As dawn broke, hundreds of people gathered in Chagcharan, the capital of Afghanistan’s Ghor province. They wait in line on the side of the road and someone comes and offers them some work. If they get work that day, their family will get two meals.
But there is very little hope of getting a job. Juma Khan, 45, has worked just three days in the past month and a half, earning just 150 to 200 Afghanis a day. He said his children had to sleep without food for three consecutive days. Seeing his wife and children crying, he was forced to ask neighbors for money to buy flour. She lives in fear of her children starving to death.
According to the United Nations, three out of four Afghans are currently unable to meet their basic needs. Unemployment is high and health care is abysmal. International aid is also less than before. Currently, it is estimated that around 4.7 million people in the country are on the brink of famine.
Ghor provinces are in the worst condition. Its men are helpless. A man named Rabbani said crying, his children have not eaten anything for two days. Khawaja Ahmed, an old man, said his eldest child had already died and he had to work to feed the rest but no one would give him work as he was too old. As soon as a bakery opens nearby, the owner distributes leftover bread and people rush to get a piece of bread.
The devastating effects of unemployment are also evident in nearby villages. A man named Abdul Rashid Azimi showed his seven-year-old twin daughters Rokia and Ruhila and said he was ready to sell his daughters. Immersed in poverty and debt, Abdur Rashid said that if the children ask for food at home, there is nothing to give them. He took this heartbreaking decision to sell a girl to feed others for at least four years.
Their mother, Kayhan, says she has to eat bread and hot water at home. Two of his teenage sons work as shoe polishers in the city and another collects garbage, which Kayhan uses as firewood.
Another man, Syed Ahmed, was forced to sell his five-year-old daughter Shaika to a relative as he could not afford the medical expenses. He made this decision in exchange for the 200,000 Afghanis required for the girl’s surgery. After the surgery was successful, he said the girl would have to move in with that relative within five years. If she had the money, she would never have sold her child, but she had no other way to keep him alive.
Until just a few years ago, millions of families like Syed’s received flour, oil and curd as food aid. But in the past few years, countries like the US and the UK have virtually stopped or drastically reduced aid. Also, severe drought has worsened the situation in more than half of the country’s provinces. A villager named Abdul Malik said that they did not get any help from the government or NGOs.
The Taliban government, which will come to power in 2021, blames the previous government and the United States for the situation. “Foreign aid used to create an artificial economy and now they have inherited poverty and unemployment,” said Hamdullah Fitrat, a deputy spokesman for the Taliban government. Another factor turning away donors is the Taliban’s ban on women. But the Taliban said humanitarian aid should never be politicized.
Currently millions of lives are at risk due to lack of emergency assistance. A 14-month-old daughter of a man named Mohammad Hasem died due to hunger and lack of medicine. Locals say that child mortality has increased due to malnutrition. Cemeteries almost doubled the number of small graves compared to large ones, painting a grim picture of infant mortality.
The situation is the same in the main hospital of Chaghachar. All the beds in the neonatal ward are full and most of the babies are having trouble breathing. The twin girls were born two months early and weighed just two kg and one kg. Their mother Shakila did not eat well during pregnancy. Tragically, the older child died while in the hospital.
Fatima Hussaini, a nurse at the hospital, said that sometimes three children die in a day, which is common for them now. The number of patients is increasing due to poverty, but the hospitals do not have enough drugs and equipment. As government hospitals do not have medicines for patients, families have to buy medicines from outside. Lack of money has forced many families to take their sick children home from hospital, where young children will now struggle to survive on their own.
