I confronted my 7/7 trauma in Kabul

A Londoner who moved to Kabul to confront the trauma she felt after witnessing the 7/7 bombings has set up a charity to help Afghan children read.

Magsie Hamilton Little saw a man die in front of her in Tavistock Square during the terror attacks in 2005.

She felt ashamed that she was unable to help the injured people around her and, out of feelings of guilt and a compulsion to "understand", moved to Afghanistan.

Miss Hamilton Little, an author from Notting Hill, said: "7/7 was a deeply shocking experience for me and it haunted me. It was chaos, carnage. Nobody knew what was happening but I rushed to the scene rather than run away.

"You can see the front of the bus on TV footage but the back of the bus was like a horror movie. That experience never leaves you. It has inevitably, and indelibly, changed me forever.

"Everybody was too badly injured, I couldn't do anything. I blamed myself for not making a difference, for not being a doctor. I was ashamed of myself. The resulting trip to Afghanistan was a punishment."

Two months after the bombings, Miss Hamilton Little, who is in her thirties, moved to Kabul in an attempt to understand what lay behind the terror that she had witnessed. It was her experience in Afghanistan that taught her that education was crucial to effecting change, and led her to set up London-based charity Little Books Afghanistan, which distributes picture and story books to deprived children.

She said: "When I went out there the first time, some children thought pencils were stones to play with, which is really tragic. I kept thinking how can we rebuild a country when children don't even know what books and pencils are? Fifty per cent of children don't go to school and 80 per cent of adults don't read."

Six Afghan men and women make and distribute the books, and the charity has handed out more than 50,000 over the past two years.

Miss Hamilton Little said: "The faces of the children light up when we visit them, it's heartening. So hopefully our charity will grow.