Kids of Kabul

Just about every day, I walk down the street from my camp to the Ministry of Defense, which is the Afghan equivalent of the Pentagon.  Back home, the Pentagon is one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the country.  Here, the MoD headquarters building is in one of the nicer parts of Kabul (and certainly one of the safest, as it’s surrounded by tall concrete walls and razor wire) but the realities of Afghanistan’s long history of war and suffering abounds.  The saddest part are the kids.

They wait for us on just the other side of our camp’s walls.  There is usually a dozen or so of them, each hawking some trinket—scarves, handmade bead bracelets, ID card holders.  One boy—not more than 5 years old—is out there every Friday, trying to sell pictures he drew with crayons.  He’s always smiling and once in a while he’ll do a little dance in his sandals.  The kids are dirty, their hands so chapped from the cold air that they bleed.  Some of the kids wear sandals without socks; their feet are as dry as the hills that surround Kabul.  They’re dirty, their colorful and mismatched clothes stained and covered in the omnipresent dust of Afghanistan.  When it’s really cold, they huddle around small fires they make out of trash.  Some of the boys who don’t have trinkets to sell crowd us and demand to be our body guards.  They’re not older than 10.  We walk past the Spanish embassy and turn down the road that runs parallel to President Karzai’s palace walls, and they give us fist bumps.

Another boy, probably about 12, sells ID card holders.  Only he kept calling them “purses.”  One of the sergeants in my office and I worked with him for weeks, trying to get him to say “ID card holder”—explaining to him that the male U.S. soldiers don’t want to buy a purse.  He finally got it right and now every time I see him, he yells “ID card holder!”  He told me the other day he was hungry and that his brother is sick.

UNESCO recently announced that the biggest health problem facing Afghanistan is mental illness—not cholera, malaria, or even starvation, all of which are serious problems here.  It’s hard to fathom, but this country has been at war for over 30 years.  Kabul essentially was razed to the ground in the 1980s, as the mujahedeen fought the Soviets and then each other.  The Taliban swept through and forced people like my interpreter, who was then just a boy, to wear a turban, go to Islamic school, and live in fear.  On the way to MoD, we pass the spot where the former president of Afghanistan was hung by the Taliban—and we walk down the same streets where they dragged his body.  And while Kabul is relatively safe, there are a few bombings each month—delivered by things as seemingly innocuous as bicycles.

Looking into the deep brown eyes of the children outside our walls, it’s easy to see what UNESCO means.  I admit that I don’t know any of these kids’ stories.  I don’t know for sure if they suffer from the residual effects of living in a violent place.  All I know is that when I ask why they aren’t in school, they tell me that they have to work, that they’re hungry, do I want to buy a scarf? 

As my family and I prepare to welcome another child into the world, every day I look at these kids of Kabul and wonder about how different life could be.  And I thank God that my kids never had to ask what that boom was, or had to try to sell their crayon drawings, or had to build a fire out of trash.  I hope that someday those same kids outside our walls can say the same thing about their children.