Posted on 28-12-2003

For Afghans, Life Gets Worse
Ilene Prusher, Christian Science Monitor

KABUL, Dec. 23 (CSM) -- Bibi Hanifa lives in the skeleton of a building,
where an unforgiving wind rushes down from the snow-capped Hindu Kush and
meets no resistance. Her home, the abandoned headquarters of Kabul Power
and Water, has no doors or windows, its dark and cold structure resembling
in some ways a dark cave.

Encouraged to return to Afghanistan (news - web sites) after the fall of
the Taliban two years ago, the "former" refugee and her family soon found
themselves homeless.

Save for a few blankets, bags of food, and pocket money they received from
the United Nations (news - web sites) when they crossed the border from
Pakistan 1-1/2 years ago, they say they have received no assistance. I
walked into Ms. Hanifa's world here a year ago, and sat shivering on the
skinny floor cushions. I wondered how any family could survive here. I
soon learned that they had just buried an infant, Bibi Hanifa's niece. The
family blamed it on the bitter weather. They were living in one room with
no electricity, no heat, no plumbing, and no access to schools or
healthcare. Despite their dire needs, help from aid agencies was not
reaching them.

Hanifa was my immediate favorite. She had the startling khaki green eyes
that only Afghans seem to have. She said she could not offer tea because
of Ramadan, but she began to talk. She told me she was ashamed of herself:
She had brought up her eight children on dreams of returning home, and now
they were angry with her for bringing them here. Their only hope, she
said, was to scrape together enough money to go back to Pakistan for the
winter.

I told her it was just a matter of time. At the time, I told Hanifa that
with so much international aid pouring into Kabul, assistance was
available - it might just be a matter of tracking it down. I gave her
suggestions of places to look for help, and left, thinking it would only
be a matter of time before conditions improved.

Now, a year later, I am the one who feels ashamed. Little has changed in
Karta i-Seh, a neighborhood of southwest Kabul with so many collapsed
buildings that it almost looks as if an earthquake had struck. Hanifa says
things are getting worse because assistance is scarce--and Afghanistan is
no longer a central focus. "Last year was better, because at least they
provided us with some coal and blankets," she says. "This year we got
nothing."

Hanifa struck me as beautiful last year. Today, she looks nearly a decade
older. But her 3-year-old daughter has hardly grown and her hair looks
more like an infant's than a toddler's. "Last year, the foreign people
were paying attention to us, but this year, they don't even ask if we need
help," says Hanifa. "They said they would provide us with windows and
doors, but nothing came and they never came back." I ask who "they" were,
but no one in the family is literate, rendering the workings of
foreign-aid groups, the UN, and the Afghan government a mystery to them.
The only visitors in the past three months have been from a government
ministry. They came to inspect the site and said they would evict the
squatters and reclaim the land for Kabul Power and Water. They haven't
returned yet.

I was drawn here because this is a part of the city that the world
sometimes takes notice of, and yet quickly forgets. The families of Kart
i-Seh saw some of the city's most devastating fighting during the 1990s.
Most here now are refugees--about 2.5 million of whom have returned to
Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban. Not all are happy they made the
trip. The families here say they were better off while living in Iran and
Pakistan, and many dream of going back. And UNHCR, the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees, has pulled foreign staff out of a wide belt of
southern and eastern Afghanistan after a French citizen was shot dead in
Ghazni last month.

Several billion dollars are supposed to be going to Afghanistan's
reconstruction. At the UNHCR office in Kabul, an official tells me the aid
organization has supervised the construction of 40,000 homes for refugees,
mostly in rural areas, and that it will build another 60,000. But only
1,500 of them will be in Kabul itself, where most of the returnees have
come in search of work and services. "The goal is to get people to return
to their places of origin," says Nadar Farhad of UNHCR. "We're focusing on
the rural areas."

The current trend, it seems, is to give construction materials to refugees
and encourage them to build their own homes. But that works only for rare
refugees who own a plot of land in the crowded capital.

Farida Anwari is among the many who don't. Around the corner from Bibi
Hanifa, past the bombed-out, rusting military vehicles which serve as
jungle gyms for the children, Ms. Anwari's mud hut looks more like a mound
of packed earth with an entrance than a house. Inside, her home comes
alive with pictures of movie stars and models. The shiny pin-ups contrast
with the drab earthen walls, with twigs poking through like veins. These
pinups are what Anwari's uncle, Mohammed Issak, sells to survive: pictures
of Indian movie stars, Japanese models, and blond children who transport
the imagination far from the mud hut with no electricity.

Anwari once lived more comfortably. Her husband, a government officer, was
killed in a rocket attack in the early 1990s. Afterwards, she fled to
Pakistan with her four children, whom she supporting by working as a maid.
When the new Afghan government of Hamid Karzai took over in late 2001, she
says, word spread: It was time to go home. "That's why we decided we
should come back to our country," says Anwari, whose round, girlish face
is framed by an bright orange scarf.

Arriving in Kabul, Anwari found that her old home was destroyed. Desperate
for shelter, she came here. With even the abandoned buildings overflowing,
they had nowhere to live. Heruncle, also widowed in the war, helped her
construct the mud house and moved in. "When I came from Peshawar, I was
very hopeful that the government would find a home for us. And the other
hope was that I could get the children into school and I would work," says
Anwari. "When I came, I found absolutely nothing." She can't find work,
and says she can't get her children enrolled in schools because she has no
money for fees. "I don't care about my life now, but I care about my
children. If I could find work, I would spend it on their education."

If it weren't for her uncle's business, they wouldn't have enough to eat.
Each day, Mr. Issak piles his pictures, stickers, and plastic flowers onto
a wooden stand and carries it to a busy commercial district. There, he
sells his goods to earn maybe 50 afghanis a day - about $1. Lately, he
says, Taliban-type fundamentalists have been harassing him, telling him
that his business, with its racy pictures of midriff-baring actresses, is
an affront to Islam. "They yell at me, 'Why are you selling these
pictures? You'd be better being a pimp,' " complains Issak. He's been
beaten several times, he says, by local police. "I tell them I'm doing
this to support my family," he says. "If someone would give me a job, I'd
do anything."

They've been to UNHCR several times to ask for help. They received only a
tent to put over the hut. Anwari hopes that, and perhaps some
distributions of coal or wood, will get them through the winter.

Allah Nazar lives on the floor of a building where the ceiling is half
collapsed, giving the children a round-the-clock view of the traffic
below. Until recently, he was out working. But a cement mixer fell on his
hand; he lost a finger and damaged several others. It is not clear if
he'll be able to do manual labor again. "To whom should we go? I don't
know anymore," says Nazar, whose face is etched by deep lines. "We keep
going to complain but they don't care." He fears officials will return to
eject them. "They said we should leave building because they're going to
start work here. And I said, 'Well, you'll have to kill all of us and our
families first, because we have nowhere to go,' " he says. "People still
living in Pakistan ask me, how's the life in Kabul?" he says, and shakes
his head. "I tell them, don't go. Don't return to your homeland. Can you
imagine saying that?"