Dear Oprah,

I will preface this letter by saying that I appreciate your attention to what is going on in Afghanistan and I understand that you would like to squeeze every last drop of tear-jerking sympathy from the American people over 9/11 to increase your ratings. After all, you are a businesswoman; I appreciate that.

But the purpose of this letter is to inform you of what your staff has been doing to my staff over the past week. Approximately five days ago someone from Harpo contacted one of my employees--who happens to speak Persian--and asked her to go out and videotape some Afghan widows for a "surprise" story for some 9/11 widows who support said Afghan widows. My employee, being a nice person (although somewhat of a milquetoast at times), kindly agreed and loaded up her video camera and one of our public relations staff and went out into one of the futher districts of the capital to get the "story" for your show.

After four hours of sitting in the sun and prodding these poor, bashful Afghan widows to talk about how they feel about the donation these 9/11 widows gave to them, my employee returned with the tape. We had no problem doing the filming, although it took away from our busy schedules, because it is good publicity for our organization.

However, once we finished taping, your staff realized that it would take too long to DHL the tape, so sending over a satellite feed was the only option--but NO--your staff would not pony up the grand for the uplink. Instead, Harpo asked one of the handful of expatriate staff members of this organization (who supports about 1000 Afghan staff) to take time out of her day to transcribe what the widows said. Your staff had to find out what the widows said first to see if it was "worth" the $1000 to send via satellite!

After the tape was transcribed and your staff read the text, they proposed that my employee fly to fucking PAKISTAN to feed the tape because it would be "cheaper"! I am sorry, Oprah, but we have JOBS that involve helping the poor of Afghanistan to live in dignity and are not your lackeys who can drop everything and fly to Pakistan so you can get your story.

But, no matter: you will get your tape. I almost broke BOTH my legs getting to the Embassy to hand the tape off to some guy going to Washington tonight (Musharaff had the roads blocked so I had to hustle). So the tape will be there by the time you tape on the 12th. You can thank me later. I just hope that the donors for our other $25 million worth of projects do not drop our funding for getting our reports in late.

Sincerely,

Confection

P.S. I expect to be reimbursed for the postage.