Kids of Kabul

by Deborah Ellis

  We have all lost things because of the war. Losing things and people is normal for Afghans. We have had enough of that. It is time to plan for good days and before you can do that, you have to fill your head with thoughts that are hopeful.

  That is why I like to paint the ocean. I have never seen the ocean for real. One day I will, when I travel the world as a famous artist. I paint it because when you look at the ocean, nothing gets in your way. There are no obstacles. You can see forever.

  This is what we want for Afghanistan — no more obstacles!

  Aman, 16

  Poverty and child labor go together. War creates poverty. War creates situations where families are so desperate for food and shelter that children must work to provide these necessities, especially if their parents have been killed or maimed by the conflict. War also destroys schools, and when schools are destroyed, opportunities for a way out of bone-grinding poverty are destroyed.

  In Afghanistan, children are engaged in all sorts of work, from water-carrying to sheep-herding to carpet-weaving and working in shops. The money they earn goes to basic necessities like bread, and a hard day’s work nets them barely enough to keep starvation at bay. And if they don’t work, they don’t eat.

  Aman is one of the lucky ones. He landed at a school that educates child workers and others from very poor families. The school is down a chopped-up, muddy alley in a slum district of the city. It is surrounded by high walls. It looks shabby compared to schools in North America, but inside it is a safe haven, a powerhouse of young minds reaching for something better.

  I lost fifteen members of my family to the Taliban, including my parents. We were living in Kabul. Not in a rich neighborhood. Lots of poor families. The Taliban came and said to my father, “What is your name?” He told them and then they killed him. Then they killed my mother. Then they kept on killing until fifteen members of my family were dead. I am alive and my little sister and my grandfather are alive. My grandfather is disabled and lives a very poor life. So I live here at this school with my sister.

  I am now in grade nine and I am at the top of my class. I want to be a doctor, of course. This is the dream of many Afghans because we have seen so much death and suffering.

  I did not begin school at the correct time in my life because I had to work. When I was young I was a shepherd and looked after sheep that belonged to someone else. My job was to keep the sheep together in the street and take them from one garbage dump to another so they could rub their noses through the plastic bags and things people threw away. That was how they would eat. They had to eat garbage because we have no grass in Kabul except in the parks and they were far away from where I lived and they don’t allow sheep. Everything else is dust and rock.

  A computer room at a school for impoverished and working children.

  It isn’t a hard job, looking after sheep, but I was very small at the time. It seemed hard to me then. The sheep were bigger than me! I was always afraid they would not go where I told them to go. If I lost one, it would have gone very bad. It doesn’t matter whether I liked it or not. It was my job and I had to do it.

  If I wasn’t able to go to school that might still be my life, taking sheep from one garbage place to another. So I study hard and I work hard. I have no free time. Every hour is busy.

  I help teach the younger boys here. Most of them also have jobs. This one is a mechanic, this one goes through garbage, this one helps out in a shop. They work in the morning. Then they come here for a free lunch and stay for classes. Many of the boys here earn money to support their whole families, so they have to work. If they don’t work, no one eats. The free meal they get here at the school for lunch makes their family feel better about them spending the afternoon at classes instead of at more work.

  When I miss my family, so much that my chest hurts and everything hurts, I try to calm myself by thinking of my future, because I think it could be a good future if no one comes in and starts killing again. Look at what I’ve learned in just a few years! When I first came here I was afraid all the time. I had too many dark, sad things in my head. I thought there would never be room there for anything else. Then I learned how to read and write and even to use a computer. So now I have many good things to think about.

  I don’t know why the Taliban killed my family. My family were innocent. They were not important, fancy people. They were nobody’s enemies. The Taliban killed my family just to show their power. They did a lot of that, killing whole families. You can see it when you go into a graveyard. Big groups of family members all buried on the same day. Like they are on a picnic. Only they are dead.

  Karima, 14

  Women need economic power. Economic power means having ownership over enough money to create their own lives, to live without being dependent on men for food, shelter and the other necessities of life. This is true for women everywhere.

  In North America there are laws to protect the rights of women and, just as important, there are strong social customs to back those laws up. When Canadian and American women are beaten by their male partners, there are shelters for them to go to with their children, and the police can arrest the men for assault. The system doesn’t always work the way it is supposed to, and each year women are still murdered by their male partners. But the ideal we strive for is that no one has the right to make anyone else live in a state of fear. And since women in North America have the right to earn their own money — and decide how to spend it — they can learn to make the types of choices that will help them avoid or get away from abusive men.

  In Afghanistan social customs make it very difficult for women to have independent economic power, and without that, they must depend on men for their survival. Very often this turns out fine, as the vast majority of Afghan men — like men anywhere — are kind and strive to do the right thing. But when a woman is forced to be dependent on an abusive man, her choices are often limited. She can suffer through it and hope things get better, she can commit suicide, she can escape the home and hope she is not found and killed for “dishonoring” her family, or she can kill the abuser and be executed or spend the rest of her life in prison.

  Karima and her mother face this situation every day of their lives.

  My father has been dead for ten years. He died of a brain attack. My mother washes clothes for people in the neighborhood, and they give her a little money. It is not enough to live on. We live in a poor area and the neighbors can’t pay a lot.

  I have three sisters and one brother. My brother is seven and the youngest. We live with my mother’s brother, my uncle. He has just a small house — one room we share with his family. There are too many of us in that small space, but where else can we go?

  There are not enough mats for us all to sleep on, so my family sleeps on the floor. There is a rug but it is thin, and the floor is a cold and hard place to sleep. The house has no electricity. None of the houses in the area do. When it becomes dark outside it becomes dark inside. I have no way to do my homework.

  My uncle has oil lamps and candles, but when I try to use one to study he says, “Why are you sitting there with books? Why do you just sit while I have to work to feed you? You should not be going to school. Your job is to get a husband, not to sit around with books, using up the candles.”

  I am lucky, though, because my mother stands up to him on this matter. She tells me to go to school, to study hard and make a good future for us.

  My mother never had the chance to go to school. She cannot read or write. She has no experience of these things. But she knows how hard her life is, and she thinks that education might be the way to an easier life.

  My great ambition is to one day work in a bank. It is a job that a woman can do where she will have good responsibility and where people will treat her with respect.

  I cry sometimes because my uncle is very cruel to my mother and brother and me. He hits
us. He says insulting things to us because he does not want to have us around, but we have nowhere else to go. When I get my job at the bank I will make a good salary and take us all to live in another place, far away from my uncle. But that is still many years from now.

  We don’t know what will make him angry. If we did, then we wouldn’t do it. I think he is just angry when we breathe, and we can’t do anything about that. My brother is a boy and can run outside, but my sisters and I can’t just leave the house when we want to. It’s not safe for us outside, either.

  My uncle keeps threatening to find me a husband. I know that will be my fate, that one day he will marry me off to someone and I won’t be able to disobey. But I hope I get to live part of my life for myself.

  So I come to school a lot because school is a nicer place than home. After I finish regular classes I stay at school for special courses, like English, tailoring and computers. All classes are free at my school, as long as you do your work. You cannot just come and not work because someone else would make better use of your space.

  When I do go home I spend most of my time taking care of my little brother and helping my mother wash clothes. My favorite food is spaghetti. Sometimes we have it here at school for lunch. I have one good friend, a girl in my class. She has a hard life, similar to mine, so we understand each other very well.

  We both work hard in school. We hope one day to have a life.

  Sharifa, 14

  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.

&n
bsp; 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.