able to come in and work. Now you can imagine a bunch of drug users approaching the Afghan government doesn't necessarily open doors and make welcome. So the key thing for us was that we were a UN backed team. We were a UN backed technical support team going in to help people who use drugs. Now it happened that we were drug users and technical experts in drug user organising. But it was very important that we went in with backing from the WHO initially and I'd like to thank Annette Verster who was from the WHO in Geneva who has played a key role in helping to mobilise funding for us as a group of drug users to go in and support our peers at a critical time in their development. And also Jamana from the regional office who match funded in that process. So the first process was a group of drug users going to meet with the Afghan National Aids Control Programme. Now I understand that the National Aids Control Programme's initial thought was I think to say that they were approaching the meeting with some trepidation would be an underestimate. I think they really were not clear why a group of drug users could in any way help them with what they were facing. However, the global fund new funding model requires governments to consult the populations that they're going to serve in their design of their proposals. Now they don't get access to nine million dollars if they don't consult people who use drugs. So the sell to them was that we could help them resolve that problem. By the end of the meeting through the discussions that we'd had showing them that this was a fresh professional approach, highlighting that community based outreach is a hundred times more cost effective than professional outreach and really showing them how we could help them consult and engage this group of highly marginalised drug users living under the bridge. By the end of the meeting they were acknowledging that there could be a potential to work together. It's been a long journey with the National Aids Control Programme but generally I would say these are people who are our friends and who have tried to help us within a very difficult environment. Now what this led to in 2015 was funded by the United Nations Aids Joint Programme by their technical support fund. We were funded to go and do two missions in Afghanistan to consult people who use drugs and in fact it moved on to also consult other key populations as well. We organised a process of consulting over 400 people who inject drugs. Now these are people living in highly marginalised circumstances. So we had to bring Buffin who has been working in Northern Ireland in community organising to teach people how to create a secure environment. So we're anti-fascist activists by background so we've had some experience of how to work in high risk environments. But let me tell you this was much much more high risk than we've ever worked in before. But we seriously had to create protected spaces with security teams within which we could run focus groups having spotters to manage the police, to manage drug users who might become aware over time that we had money to pay people therefore they could just come and take that money off us rather than take small bits of money. And at certain points we did have to quite quickly leave once we realised the situation was getting high risk. So we also consulted a group of women and Judy Chang who is now the Executive Director of Input was a specialist consultant who joined us on this project. And she led a specialist consultation with what we're called AQUIS risk women which essentially is women who use drugs, predominantly smoking, methamphetamine and heroin but a small number injecting but also female sex workers and the wives of men who use drugs. And really interestingly for example the wives asked us to teach them how to do safer injecting because they were often asked to inject their husbands and they wanted to learn how to do that effectively. Now let me tell you that was not something I thought we were going to end up doing as we went into the mission but it shows the value of a bottom-up participative model of development. While we were doing this series of focus groups I think we were showing, yes, so here you can see Raheem doing who is the incredibly courageous leader of what is now BRIDGE and the key thing was to rebrand the Afghan drug user group as BRIDGE Hope and Health Organisation because we couldn't, if you try to call something a group it then needs to be registered with the Ministry of Interior as a political group and the idea of a political drug user group is unconscionable in Afghanistan but BRIDGE Hope and Health Organisation as a health-based NGO that was acceptable. So you can see we did these consultations, you can see them actually filling in questionnaires where the questionnaires are all based on pictures because literacy levels are under 30%. So then after we finished the focus groups we also invited people to join the drug user group itself and over 300 of the people that we worked with went on to join the drug user group and become activists. Now from within that, and this is part of the co-op model, we were also looking for peer leaders. So no, there were some people who were strong in terms of being members and signing up in solidarity but we were also looking for the key leaders who would join our team and we would then take them through a capacity building event and we recruited 13 people over a period of time. Now we have tried to work with men and women together but it really just didn't work because culturally it's not acceptable so we've now started to create parallel development programmes with women and Judy and then we'll see another colleague who's been helping us with that work. Now alongside this process me and Raheem were also going out and taking part in the formal global fund meetings. Now this is part of what we were arguing is you have the drug users on the ground who have all this experiential expertise but you also have the higher level advocates who can come and take part in these meetings to advocate for quality services so that the nine million dollars being spent in Afghanistan is spent in the way that communities left or to go. Left. I've had five minutes. Left, okay, bugger. Okay, so then we did this consultation. We gathered information that was groundbreaking. For example, nobody had realised that methamphetamine had arrived six months earlier in Afghanistan and was causing substantial problems when people were dying of heart attacks. It was people who were already very vulnerable in their health just being pushed over the limit. Drug dealers telling drug users that if you take methamphetamine it stops you having heroin with drills. So real huge problems going on and the outreach team hadn't even noticed this was happening which actually led us to find out the outreach team wasn't actually doing outreach on the scene which is why bridge is now stepping up to perform that function. In 2016 we met again at the KL harm reduction conference. We had a breakfast with ten donors there and we received a commitment to fund bridge through its start-up phase to the tune of 130,000 from the global fund through a regional global fund grant. Okay, then we spent the next six months rewriting the proposal six times and at the end of that time we were told we weren't eligible for the fund so for six months we burnt our management capacity, left our team on the ground not working and frustrated ourselves incredibly while our peers on the ground had to stand by and watch people die on the ground while we, sorry I'm pretty fucking angry about this, but we were left not able to respond when we had had clear commitments that we would be supported. So that took us to the second half of 2016 which I described as a hallelujah pass and if people don't know the hallelujah pass it's something that happens in American football when all else fails and you throw the ball in a long throw. So this was it, we could see that we were getting pushed out and if we didn't so having helped everybody in Afghanistan secure nine million dollars for their country the key population networks at the last minute was pushed out and was not funded. So what we did was we had $15,000 was given to us from the Czech government and we're grateful to the Czech International Development Agency, Padana Rucho, the local harm reduction NGO and Madara, their local partner for giving us 15,000 and OSF gave me some money for technical support and we went and just launched the NGO. Now it's completely unethical, it's completely inappropriate to launch a service for three months but we knew that if we didn't do it we were going to be pushed out. So we went in, launched the service within a three month period, the drug user did 1,300 wound care interventions with drug users on the street. We mapped the outreach scene once again identifying trends that professional workers hadn't identified up until that time so we were starting to spot major root transitions away from injecting in that situation and you can see up here is that this is the team of outreach workers so from our 13 initial researchers we've now trained up nine peer outreach workers and that's them being briefed as they go out to map the 16 active drug scenes around Bristol, around Kabul and then this is Raheem, the leader caring for someone's wound. Now people die of abscesses in this. Now the biggest cause of amputations now apart from landmines in Afghanistan is people who use drugs having completely unnecessary injuries that if they were treated early would not become life threatening. So as I said we've come consistently through our work, we've uncovered major significant drug trends that other partners didn't even understand let alone know how to respond. So we've found for example people using the cold shake method as we're calling it which essentially is pouring heroin and water into the back of a five mil syringe and shaking it, not cooking it up and injecting it in a large blue needle because they're so scared of police harassment that they can't take the time to cook up their drugs. So in the consultation they asked us if we could give them bigger needles because their needles kept getting blocked and as you can realise that wasn't the solution and we've now written a briefing paper based on our video testimony to try to push things forward. We've also found really positive trends like this is a guy up at the top and you look on the COAC website you'll see a full video of this. This is a drug user making crack methamphetamine pipes out of merging two five mil water amps together and that really shows the technical skills that drug users have and if they were given resources what they could do to fight for their own rights. So this is Raheem who is the leader. We've now come up with a master proposal which costs about 160,000 and that's what we think we need to run this project in Afghanistan. We have a master proposal. We are now submitting to every fund we can. We have UNDP, the United Nations Development Programme has opened a small grant programme especially for us with the potential to take 30,000 and we're looking to raise the rest of the 160 to fund bridge. So this is Raheem standing up for his peers and what my question to all of you is if Raheem stands up for his peers will you stand up with him? We've launched a crowd source fundraising campaign called In Hajji's Name. I haven't got time to explain to you the story but if you watch the video that supports this campaign it will explain the tragic story of how Hajji, one of our peer workers died through hospital neglect and this is about launching a human rights monitoring programme in his name. So what we would really ask you to do is if you have any, even if you can't donate money to us please use your social media networks to push this campaign out and to help drive the funding because we want to be in a situation where we don't have to be any more tied into the politics of the country of the international community. We want to be able to fund our own project with our own resources at least significantly so that we can guarantee the future of drug user activism in Afghanistan. Thank you.