Kids of Kabul

by Deborah Ellis

  The thing I most like to do is study the Qur’an. My father was killed while he was praying, and I think that makes his death holy in some way. I like to think so, anyway. By studying the Qur’an I feel that he is not so far away from me.

  It is my dream to one day memorize all of the Qur’an. It was the wish of my father that all his girls be able to do this. I want to become a hafiz, which is what people will call me when I have memorized the whole Book of Allah.

  It will be a big job. The Qur’an has 114 surahs [chapters] and over six thousand verses. But others have done it and I will be able to do it. Then the message of the Prophet will be inside me, and I’ll always have it, even if all the Qur’ans disappear. And when I have a problem, I can know what part of the Holy Qur’an will help me solve it.

  I haven’t started to memorize it yet. I am still learning to read it, and I make a lot of mistakes. When I stop making mistakes, then I will start to memorize.

  There is a television show on Afghan TV called Qur’an Star, for those who memorize the Qur’an, a kind of competition. I want to go on this program and do well. That is one good way I can help my family. The last winner was a sixteen-year-old girl. She won 150,000 afghanis ($3,000 US). My family will be helped a lot with that much money.

  My mother says that when it is her turn to die, it will be my responsibility to recite the prayers over her body. She says that praying over her will be more important than crying over her, so I should practice the prayers and have them easy in my mind to get to when the time comes.

  I hear that Kabul is a nice city, with parks and gardens and big shops and even a zoo, but I haven’t seen any of that. All I have seen is this area, and it isn’t very nice. It doesn’t really matter, though, if you live in an ugly place. If you have beautiful thoughts in your head then it’s like you are living in beauty.

  In the future I want to be a teacher and teach both English and Islamic studies. People who know English are more respected, and if I am a scholar of Islamic studies, I can help spread the news of the Qur’an.

  War comes when there is no unity, when people look out for themselves instead of each other. But through discussion we can solve all our problems, create unity and avoid war.

  Mustala, 13

  Life expectancy for people in Afghanistan is, on average, forty-four years. In Canada and the United States it is about eighty. Poor nutrition, lack of access to health care and clean water, exposure to the elements, poverty-related illnesses such as tuberculosis, plus war and related violence all take their toll. Twenty percent of all children born in Afghanistan die before they reach their fifth birthday.

  Many people have fled Afghanistan because of the war. Others have left in search of jobs or a better life elsewhere.

  In Canada and the United States, we have an economic safety net. People over sixty-five receive a pension. People who are out of work are often eligible for unemployment insurance. For those who are too ill to work, there is another type of assistance. We have these things because the people who came before us worked really hard to make them happen. We have also never suffered the horrible destruction of prolonged war on our land.

  War creates poverty. In countries like Afghanistan, where there has been prolonged war, there is no economic safety net. People go hungry. According to UNICEF, nearly 40 percent of children under the age of five are undernourished, and over half of all children under five are smaller than they would be if they had enough to eat.

  Mustala’s family has been split apart by war.

  I live with my grandfather and grandmother. We are really poor. My grandparents don’t work. We have no money for soap, so I am often dirty and wearing dirty clothes. I would like to be better dressed, so when people see me coming they will think, “Oh, this boy is important, look at his clothes. He must be somebody special.” No one will think that of me if I don’t have nice clothes.

  My father left when I was quite small. He went to Iran to find work and also because some people here wanted to kill him. My mother got another husband and left us so she could be with him. I think she has other children now.

  Classrooms and playground at Mustala’s school.

  I get free food at school, which is often the only time I eat, and sometimes my grandparents don’t eat at all. When I can, I put food in my pockets at lunchtime to take back to my grandparents, but it is a thing that makes me nervous to do. I don’t want to get in trouble. So, sometimes if I am hungry for two pieces of nan, I take two, but I don’t eat them. I hide them in my jacket to take home. That’s not stealing, is it?

  This whole school is filled with kids who have a hard life but who are really smart, although not all are as smart as me or as good at playing football as me! Many have lost one parent or two parents in the war or from some illness. I have not lost my parents. They are both alive. They are just not with me.

  I wish my father would come back from Iran, even for a day. He would see what a smart, good boy I’ve become, and he would keep me with him. I don’t care where. I could go back to Iran with him or we could stay here. Or we could go someplace else. I would be fine with any decision.

  Sometimes my mother sends my grandparents a little bit of money to help out. This way I know she hasn’t forgotten about me. Her new husband would not want me to live with him, so I don’t think about that or dream about that. When I get to be a man, maybe I can take care of my mother and she won’t have to live with him anymore. But that’s a long way off.

  I was young when my father left, maybe five or six. Sometimes, when I’m playing football with my friends, a man will stop and watch us or will walk by really slowly, and I think, “Maybe that’s my father.” I play extra well then, so that he’ll take me away with him. He won’t want a son who is no good at football.

  It gets very dark in our house at night, and sometimes I get afraid. When you hear things in the dark and you can’t see what they are, anybody would be afraid. It doesn’t mean I’m not brave. But if someone shoots a gun or there is yelling or a cat screams, it can get scary. When I get scared I try to think of football or I practice my English.

  I think Afghanistan could be a great country, especially if I was the president. I’d help all the poor people and make sure they have food and electric light. I would make a law that everybody has to go to school. Even adults, because there are a lot of adults who have never been to school, and I think that makes them have bad tempers. If they see me going to school, they yell at me that I should be working. So I would make them to go school, too, so that they’d stop bothering me.

  We need to study to make a good country out of Afghanistan. Right now we are a backwater country. At school I have learned there are better ways to do things than all this war, war, war all the time. It’s the young generation that will change that.

  My generation.

  Me.

  Ajmal, 11

  In the western part of Kabul is a holiday spot called Qargha Lake. It has guesthouses that are rented by Kabul’s elite during the summer, a beach with donkey rides for kids, a picnic area, a restaurant and even an old amusement park. Nearby is the golf course that was built by King Habibullah in 1911, occupied by Soviet tanks during the 1980s, and then planted with land mines by the Taliban. When the Taliban left, it became a place where people were trained in how to remove land mines, and now golf is played there again.

  Ajmal and his younger sister, Spegmai, try to get money from Qargha’s few visitors on a cold winter day.

  My sister is ten. We live in a neighborhood a little ways from here. It takes us a while to walk here. I don’t know how long. I don’t carry a clock. A while.

  Both my sister and I go to school, but we don’t go every day. Sometimes the school is closed. Sometimes it is open and we go but the teacher doesn’t show up, so we leave again. Sometimes there is no food or money in our house so we have to go out to wor
k instead of going to school.

  Our mother is dead. I don’t know how she died. She was sick, I think, and we had no medicine. So she died.

  Our father is also sick, but he is not dead. His sickness is in his legs. When he is feeling well he looks through garbage to find something we can eat or use. He taught us how to do that, and so we do it when we are out.

  You have to pay attention. You can’t just go walk and think of other things. You have to see everything and think about if what you see is useful. I found a plastic bag on the beach this morning and put it in my pocket. A plastic bag is useful.

  Today it is cold and the lake is frozen. Not many people are here, so we don’t make much money. When there are a lot of cars we stand in the street and bang on their windows.

  Our work is to ask people for money, and when they give us money we burn some coal and the smoke takes away the evil spirits. We make maybe 35 afghanis a day (about 75 cents) when people are kind.

  Qargha Lake holiday spot.

  My sister likes this work more than I do. She is better at running than me, and she is pretty and speaks well, so people are nicer to her.

  I do not run well. My legs have a kind of sickness like my father’s, and you can see I do not speak well. So people laugh at me and call me names.

  If people don’t want to give us money, that’s okay. They don’t have to. We are small. What can we do to them if they don’t give? But why do they have to be mean? Why do they have to call us dogs and say bad words? That’s what I do not like about this job.

  My sister likes writing the best in school and I like reading the best. I would like to become something in the future. I don’t know what, just somebody of importance. Maybe I’ll become a teacher. When I’m a teacher I will show up for work every day so my students don’t waste time sitting in an empty classroom with nothing to learn.

  Amullah, 15

  Cricket was made popular by Afghans who had spent time as refugees in Pakistan, where cricket is played and followed with great enthusiasm.

  When the Taliban came to power in 1996, they banned the game. They allowed Afghanistan’s national cricket team to play again in 2000, but spectators were not allowed to cheer or clap. All they could do to show their enthusiasm was say “Allahu Akbar,” which means God Is Great. And the games had to be scheduled around the executions and torture that the Taliban carried out in that same stadium.

  Amullah and his friends are taking advantage of a free day to work on their cricket game in the schoolyard.

  My father is a farmer, or he used to be. We had to leave our land when I was small because of the war. There was shooting, bombing, people being killed for no reason. I don’t remember much about that time because I was very small, but my older brothers have told me. It got so bad that we couldn’t stay there. We moved around a lot, from place to place, trying to find somewhere safe. We ended up in Kabul.

  My father now works as a shopkeeper in someone else’s shop.

  I don’t remember much about the Taliban time. Like I said, I was really small. My brothers said that for them, the worst thing was that they couldn’t play sports. The Taliban wouldn’t let them. They wouldn’t let anybody play. But people would listen to games from India and Pakistan on radios they kept secret.

  How could they say, “No more football, no more cricket”? Those are the best things in life! It’s a good thing I was small. If they came back into the government with those rules, I would go mad. I remember my brothers trying to play football and cricket in our house, but we had a very small house, and our mother did not like them playing ball inside.

  My school is on holiday today, but we all came here to practice because we have a big cricket match coming up soon against another school, and of course we want to win!

  Cricket practice at Amullah’s school.

  All of us, yes, we like to play, but we also want to do good things for Afghanistan, like be teachers, doctors, engineers — all of the best kind because there is so much to do.

  I want to finish my schooling here, then go on to study agriculture. My father talks about his little farm, how much he loved it, and I would like to get that back for him. Probably not the same farm. That’s all gone in the war, but another piece of land, a better piece. Then I would take him and my mother out of Kabul to a place that is cleaner and quieter, and they can have some peace.

  I think it is good to study agriculture because there are new ways of doing everything. All the time, people are coming up with new ideas. Some may not be good, but some may be very good. So I’ll learn all I can, then become a good farmer. Maybe even a rich one!

  But first we need better security. Everyone is tired of being afraid. Here in the schoolyard everyone is playing hard and we’re having fun, but we can never really forget about the security. We see helicopters every day and military cars and trucks, and things still get blown up.

  But if all that can stop, then Afghanistan will be great, because there are so many of us who want it to be great, it can’t be anything else.

  Shabona, 14

  Years of war and repression have left Afghanistan lacking many basic things that other countries take for granted. A country without a fully functioning education system, for instance, cannot hope to move forward. After the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan needed everything — school buildings, books, chalk, pens and teachers. Trained teachers were in short supply. The Soviets, the warlords during the civil war and the Taliban all targeted teachers because teachers have such power to encourage independent thought — and independent thought is the enemy of despots.

  Teacher training is a priority for many organizations working to help rebuild Afghanistan — especially training women, since many families don’t want their daughters to be taught by male teachers.

  At a large wedding hall in Kabul, teachers from all over the area have gathered to learn new teaching methods from each other. Shabona and her classmates are taking part.

  We are from a high school about an hour from the city of Kabul. We have come here today to sing for the teachers who are part of this teacher-training conference. We sang the Afghan national anthem this morning and we’ll sing something else this afternoon.

  I like the national anthem. It lists all the tribes in Afghanistan, and it’s about how everyone should work together, even though they don’t.

  Then we had to sit and listen to the teachers. Some of them talked too much, but some were interesting.

  Some teachers sat up front in rows and pretended to be students while other teachers took turns pretending to teach math or science and other subjects in new ways to make it a better experience for the students. Some of their ideas would work better than others, in my opinion. I think it’s better to have a conversation with your students, not just talk all the time, because that can make us drift off, especially if we’re hungry.

  Our school is a good school, but there is no safe place for us to run around outside. We are girls but we want to move, too! It would be nice to have some green space that is safe so we could run around without being stared at or yelled at.

  I like most to study science. At my school we can study geometry, math, chemistry and biology. It’s all from books and sheets of paper and notes on the blackboard. We have two microscopes but they are very old and broken.

  There are so many girls who want to come to our school. We have almost 2,500 girls! We have to go to school in shifts. I’m on the morning shift. I’d like to go to school all day but we have to make room for the others.

  I was really young when the Taliban were in power, so I don’t remember a whole lot. Our teacher remembers. Whenever she thinks we are not studying hard enough, she tells us about that time. She had to leave school and was stuck at home most of the time. Her aunt had a little school for girls in her home. Not a school, just a study group, really, but it had to be very
secret. Our teacher would put her schoolbooks in a basket, then cover them up with fruit so the Taliban wouldn’t find out that she was studying.

  The Taliban were ignorant. They didn’t know that men and women are equals. It says so in the Qur’an.

  The Taliban broke their own rules all the time, too. Our teacher’s brother was arrested by them three times. He had a little shop, a secret shop that sold satellite dishes for televisions. These were against the law, so the Taliban would arrest him. But then they would say, “You can go free if you give me a satellite dish.”

  Our teacher says it was hard for her to go back to school after the Taliban because her brain wasn’t used to working. She says if studying hard becomes a habit with us, then we’ll be able to continue the habit if we are ever forced out of school again.

  We joke around, but we are also serious students. We want to be doctors or journalists or members of parliament or teachers. We will have to get there through hard work because none of our families have money. Just in this group we have girls whose fathers died in the war, who have had family members injured or homes that were blown up.

  I was living in an area south of Kabul. There was a lot of war there, even after the Taliban were kicked out of power. We had lots of rockets, lots of shooting, lots of explosions. It was very scary. I remember not wanting to leave my mother’s side. She would even just go into the next room and I’d scream because I was afraid I would never see her again.

  We were about to go to Kabul where it was supposed to be safer. Really, we were ready to go, about to get into the car, when a rocket hit the car and it exploded. So we were stuck until we could find another car to take us.