Diana Haskins of Goleta left for Kabul on Friday to meet Afghan children she are helping support at an orphanage and school.

Mrs. Haskins formed a non-profit organization earlier this year to assist women and children in war-torn, post-Taliban Afghanistan.

Her first project is expanding the Wafia Educational Training Center for Children in Kabul and providing funding for Afghan-made uniforms and shoes for the 120 students enrolled there.

“I’m very excited. It’s going to be wonderful,” Mrs. Haskins, a founder of the Afghan Academy of Hope, said last week.

“I have all kinds of appointments with administrators and I’m attending a conference May 7, with people who are helping put together the permanent government. I will be setting up an office, with an electric typewriter. And I have made some fabulous connections with another agency, Free the Children, which helps open schools in Third World countries.”

Eventually, the she hopes to help Afghan children pursue college degrees.

She is making the trip with 22 other delegates selected by the human rights organization Global Exchange. All but four members of the delegation are natives of Afghanistan who want to help rebuild the troubled nation.

Mrs. Haskins raised more than $7,000 for the school by holding fund-raising dinners, tea parties and garage sales. Proceeds have also come from Cub Scout troops, neighbors, churches and friends.

More than $900 was raised at a garage sale by the Goleta ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, where Mrs. Haskins worships. Then church members Merrilyn and Earl Damitz matched that amount.

Seven members of Goleta Cub Scout Pack 6 also raised funds for the Afghan students by making 100 red, white and blue “freedom” pens decorated with beads, which sell for $5 each.

Mrs. Haskins’ son, Jordan Bishop, a member of the troop, decorated 60 of the pens himself, and also donated clothes and toys to the cause.

Mrs. Haskins knew she wanted to help the people of Afghanistan, but she didn’t know exactly how until she met a third woman, Soraya Abdullah Hakim, at a fund-raiser in Los Angeles.

A former United Nations worker in Afghanistan, Mrs. Hakim opened the Wafia school and orphanage in her family’s compound in 1995, after shelling between rival warlords left 43,000 people dead and the city in rubble.

Children at that time were wandering the streets, with nowhere to go.

A year later the city fell to the Taliban and the girls were forced out of the school.

Mrs. Hakim, a teacher at the school, sought asylum in the United States but continued to support the school and its staff.

On March 22, the school reopened after the winter break and girls were allowed to return. Mrs. Hakim can’t make this trip, but has plans to visit the school and her homeland again in July.

Mrs. Haskins will be visiting Afghanistan until May 19. She will post news of her visit on the Afghan Academy of Hope website, at www.aaoh.org.