Kids of Kabul (5 page)

War creates poverty. In countries like Afghanistan, where there has been prolonged war, there is no economic safety net. People go hungry. According to UNICEF, nearly 40 percent of children under the age of five are undernourished, and over half of all children under five are smaller than they would be if they had enough to eat.

Mustala’s family has been split apart by war.

I live with my grandfather and grandmother. We are really poor. My grandparents don’t work. We have no money for soap, so I am often dirty and wearing dirty clothes. I would like to be better dressed, so when people see me coming they will think, “Oh, this boy is important, look at his clothes. He must be somebody special.” No one will think that of me if I don’t have nice clothes.

My father left when I was quite small. He went to Iran to find work and also because some people here wanted to kill him. My mother got another husband and left us so she could be with him. I think she has other children now.

Classrooms and playground at Mustala’s school.

I get free food at school, which is often the only time I eat, and sometimes my grandparents don’t eat at all. When I can, I put food in my pockets at lunchtime to take back to my grandparents, but it is a thing that makes me nervous to do. I don’t want to get in trouble. So, sometimes if I am hungry for two pieces of nan, I take two, but I don’t eat them. I hide them in my jacket to take home. That’s not stealing, is it?

This whole school is filled with kids who have a hard life but who are really smart, although not all are as smart as me or as good at playing football as me! Many have lost one parent or two parents in the war or from some illness. I have not lost my parents. They are both alive. They are just not with me.

I wish my father would come back from Iran, even for a day. He would see what a smart, good boy I’ve become, and he would keep me with him. I don’t care where. I could go back to Iran with him or we could stay here. Or we could go someplace else. I would be fine with any decision.

Sometimes my mother sends my grandparents a little bit of money to help out. This way I know she hasn’t forgotten about me. Her new husband would not want me to live with him, so I don’t think about that or dream about that. When I get to be a man, maybe I can take care of my mother and she won’t have to live with him anymore. But that’s a long way off.

I was young when my father left, maybe five or six. Sometimes, when I’m playing football with my friends, a man will stop and watch us or will walk by really slowly, and I think, “Maybe that’s my father.” I play extra well then, so that he’ll take me away with him. He won’t want a son who is no good at football.

It gets very dark in our house at night, and sometimes I get afraid. When you hear things in the dark and you can’t see what they are, anybody would be afraid. It doesn’t mean I’m not brave. But if someone shoots a gun or there is yelling or a cat screams, it can get scary. When I get scared I try to think of football or I practice my English.

I think Afghanistan could be a great country, especially if I was the president. I’d help all the poor people and make sure they have food and electric light. I would make a law that everybody has to go to school. Even adults, because there are a lot of adults who have never been to school, and I think that makes them have bad tempers. If they see me going to school, they yell at me that I should be working. So I would make them to go school, too, so that they’d stop bothering me.

We need to study to make a good country out of Afghanistan. Right now we are a backwater country. At school I have learned there are better ways to do things than all this war, war, war all the time. It’s the young generation that will change that.

My generation.

Me.

Ajmal, 11

In the western part of Kabul is a holiday spot called Qargha Lake. It has guesthouses that are rented by Kabul’s elite during the summer, a beach with donkey rides for kids, a picnic area, a restaurant and even an old amusement park. Nearby is the golf course that was built by King Habibullah in 1911, occupied by Soviet tanks during the 1980s, and then planted with land mines by the Taliban. When the Taliban left, it became a place where people were trained in how to remove land mines, and now golf is played there again.

Ajmal and his younger sister, Spegmai, try to get money from Qargha’s few visitors on a cold winter day.

My sister is ten. We live in a neighborhood a little ways from here. It takes us a while to walk here. I don’t know how long. I don’t carry a clock. A while.

Both my sister and I go to school, but we don’t go every day. Sometimes the school is closed. Sometimes it is open and we go but the teacher doesn’t show up, so we leave again. Sometimes there is no food or money in our house so we have to go out to work instead of going to school.

Our mother is dead. I don’t know how she died. She was sick, I think, and we had no medicine. So she died.

Our father is also sick, but he is not dead. His sickness is in his legs. When he is feeling well he looks through garbage to find something we can eat or use. He taught us how to do that, and so we do it when we are out.

You have to pay attention. You can’t just go walk and think of other things. You have to see everything and think about if what you see is useful. I found a plastic bag on the beach this morning and put it in my pocket. A plastic bag is useful.

Today it is cold and the lake is frozen. Not many people are here, so we don’t make much money. When there are a lot of cars we stand in the street and bang on their windows.

Our work is to ask people for money, and when they give us money we burn some coal and the smoke takes away the evil spirits. We make maybe 35 afghanis a day (about 75 cents) when people are kind.

Qargha Lake holiday spot.

My sister likes this work more than I do. She is better at running than me, and she is pretty and speaks well, so people are nicer to her.

I do not run well. My legs have a kind of sickness like my father’s, and you can see I do not speak well. So people laugh at me and call me names.

If people don’t want to give us money, that’s okay. They don’t have to. We are small. What can we do to them if they don’t give? But why do they have to be mean? Why do they have to call us dogs and say bad words? That’s what I do not like about this job.

My sister likes writing the best in school and I like reading the best. I would like to become something in the future. I don’t know what, just somebody of importance. Maybe I’ll become a teacher. When I’m a teacher I will show up for work every day so my students don’t waste time sitting in an empty classroom with nothing to learn.

Amullah, 15

Cricket was made popular by Afghans who had spent time as refugees in Pakistan, where cricket is played and followed with great enthusiasm.

When the Taliban came to power in 1996, they banned the game. They allowed Afghanistan’s national cricket team to play again in 2000, but spectators were not allowed to cheer or clap. All they could do to show their enthusiasm was say “Allahu Akbar,” which means God Is Great. And the games had to be scheduled around the executions and torture that the Taliban carried out in that same stadium.

Amullah and his friends are taking advantage of a free day to work on their cricket game in the schoolyard.

My father is a farmer, or he used to be. We had to leave our land when I was small because of the war. There was shooting, bombing, people being killed for no reason. I don’t remember much about that time because I was very small, but my older brothers have told me. It got so bad that we couldn’t stay there. We moved around a lot, from place to place, trying to find somewhere safe. We ended up in Kabul.

My father now works as a shopkeeper in someone else’s shop.

I don’t remember much about the Taliban time. Like I said, I was really small. My brothers said that for them, the worst thing was that they couldn’t play sports. The Taliban wouldn’t let them. They wouldn’t let anybody play. But people would listen to games from India and Pakistan on radios they kept secret.

How could they say, “No more football, no more cricket”? Those are the best things in life! It’s a good thing I was small. If they came back into the government with those rules, I would go mad. I remember my brothers trying to play football and cricket in our house, but we had a very small house, and our mother did not like them playing ball inside.

My school is on holiday today, but we all came here to practice because we have a big cricket match coming up soon against another school, and of course we want to win!