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Imamuddin with his family in a shelter camp near Kabul. |
Kabul-- Hardly making a day-to-day living from collecting scraps and daily labouring,
Imamuddin and his family live in the dirty outskirt of Kabul under a roughly cloth-made tent that barely hides them from the public. The 47-years old father of three is part of a tiny camp that accommodates25 families which migrated from Iran to escape the civil war of the 1990s.
This camp to the west of Kabul and another nearby camp of hundreds of internally displaced families tell the story of a life affected by consecutive Afghan wars over three decades.
“I remember the happy days, 13 years ago, when we had our own home and an honourable livelihood in the middle of the city.. Intense wars forced us for the second time to leave homes - this time I migrated to Iran. When I returned home, it was a completely different life; no home, no food, and no job,” laments Imamuddin, who added that his home had been taken forcibly by warlords in recent years.
He had spent six years in Pakistan during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and then returned with the victory of Mujahideen. However, like most of other Kabul residents, Imamuddin was forced to leave the capital after a raging bloody civil.
The next destination was Iran, where he made relatively a good living along with his family.
The US-led invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001 forced Imamuddin to stay longer in Iran, however, unfortunately he was captured as an illegal immigrant by the Iranian police, and deported along with a wave of Afghans, mostly families, last year..
Balance Between Life and Death
Tortured, deprived of his earnings when deported and frustrated, Imamuddin lived the last winter in his current small shelter made from pieces of cloths, and is on the threshold of the second chilly winter of Kabul where the temperature drops to minus 20 degrees centigrade.
When I asked him how possible to survive in such a shelter during the cold winter months, Imamuddin told IOL:
“I know some of the women and children froze to death last winter. However, we are here out of necessity, whether we want it or not .Where can we go? We have nobody’s help to seek, but Allah’s.”
Elaborating further, the situation of families living in this tiny camp near Charah-e-Qambar area, Imamuddin said they make a living just for survival, He explain:
“Men go on daily basis to some local squares in the city where jobless people come together from across the capital in quest for work. The ones who are lucky are hired for two consecutive days”.
Children, contribute to the struggle for survival by collecting scraps of leftover food from garbage, scraps of metals, pepsi cans and used electrical goods which they resell.
Qutbuddin, who acts as chieftain of the camp, describes life as a day-to-day struggle for survival.
“I swear nobody here has the food for tomorrow reserved. If we and our children don’t work, we won’t have any other way but to beg. Today is Friday and is a public holiday for all working people, but we can’t stay home if we want to eat something tonight.”
There is no news of education for the children and no public services available.Qutbuddin says they usually do not visit the doctor unless one is severely ill.
“We can’t afford doctor fees, and therefore we don’t take our patients to hospitals until we know he will die if not treated. The other day, an old man from the camp fell sick, and we collected 10 Afghanis from each family to prepare the doctor’s fees and the money for medicine,” Qutbuddin said.
The 25 families, all of them living in the open dirt-covered ground, take water from a well they dug which provides them with murky and worm-riddled water, which serves to be insufficient.
The high epri of living is poverty and joblessness. The lack of attention from the government and aid agencies have left these families languishing in a ‘situation between life and death’, as described by Qutubuddin.
“We don’t feel that we have a government because it doesn’t do any good to the poor and helpless people, and they don’t care even if we die under whatever circumstances. Thousands of aid agencies and non-governmental organizations who claim to be helping Afghans have not helped us said Qutbuddin, who added that they only receive inadequate food aid from neighboring local residents. Once they received food aid from an Islamic aid agency.
Selling Children to Feed the Family is not Unusual
The next camp in Charah-e-Qambar known as the Helmandis’ Camp since most of the residents come from the most battle-affected province of Helmand, have a more pitiful story to tell.
It is home to hundreds of families who left Helmand and Kandahar provinces in the south due to a very fierce battle between the Taliban, governmental and foreign forces. Some of them have lost members in bombings and shellings of their villages.
Feeding their traditionally extended families has made it difficult for men taking care of the household expanses, to find easy ways of livelihood.
Some families forced by poverty sell their children and their babies for a cheap price-.as a final alternative. It has become a wide spread phenomena, not only in this camp, but in many other areas and provinces inside Afghanistan.
The selling of children reduces the size of the family, and feeds remaining family members, however, this is not unusual. Such destitute fathers even take their children to mosques to ask worshippers to ‘relieve them of their children’ or to help them to survive.
Not only have three decades of wars badly affected the lives of Afghans, natural disasters and drought have also played an important role in the suffering of the people.
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