Kids of Kabul dance with death along city's wrecked streets

By Sarah Davison

September 2009

(Editor's Note: Sarah Davison is a freelance journalist based in New Delhi. Her work is currently used by a variety of news organizations including CBC, The National (U.A.E.) Globe & Mail, USA Today and others. She can be reached at sdavison@sdavison.net.)

The streets of Kabul are full of working kids. By some estimates, 70,000 children are working the streets of Afghanistan's main city, and the number is growing as IDPs, or internally displaced persons, flock towards the relative calm of Kabul.

Many are barely tall enough to press their noses to the window of a passing car and stare into its warm, comfortable interior. They may be as young as six or seven years old, but they are working - and they are the lucky ones: a full one quarter of all Afghan children do not make it past five years of age.

In a country with an average life expectancy of 44, these children learn early how to work to survive. They dart and weave among the passing cars, flapping filthy rags at windscreens, tapping the window with sticks of chewing gum, swarming SUVs with noisy pleas for a coin or food scraps.

A sale, or a food wrapper, or a coin tossed out of a lowered window is met with whoops from the smallest kids but the older children - who have shoes, warm coats, and often a hat - waste no time getting straight back to business. By 12 years old or so, they are supporting families, often led by widows.

This urgent need to earn explains why many parents refuse to allow their children half a day of school at the Aschiana Foundation, which comes with a hot lunch and some basic hygiene instruction.

"We have some programs for children's rights training for the family members of the children but actually it is not easy to stop the work of the children," said founder Engineer Youseff.

"You can see the street is not a good place for these children, they are vulnerable to a lot of things, not just prostitution and drugs. They are vulnerable to kidnapping, to accidents of the vehicles or basically abuse, and sexual abuse, and people want them to carry drugs for them and work in the drugs business."

But parents with no job confront a difficult choice: keep the kids working, or send them to the orphanage. A full two-thirds of the children at Afghanistan's main state orphanage, Allahoddin, are not orphaned, but instead abandoned by parents who believe their kids are better off without them. The orphanages are full, and boys outnumber girls by a high margin; girls tend to get turned away. If families cannot register the child at the orphanage because it is full, or for some other reason, they may choose to round up a group of kids and send them to Pakistan, where they enroll in madrassas that teach radical Islam while providing basic food and shelter.

"It is good to learn about their religion, but these are just children, they don't know how to be a good Moslem," said Yasin Farid at Physiotherapy and Rehabilitation Services of Afghanistan (PARSA), an NGO affiliated with the Red Crescent Society. "These people use their childishness, and when they come back they make problems for the country here, and for people in the rest of the world."

Farid is married to Allahoddin caseworker Saleha, who actually grew up in the orphanage during the Russian occupation and has good memories. Saleha not only got a good education, but now speaks three languages, has a good job, a stable marriage, and her own family. She was one of 600 kids rounded up by the Russians and sent to Tajikistan. "These are educated people, in fact, more than other people who went to public school," Farid said.

"In 1984 it was much better than the present time," Saleha said, recounting how three years ago, children were sleeping on filthy floors in rooms with no windows or doors. There were no stoves, no water or power, and the children had no clothes or food. Testing revealed that 10 percent of the kids had hepatitis B.

ISAF came in and rebuilt the buildings, providing essential services. But the critical problem was not the the wrecked building, but a system destroyed by 30 years of war; the caregivers did not know how to look after the children. Severely deprived themselves, they did not even wait for the PARSA team to leave after its first visit before stealing every single item in a first donation of blankets and food.

Theft remains a significant problem. The Ministry of Social Affairs provides a dollar a day for each child, but three quarters of that never reaches the kids. "It is stolen by the government or by people who should be taking care of the children," said Farid.

"I'm seven. My mother died," whispered Mobin. "I was living in a tent with my family. There were too many people," said five-year-old Mirwas. "My mother died and my father was working," said Mustafa, 7. None of these children have shoes, and Mustafa has no coat and no hat. But for these children, such hardships pale by comparison with life on the streets. They have heat, one meal a day, and cots to sleep on. And they are remarkably resilient.

"When we get upset, we must stay calm," says Zainab, a 15-year-old who arrived at Allahoddin two years ago after being rescued by a stranger from the street, where her uncle had put her up for sale. "My uncle had bad character, and also his wife," she said, in impressive English learned at a short course. "I feel safety here. I want to work as a journalist and also I want to work as English teacher."

Ahmed is calm, which is commendable, given that his face is swollen from the acid his uncle threw in his face. "I don't know," he answered, when asked why, and a shadow passes over his face.

The relative safety of Allahoddin may soon end. The director of the orphanage announced during our visit that he is closing the orphanage and turning it into a daycare centre instead. "The government will close all the orphanages and send the children to the community, " said Farid. "That means they will throw them out, they will go to mosque, they will work as slaves for people."

This is what happened last year in Chaghcharan, in Bamyan Province in central Afghanistan. Before the winter, 300 children were packed into a small building there, with no doors or windows, and no food. Then, just as winter was coming, the government closed the orphanage. By the spring, only 160 kids returned. "They started working as laborers and slaves and couldn't come back," said Farid. "This winter the government wanted to send them back to the community, that means nowhere, then they don't have food or somewhere to stay." One boy was discovered in the market. He was covered in scabies, sleeping under the stalls, and was being raped repeatedly.