Three Days in Kabul: A Reflection

By Jonathan Frerichs

Oliya, her son Nasratullah, and five other children live in the Kabul neighborhood of Mullah Bazerk. Aid workers supported by ACT provided the family with a two-month supply of rice, oil, beans and sugar in early December but most of it was eaten in one month. Oliya's husband was killed in factional fighting five years ago. She earns what she can doing washing and tailoring for other families. Her neighbors also help. Credit: Jonathan Frerichs/ACT International

From afar many people in aid agencies, churches and governments have struggled for an accurate overview of the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan. Once here, however, your attention turns to individual persons and their circumstances. After a while your mind begins to process both perspectives, like a mental camera trying to keep both a close-up and a panorama in focus.

After three days here it is clear that you have not really seen much of Kabul, that Afghanistan is much more than Kabul, and that, as the saying goes, the more you learn the more you know how much there is to learn. All these are givens. But you take stock anyway, perhaps because so many people in the ACT network and beyond have been working or worried for Afghanistan for so long and the picture needs filling in.

   On the first day in Kabul the word that comes into focus is hope.

This hope is only a feeling shared by people you meet, but it sticks in your mind despite all the evidence to the contrary - the standing skeletons of houses hit by rockets years ago, a whole complex gutted in the recent bombing, the landscape of lifeless browns outside your airplane window.

Despite all this and much more, the Afghans you meet say they have hope and that their hope is growing. For some, hope exists because it was their last resort long ago and has not failed them. Several say that they had finally lost all hope during the time of the Taliban. "In June last year," said one. But now, these say, their hope is back.

Hope has come in hindsight for others. They have recently begun to hope that American bombing will prove to be the one war that ends Afghanistan's many wars.

"It's an unfortunate situation for Afghanistan to have to appreciate the bombing," a veteran Afghan aid worker says, "but that's what we've come to."

   By the third day in Kabul, however, the word most on your mind is hunger.

Hunger here is not so much a stark image but a shadow that appears over poor sections of town. You see it in two-year-olds that look like they are one, and in five-year-olds that look three. You see it when a mother lifts her veil at a nutrition clinic and her face is gaunt like her child's. You are reminded of another cold country, North Korea, where winter clothing also hides hunger's effects.

You see hunger and the childhood diseases that accompany it when a healthy looking woman says she has had 16 children but that 10 of them have died. And the baby she has brought to the clinic now is small and listless. She and her circumstances are the statistic from UNICEF that one out of every four Afghan children dies by the age of five.

If hunger can stalk the poor in Kabul, the hub of international attention and the capital of Afghanistan, what can it be doing in remote places? That data is still a casualty of chaos and isolation, but surely it is the poorest and most isolated citizens of Afghanistan who should be the ones to declare victory over this enemy.

   During each of these three days in Kabul words also come from above.

These are words that come to life in dusty alleyways of dirt and refuse and in crumbling homes of clay. One is the Bible verse that reads, "Pure religion, undefiled, is visiting widows in their affliction." You sit in widows' homes where food parcels delivered by Afghan aid workers made this verse come true during last year's bombing. While most outside aid was in limbo from fear and insecurity, a local partner organization of Norwegian Church Aid bought what was needed on the open market and arranged ways to reach the neediest households. These same widows serve you tea.

Distorted religion has been potent in this crisis, but here you hear an echo of the Great Commandment about loving neighbors. A local aid worker explains that when so many are in need the toll from hunger could be much higher, except for one thing.

"The sense of community is so strong," he says, "that people will not let a neighbor die for lack of food." All widows you meet mention that their neighbors give them food. A community leader, who himself is poor, refuses to take an NGO's ration card because others need it more. Even in hunger, hope.

With people like these the words of Micah come too, pushing us to "do justice" as well as mercy. Kabul is full of questions about justice: Why have so many women been widowed here? Will the outside world - your nation - your church - remember them this time? How will a nation in this condition heal? Are the Afghan wars over?

   The answer is coming. Of all things, it has begun with hope.

February 4, 2002

   

How You Can Help

UMCOR 9/11 Update September 2004: UMCOR's response to the aftermath of September 11 continues. We thank are thankful for all of contributions that United Methodists and others have so generously given.