Kids of Kabul (4 page)

One of the legacies of decades-long war in Afghanistan has been the bombing, land-mining and burning of orchards and farmlands. Afghanistan used to grow enough food to feed itself. War changed that.

Farmers came back from war or exile to find that their land could not be used. But they still had families to feed. So they turned to a crop that can grow in rocky, dry soil — opium poppies.

Opium poppies produce a gummy substance that is the raw material for heroin, an illegal, addictive drug. The opium itself can be smoked. It is a painkiller, producing a heavy stoned feeling in those who smoke it.

Afghanistan now produces more than 90 percent of the world’s heroin. It is used by addicts in Russia, Europe and North America. The trade is controlled by warlords and other criminals — and the Taliban — who have no interest in human rights or the well-being of children. The money they get from selling heroin buys them more guns and more power.

The poppy farmers are generally poor families growing poppies on small plots of land that will not support any other crops. They often have to borrow money to buy the seed. If their poppy crop is destroyed by foreign troops to prevent the heroin from being sold in their home countries, the farmers cannot repay the debt. So they may give in payment the only thing they have — a daughter. These girls who are forced into marriage — a form of rape and slavery — are called Opium Brides. Farmers who don’t pay their debt have also been tortured and killed.

Heroin is a bad business.

In the absence of proper medicine, opium is used to get rid of pain, including the pain of hunger. Parents give it to babies who have earaches and to children whose bellies are empty. For adults, smoking opium eases the pain of long hours of back-breaking work, and it blocks out the memories of trauma from the war.

The number of opium addicts in Afghanistan is estimated at 1.5 million. In a country of thirty million people, that works out to one of the highest rates of addiction of any country in the world. Treatment options are very few.

Anyone who has lived with or known an addict knows the kind of chaos and havoc they create around them.

Sharifa has an addicted father.

My brother is one year younger than me. We live with our mother. I hear from other girls how their family members sometimes argue, but we don’t have that problem. The three of us have to pull together if we are to manage, and even then it is very hard. So we have no energy to waste in arguments. What would be the point? Our lives would still be hard, no matter who won the argument.

My mother washes clothes for neighbors and also does cooking jobs when she can, not as a formal cook but as a helper. My brother does odd jobs to help out, whatever he can, carrying things or helping someone out in their shops. He gets paid very little. He works hard, but people think he is young so they don’t need to pay him much.

I wish there was a job I could do to earn money, but for Afghan girls it is very difficult.

My father is still alive, I think, but he does not live with us. As far as I know, he is in Karachi staying with relatives, but I can’t be sure.

He is addicted to opium. He has been addicted for ten years. He used to be a shopkeeper. He kept up this job even while he was addicted, but then his health became too bad. He took more and more opium and he stopped working.

It was hard to live with him. Our house always smelled of opium smoke. My clothes, too, would hold the smell. When I went to school other children would call me names because of the smell on my clothes. I tried to keep clean but there was no place to hang clothes away from the smoke.

My father had many moods when he lived with us, all bad except when he had smoked a lot of opium. Then he just lay on the floor and didn’t bother us. He had a lot of bad memories from the war, my mother said, and was in pain a lot of the time from injuries that had no proper treatment. Opium took away his pain and his memories.

When he didn’t have opium, he would smoke hashish. When he could not get these things, then he would be in a very bad mood. He would yell and say bad things for hours and hours, mean and insulting things. We all lived in one room and there was no way to get away from the insulting things he said. And there was no way to make him feel better.

Finally, it got so bad my mother asked his relatives in Pakistan to take him in. I don’t know how she came up with the money or how she got him to go. But he went away and now it is just the three of us.

I try to remember that my house is not me. Where we live it is very, very bad. We have no clean sheets, no beds. We sleep on the floor. We try to keep it clean but there is mud when it rains and dust when there is no rain.

We have no electricity, just a little oil lamp that we light to do our homework, but we must work quickly and not waste the oil.

I like to have fun, and at school that can happen sometimes with my friends and classmates. We all work hard, but we can’t be serious all the time! We are not old yet!

I have decided not to be married. I want to be a doctor, and I don’t want a husband that I have to take care of. I want to do good work and make a better life for me and my family.

Sadaf, 12

One of the great Islamic traditions is the discipline of memorizing the entire Qur’an, the Islamic holy book. This tradition may spring from the days when books and literacy were less widespread than they are now. Memorizing and reciting the Qur’an was a way to pass on the words from one person to another.

A person who has accomplished this phenomenal task is called a hafiz. It is a revered title, one worthy of respect. The Qur’an is more than 86,000 words long, and it takes, on average, three to four years to memorize the whole thing. Anyone who has tried to memorize a poem for school will understand the concentration and dedication such a task takes! The children who accomplish this are said to be an extra special blessing to their parents.

Becoming a hafiz is a goal of Sadaf’s.

I live with my mother and three sisters. My father was killed in a rocket attack a few years ago.

We were in our village, which has the name of Kolach. It was an ordinary place, not a special place.

My father liked to pray outside. He liked being under the sky instead of under a roof. So he was outside of the house, kneeling on his prayer mat, saying his prayers. And a rocket came down and killed him.

The rocket blew my whole house apart. There was nothing left of it. Maybe scraps of things. Nothing we could use. Nothing of value.

I was in my grandfather’s house at the time, with my mother and sisters. My grandfather’s house was right beside my house, so when the rocket hit my house, we felt it at Grandfather’s.

It was very, very bad, so bad that you cannot even imagine it, like a nightmare. But worse than a nightmare. When you are next to a rocket exploding, you see it, you feel the ground shake, you hear the noise like a big animal roaring, and you smell it, too, the fire, the dust.

I did not want to believe that my father had been killed. I wanted to dig through the yard, through everything that was broken, to see if we could find him. But my grandfather took me away. It would not have helped. Of course he was dead.

I don’t know who fired the rocket. Maybe it was the Taliban. Maybe it was the foreign soldiers. You think they would tell me? You think the Taliban would come to me and say, “Oh, we killed your father but we didn’t mean to. The rocket went the wrong way.” No, they don’t do that. Nobody explains anything.

My father was a good man, a kind man. He liked his daughters to be smart and to learn things. He was proud when we learned how to read.

After the explosion my uncle took us away to another village to live with him. He is my mother’s brother. We lived with him for a few years. My grandfather was too poor for us to stay with him. Now we are here in Kabul, trying to make a new life.

My two older sisters are married now, and they share everything with my mother and me. When they get some food, we get some food. My mother is jobless. She gets a bit of money from her brother, but not a lot. He is a laborer and does not make a lot of money.

The thing I most like to do is study the Qur’an. My father was killed while he was praying, and I think that makes his death holy in some way. I like to think so, anyway. By studying the Qur’an I feel that he is not so far away from me.

It is my dream to one day memorize all of the Qur’an. It was the wish of my father that all his girls be able to do this. I want to become a hafiz, which is what people will call me when I have memorized the whole Book of Allah.

It will be a big job. The Qur’an has 114 surahs [chapters] and over six thousand verses. But others have done it and I will be able to do it. Then the message of the Prophet will be inside me, and I’ll always have it, even if all the Qur’ans disappear. And when I have a problem, I can know what part of the Holy Qur’an will help me solve it.

I haven’t started to memorize it yet. I am still learning to read it, and I make a lot of mistakes. When I stop making mistakes, then I will start to memorize.

There is a television show on Afghan TV called Qur’an Star, for those who memorize the Qur’an, a kind of competition. I want to go on this program and do well. That is one good way I can help my family. The last winner was a sixteen-year-old girl. She won 150,000 afghanis ($3,000 US). My family will be helped a lot with that much money.

My mother says that when it is her turn to die, it will be my responsibility to recite the prayers over her body. She says that praying over her will be more important than crying over her, so I should practice the prayers and have them easy in my mind to get to when the time comes.

I hear that Kabul is a nice city, with parks and gardens and big shops and even a zoo, but I haven’t seen any of that. All I have seen is this area, and it isn’t very nice. It doesn’t really matter, though, if you live in an ugly place. If you have beautiful thoughts in your head then it’s like you are living in beauty.

In the future I want to be a teacher and teach both English and Islamic studies. People who know English are more respected, and if I am a scholar of Islamic studies, I can help spread the news of the Qur’an.

War comes when there is no unity, when people look out for themselves instead of each other. But through discussion we can solve all our problems, create unity and avoid war.

Mustala, 13

Life expectancy for people in Afghanistan is, on average, forty-four years. In Canada and the United States it is about eighty. Poor nutrition, lack of access to health care and clean water, exposure to the elements, poverty-related illnesses such as tuberculosis, plus war and related violence all take their toll. Twenty percent of all children born in Afghanistan die before they reach their fifth birthday.

Many people have fled Afghanistan because of the war. Others have left in search of jobs or a better life elsewhere.

In Canada and the United States, we have an economic safety net. People over sixty-five receive a pension. People who are out of work are often eligible for unemployment insurance. For those who are too ill to work, there is another type of assistance. We have these things because the people who came before us worked really hard to make them happen. We have also never suffered the horrible destruction of prolonged war on our land.