In Kabul, Suffering has long been the norm
Boston Globe December 05, 2001
Lynda Gorov

KABUL, Afghanistan - The babies were dying. The doctor denied it, of course. But they were clearly escaping this impoverished, unprincipled place. Maybe in the next world they'd have enough medicine and a clean IV. Maybe there the ceiling wouldn't leak on their tiny heads. Suffering in Afghanistan is out in the open in a way that most Americans would find unfathomable. Refugees and residents alike witness it, watch it parade past, wonder from one day to the next whether their own luck will hold.

Men with no legs drag themselves into traffic, hoping their status, as land-mine victims will bring an afghani note or two. Orphans three and four deep, their faces filthy, their clothes in rags, surround anyone fortunate enough to be able to afford food. Women appear at car windows like apparitions, imploring with all they have at their disposal: their eyes, barely visible through the screen woven into their blue burqas.

Many are homeless refugees. Many more are hungry. Most will not live past the age of 45. Two-plus decades of war - against the Soviets, against the Taliban, against one another - have trimmed their life span and made living a chore. People don't seem ashamed of their status as sufferers. They don't seem rattled by the raw sores that afflict them day and night.

At one of the children's hospitals in Kabul, where poor villagers come for the best medical care available to them these days, 25-year-old Znaib stands in the hallway holding her son Shokriah in her thin arms. Shokriah is 6 and weighs maybe 20 pounds. He has malaria, meningitis, and a tube in his nose. His head has the exact contours of a science lab skull. The cheerful red-fringed cowboy vest he is wearing makes an unintentional mockery of his lost Afghan boyhood.

''I borrowed a lot of money to come here,'' says Znaib, who, like many Afghans, uses only one name. ''I am sure my son is getting good care.''

Down the hall, in a room crammed with 10 beds, a mother and child on each one, the colour scheme is grey and rust. Every surface is dusty, every bed frame breaking down to its basic elements. In one corner, a 5-year-old boy named Fazulah Akmahad is running a temperature above 106, his eyes rolling with each convulsion of his little-boy body. The hand of his mother, Qandigullah, is on his forehead, trembling. The nose and the mouth of a young girl are black with sores.

The doctor says she has severe anaemia and perhaps a liver malfunction. In the States, she'd probably be home playing by now. But the hospital has few of the medicines that help American children who get sick get well. Many of the best-qualified doctors have fled to Pakistan. Dr. Rahimullah Rahimi, who stayed behind to minister to children under the Taliban and now the Northern Alliance, says during rounds that only about 40 percent of the supplies he needs can be found on the hospital's shelves. Used intravenous needles sit on a cart, ready to be used again in an emergency.

''If there'd been medicine, a lot of kids would have improved,'' says Dr. Amhnullah, 20, a medical student who, even at his age, is well into his residency at the children's hospital. ''A lot of them have died and there wasn't anything we could do. We can't save the children born prematurely. Yesterday another one died.''

The statistics are as appalling as the dark, dank hospital. At one of the regular press briefings held by the United Nations at Kabul's Intercontinental Hotel - where, despite its pedigreed name, the roof rains water into the lobby, the electricity ebbs and flows, and some rooms come without glass in the windows - a spokesman for the world body ticks off the troubles facing the children born and yet-to-be born in Afghanistan.

One of four births will end in death, the fourth-highest infant mortality rate in the world. A mother-to-be dies of pregnancy complications every 30 minutes, the second-highest delivery death rate anywhere. Half of Afghan children are malnourished. Nearly all of them have had a firsthand look at violence. Only 8 percent of girls and 32 percent of boys have participated in any primary education.

The numbers go on, UN spokesman Eric Falt piling one numbing detail atop another. He means to make his audience care. But this is Afghanistan. After a while the only sure way to survive is to become inured to the awfulness - the boy who mentions that his mom and dad are dead, then pleads to shine an American's shoes; the girl who should be in fourth grade crying for crumbs; the merchants whose fruit and vegetables rot on the cart because too few of the hungry have enough Afghanis to buy them.

Beaten and beaten down by one government after another, Afghans seem not to notice their own country's agony. But they do, especially the ones who continue to resist their oppressive circumstances. In a rundown housing development deep in Kabul, Saria Parlika sits in front of a bare cracked wall and contemplates her place in Afghan society. Her father, Mohammad Harif, 80, shrugs and offers, ''What she wants, she can do.'' That's a radical philosophy for any Afghan man. For one as old as Harif it borders on the heretical

What his daughter wants is to walk the streets of Kabul without covering herself from head to toe in one of the burqas that some call Afghan tradition, many more call a form of subjugation by the now-toppled Taliban. Her head covered only by a gauzy beige shawl, Parlika recalls the demonstration she organized recently to make her point. Women - Afghan women - poured into the streets and lifted their veils as one.

''We were not frightened,'' says Parlika, who was imprisoned for 18 months for her political activism on behalf of all Afghan people, not just women. ''Our plan was just to say to the world: This is the voice of the Afghan woman and we do not accept this dress. ... ''I'm hopeful and I'm praying, but according to our dark past, I cannot know anything,'' she adds. ''But now the world is concerned. It's the responsibility of the world to not let the past repeat itself.''

Just beyond Parlika's crumbling walk-up apartment building, a gaggle of skinny preteen girls, some as young as 7 or 8, repeats the refrain to a newly popular children's song: ''Nene Taliban.'' No, no Taliban. They're young enough to fill with hope at the sight of a woman in baggy pants, black sweater, and hiking boots, old enough to know they could never wear similar clothes as adults in Afghanistan, at least not now.

The girls gather round, giggling with each introduction, awed by the unexpected appearance of a foreigner in their meagre midst. ''Hello, do you speak English?'' one asks, offering the only sentence she knows in English. ''My name is Farah,'' says another. Theirs is the first genuine happiness a visitor has experienced in Kabul. This time, their shiny eyes imply, it might even last.