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Afghan Orphans Face a Pitiless Future

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

Their most frequent companions are hunger and cold, and like Oliver Twist, they daydream of being able to eat their fill. Home--if you can call it that--is a drafty building without electricity, heat or running water on a dusty plain littered with abandoned Soviet military equipment.

For as long as they can remember, the 850 residents of northwestern Kabul’s Daurul Itom orphanage, ages 6 months to 21 years, have known nothing but war. Perhaps a rocket killed their mother, or their father--a government soldier or a Muslim moujahedeen fighting the Communists--lost his life in a faraway battle. Some don’t remember their parents at all.

The past decade and a half have been a calamity for most Afghans, millions of whom have lost homes, livelihoods, relatives, herds and other property in this country’s civil war. But no group elicits more pity than the children who no longer have parents or loved ones to turn to in a society where family ties count for everything.

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“Really we can’t do the same thing that children’s parents do,” Daurul Itom’s acting director, Abumoslim Mokhtar, admitted. “The orphans feel different from other children; when they see the kindness of fathers and mothers toward their own children, it is very painful for them. That, I think, is the hardest thing for them to bear.”

Before they entered the orphanage, the odds were already stacked against these unfortunate children. Afghanistan has the second-highest infant mortality rate in the world: Almost three of every 10 newborns will not live past age 5. A study conducted two years ago by CARE, the American relief organization, found stunted growth--a key indicator of chronic malnutrition--in almost half the children under 5.

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According to UNICEF, only 27% of Afghan boys attend primary school, and just 4% of the girls. Under the steel-fisted rule of the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban militia--which has closed schools for girls in the areas of Afghanistan it controls--the percentage of literate girls will almost certainly decline.

For the children at Daurul Itom, the hardships keep coming. The director panicked and ran off as bands of armed Talibs approached Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, in late September, leaving the 36-year-old Mokhtar, who had been in charge of the paperwork, to run the place as best he could.

When the Taliban banned women in Kabul from working, the orphanage lost all but four of its 350 female employees, and the 100 men who work there have been poor substitutes at mending and washing clothes, teaching school or acting as surrogate mothers.

“All the children do now is sleep and eat,” said Mokhtar.

Because Kabul’s banks have been shut for most transactions since the Taliban occupied the city, the orphanage cannot buy food. U.N. agencies have promised to pitch in to tide Daurul Itom over, but already stocks are running low: two weeks’ worth of flour, nine days’ of oil, five days’ of sugar, Mokhtar said.

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It has been three months since the orphans last tasted meat, a staple in the Afghan diet. Now, they say, they are hungry all the time.

“We used to [each] eat a plate of rice or potatoes or whatever there was,” Hadayat, a jug-eared 10-year-old with close-cropped black hair, told a visitor. “These days we have to share it with somebody else. We used to get meat and fruit three times a week, and now there is nothing.”

Mokhtar said he has tried to see officials of the Taliban’s interim government to explain his charges’ plight but that he has had no success.

It is only early November, but already the nights are cold in this mountain-ringed city. Flimsy plastic sheeting has been stretched across dormitory windows in lieu of glass.

Like most of Kabul, Daurul Itom, where mice skitter along the floors in dark, naked concrete halls, is without electricity or heat. The floor where Hadayat sleeps has 10 dorm rooms but only three kerosene lanterns. For want of electric light, the older children get up at 5 a.m. and go to bed after sunset at 7 p.m.

There is no money for coal, firewood or plastic sheeting to mask all the window frames that are still open. The orphans were last issued clothing five months ago, and Mokhtar, a fighter for three years in the anti-Communist jihad, says he doesn’t have anything to dole out for winter weather.

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Some children have only pullovers or worn denim jackets, scant protection against mile-high Kabul’s winters. Hadayat and other boys who sleep in a dorm room of 11 rickety double-decker beds say that they used to have two blankets apiece but that they now have one.

Toddlers sleep up to three to a bed in separate rooms. The dining hall is a dark chamber so cramped that the children have to eat in half a dozen shifts on tables covered with greasy green plastic.

On a typical day, lunch is a small serving of rice and potatoes. It seems very little, but it is more than many poor Afghan children living with their parents get.

The orphans used to bathe twice a week. But since the women left, they get one bath a week, in warm water carried upstairs in pails. They have no good shoes or socks, no toys, few books beyond dogeared school manuals. But the one thing they really wanted last week was a ball they could play soccer with in a barren field near abandoned Soviet army field kitchens. Their ball had a puncture.

“I dreamed a few days ago that all my friends came to class, and there were enough balls for everyone,” one young boy said. “Then I woke up, and it was just another morning.”

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As well as war orphans, Daurul Itom, built 15 years ago under Communist President Babrak Karmal, houses children of drug addicts, convicted criminals and parents who are indigent or have communicable diseases such as leprosy. Most of the children seem lively and high-spirited despite their family tragedies, but some bear deep psychological scars that are a product of Afghanistan’s violent past.

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Friba, 18, a young woman with a crew cut, spends hours in an unlighted second-floor corridor hugging herself and saying nothing. She came to the orphanage 12 years ago after her parents were killed during combat between Afghanistan’s then-Kremlin-installed government and Muslim insurgents.

Noor Jan, 9, is another speechless girl, who sometimes tears her clothes for no apparent reason. Orphanage workers said her mother, driven mad by the sound of bombs and rockets, burned four of Noor Jan’s sisters alive one day by throwing them in a cooking fire.

What will happen to the next generation of Afghans--those with parents as well as those without--is a matter that preoccupies many Afghan and foreign aid workers. When Save the Children, a U.S.-based humanitarian organization, asked a group of Afghan children to make a poster for a competition, most drew objects that have become ubiquitous in their lives: AK-47 assault rifles, MIG warplanes, tanks, Afghans killing each other.

“What will they do in the future?” Zarak Asmaie, project officer for Save the Children, asked of Afghanistan’s youth. “They will be illiterate. They’ve been brought up with an AK-47. They won’t want to go to the fields or to the factories. Actually, because of the war, there are no longer any factories.”

In this season, one sees many children in Kabul flying kites they have fashioned from scrap paper, twigs and string. Some parents keep their offspring at home, though, out of fear they will stumble over a land mine or pick up a live shell.

Such concerns are well-founded. Save the Children was forced to suspend mine-awareness programs in Kabul schools last month because of the Taliban’s opposition to women working. Since then, the organization has registered a 35% increase in injuries to children as they scrounge for firewood or scrap metal or play during school.

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In the past 5 1/2 months, Save the Children program manager Jay Zimmerman said, 193 children in the Afghan capital alone have been killed or wounded by mines and “UXO”--unexploded ordnance such as rockets, machine-gun bullets and artillery shells.

For the children of Daurul Itom, the orphanage has become the only community they know. Many of the children say they wouldn’t leave if they could. Where else in Afghanistan, they sensibly ask, would they be assured these days of food and schooling?

Hadayat has an uncle who now lives in Kandahar in southern Afghanistan and who took custody of his four brothers and sisters. The boy is not keen to go live with him.

“When he left Kabul, he did not take me,” he said in puzzlement.

Already, the boy in a worn and baggy brown pajama suit has decided he wants to be a doctor.

“I would be able to help my relatives, friends and all Afghans when they get sick,” he explained.

One of Hadayat’s bunkmates, son of a slain soldier with former Defense Minister Ahmed Shah Masoud’s forces, has different plans.

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“I want to be a fighter,” said 9-year-old Sakhi Farad. “So I can defend Islam.”

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