Children as Barter in a Famished
Land
By BARRY BEARAK
KANGORI, Afghanistan,
March 2 — Haunted by
want, depleted from hunger,
Akhtar Muhammad first sold off
his few farm animals and then, as
the months passed, bartered away
the family's threadbare rugs and
its metal cooking utensils and
even some of the wooden beams
that held up the hard-packed roof
of his overcrowded hovel.
But always the hunger outlasted
the money. And finally, six weeks
ago, Mr. Muhammad did
something that has become
ruefully unremarkable in this
desperate country. He took two of
his 10 children to the bazaar of
the nearest city and traded them
for bags of wheat.
Gone now from his home are the
boys, Sher, 10, and Baz, 5. "What
else could I do?" the bereft father
asked today in Kangori, a remote
hamlet in the mountains of
northern Afghanistan. He did not
want to seem uncaring. "I miss my
sons, but there was nothing to
eat," he said, casting a glance
sideways to prove that his misery
was hardly unusual.
In the nearby foothills, enfeebled
people were coming back from
foraging wild spinach and even
blades of grass — a harvest of
hideously bitter greenery that can
be made edible only if boiled
long enough. "For some, there is
nothing else," Mr. Muhammad
muttered.
Afghanistan, cradle of tragedy, is now in its fourth year of
drought, and with the drought has come its inevitable
offspring, famine. The hungry, spiraling deathward, try to
cope in pitiable ways, selling all, eating fodder,
wandering away to beg.
Yet a measure of solace accompanies the abundance of
despair. Last fall, when American bombing raids hindered
emergency food deliveries, humanitarian groups were
concerned about mass starvation. As winter comes to a
close, the famine has not proved as lethal as feared,
leaving millions in the vicinity of the grave without quite
pushing them in.
"Always, in any situation like this, people are going to
die, but we've done a lot to minimize the loss of life," said
Alejandro Chicheri, a spokesman for the World Food
Program of the United Nations. "If there is starvation, it's
only in small pockets."
The World Food Program and various aid groups are
generally credited for a laudable mobilization. Wheat —
and occasionally beans and cooking oil — have been
distributed to 6.5 million Afghans, the goods sometimes
sent in a relay from trucks to camels to donkeys.
This charity has kept huge numbers from a final spill into
nothingness.
"It's really quite weird," said an aid worker, Christopher
S. F. Petch. "You go to places where people are only
eating bread made out of barley and grass. The people
don't look good and they don't look strong. But they also
don't look skeletal. They are managing."
It is hard to estimate how many lives hunger has recently
claimed. The situation is complex, and information
incomplete. This is not a nation of record-keepers.
Besides, hunger is often an indirect killer, letting disease
provide the finishing blow.
In Afghanistan, two decades of war have also left it hard
to distinguish between the bad times and the worse. Even
without famine, more than one in five children die before
the age of 5 and the average life expectancy is a mere 44.
The largest of the unanswered questions are complicated
by topography.
Hundreds of villages are far from roads, tucked away in
steep ravines and mammoth peaks, cut off further by snow.
Some Afghans are several days journey from any site of
food distribution.
What has happened to the isolated?
"We call them internally stuck people," said Ahmed Idrees
Rahmani of the International Rescue Committee.
"Wherever the roads stop, disaster seems to start.
Reaching some villages requires 4-5 days on a donkey.
People might be starving. We wouldn't know."
Kangori, in Sar-i-Pol Province, is a modest village of
mud-walled dwellings that seem to blend seamlessly into
the parched, unyielding earth. It is a three-hour walk
through rolling hills to Sholgarah, the nearest town of any
size, and that has proved an impossible distance for some.
The old, the infirm and the morose are paralyzed with
deprivation.
Not all in Kangori are suffering, however. Ajab Khan, a
prosperous shepherd, provided a welcoming hand and an
energetic tour of the sickly and dispossessed.
"Look, she is eating the grass," he said at the first stop,
introducing a frail woman who was sitting near her only
food, a bowl of weeds. "She has nothing, nothing at all."
The woman, Gul Shah, said she had sent her five children
out to gather more wild greens from the landscape. For
her, Sholgarah, where wheat was once given away, might
as well be Timbuktu. "How would I know when or where
there is free food?" she said.
Mr. Khan then directed the way to someone even more
pitiful. "I can show you a woman whose husband and two
children died of hunger," he said, pacing toward another
hovel.
There sat Khali Gul, a tearful woman with a bowl of grass
at her feet and nearby a young daughter whose face was
blemished with sores. She said her family had become
foragers two months before and now seemed to be
succumbing one by one to diarrhea. Five days after her
husband died, a son, 3, and a daughter, 4, perished as
well.
"I have no one to help me," she said, beginning to weep.
"There are some rich people in the village. When they feel
like it, they give me scraps of bread."
Mrs. Gul looked toward Mr. Khan, who nodded amiably
and said he himself was among the generous in this way.
"But there is hunger all over, and if I give someone food
for a month, then what follows after that?" he complained.
"For how long do you help?"
The same matter troubles the aid agencies. These days,
food is a lodestone, luring the hungry from their homes and
into huge camps where paltry monthly rations — usually
just one hefty sack of wheat per family — are nevertheless
dependably supplied.
One such place has been set up in the city of Ser-i-pol.
After the first gift of grain, the population of the camp
doubled within a few days as destitute people eagerly
forsook their mountain villages for life in a makeshift
municipality of donated tents.
Children as Barter in a Famished Land
(Page 2 of 2)
"The people won't leave and why
should they?" asked Ghulam
Nabi, director of the camp. He
was standing amid long rows of
white canvas tents. In the distance
were snow- topped peaks. "Out
there, there is no food or water or
seed for planting."
In the past year, Mazar-i-Sharif,
northern Afghanistan's largest
city, rapidly became home to 27
separate camps, with its own
urban poor lining up for food
alongside famished migrants. The
merely vulnerable feel as entitled
to a handout as the fully stricken.
Perhaps the biggest challenge
ahead will be getting people to go
home, where their last memories
are of unendurable hardship, the
burying of their dead, the dying of
their animals, the eating of the
seed they direly needed for the
next season's planting.
Afghanistan is primarily a country
of those who live from the land.
When rain falls once again, they
will require the replenishment of
seed as well as fertilizer and
tools and draft animals.
"The key word is return," said
Mireille Borne of the aid group
Acted. "If you just give away
food, you undermine the
economy. You have to think about
the long term."
The long term is what most disconsolate parents are
thinking of when they sell their children. There is not much
precedent in Afghanistan for this heart-wrenching
sacrifice. Traditionally, girls are "sold" for marriage, with
the bride's family collecting a price. But what is occurring
now is closer to the practice of bonded labor.
Arrangements differ but most often the child is exchanged
for a continuing supply of cash or wheat.
"The family was very hungry and I needed help in my
restaurant," said Muhammad Aslam, explaining why he
bought two young brothers nearly two years ago. As he
sipped tea, Bashir, 13, and Qadir, 11, were cleaning the
cooking area in the narrow establishment in Sholgarah. "It
is cheaper to buy boys than hire boys. Actually, I could
have had them free."
Mr. Aslam described the transaction: the boys' father had
offered to give up his sons so long as they were kept well
fed. "But I know about human rights," said the restaurant
owner. "I knew I was obligated to pay him something."
The compensation settled upon was 400,000 Afghanis per
month — about $5 at the time of the deal. "After two
years, I stop paying and the boys are mine forever," Mr.
Aslam said happily, presenting the situation as something
as benevolent as an adoption.
He asked the youngsters to sit at his side. He requested a
smile. They complied.
Abdul Hamid, a porter, was also seated in the restaurant.
"I've bought three children, all from different families," he
volunteered. Noor Agha is 8, Amruddin 9, Malik 11. He
sent someone to get the boys. He said he considered
himself a doer of good deeds.
"These families were all hungry," Mr. Hamid said. "They
cannot give their children what I can. The boys work for
me, but I also send them to school. They are becoming my
sons. If they get lonely, I have agreed to let them see their
real parents every six months."
Akhtar Muhammad, with his family starving in Kangori,
bargained harder than most. For his 10-year- old, Sher, he
now receives a stipend of 46 pounds of wheat per month;
for the younger boy, 5-year-old Baz, he receives half that
amount. The deal continues for six years.
"I have sold the two most intelligent of my 10 children,"
the father said insistently.
Six weeks had passed since his sons were delivered to
Sholgarah. He agreed to ride into the town, to search out
his older boy, to inquire about the lad's uprooted life.
By chance, father and son happened upon each other in a
crowded street. Immediately, they embraced. Sher was
astride a donkey, toting several metal jugs. He had been
sent to fetch a supply of water.
"They don't treat me well," the boy said sorrowfully when
asked. Indeed, looking away from his father, his eyes
moistened. He seemed close to sobbing.
"I work very hard and during the night they send me into
the mountains to sleep with the sheep."
His father listened silently with no telling expression on
his face. "I felt bad that I was sold," the boy continued,
staring down now, swallowing his shame. "I cried.
Sometimes I still cry. I cry at night. But I understand why
the selling of me was necessary."
He is his family's antidote to hunger.
"I must go now," the 10-year-old said, riding off. "I must
hurry or they will beat me."
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