U.N. Food Relief Draws Crowd of Hungry Afghans

Down from the snow-covered mountains they came by the hundreds, to load giant sacks of donated wheat onto their backs or their burros.

The worst off said that for days they hadn’t eaten much more than grasses foraged from the forest and tea brewed from barley or the leaves of walnut trees.

The better off said they hadn’t tasted the long flatbread called naan, an Afghan staple, in ages, and had been subsisting on maize baked with grass into coarse, unpleasant loaves.

They came to partake of the first handout from the United Nations World Food Program in four war-battered valleys northeast of the capital, Kabul. During the weekend, aid workers began passing out 700 metric tons of wheat, enough to feed as many as 85,000 people for two months.

Many in Afghanistan are hungry. The worst drought in 30 years has withered the country’s crops, while more than two decades of fighting have decimated its population.

“The people in my village are weak,” said Mohammed Yaqub, 38, who started walking at 7 a.m. on a recent frigid morning from Dochi Khail, roughly eight miles away. He arrived at 10:30 at the Nejrab clinic, which was doubling as a wheat distribution center. “There are no jobs, no water, no work, no business.”

So many people came down from the mountains that Nejrab was overrun by donkeys and horses bedecked with bright red woven sacks and pink, red, purple and yellow tassels, all waiting to be loaded down with 220-pound burlap bags of grain. Each would cost about $85 in the local market.

The villagers are among the 6 million Afghans--about a quarter of the nation’s population--for whom the U.N. is providing food. Wheat for this distribution came from Pakistan in brightly colored commercial trucks, and local aid groups were charged with handing it out. Since Sept. 11, the World Food Program has sent more than 250,000 metric tons of food into the country, or about 12,500 truckloads.

Still, the agency hasn’t been able to reach some of the areas it thinks are most vulnerable to famine. They are deep in the country’s snowy central mountains. Helicopter airlifts are being considered.

Nejrab is just 50 miles from Kabul, but the roads are so bad that the trip takes more than three hours in the U.N.’s four-wheel-drive vehicles and more than a day by truck.

And there are safety problems. One food truck slipped off an icy bridge, killing the driver. Another hit a land mine, destroying the truck and the wheat, though the driver survived. Other drivers have been attacked and robbed of wheat--40 metric tons of it. In one case, the truck was stolen and the wheat handed out to residents by the thieves.

Still, just 0.2% of the wheat distributed in Afghanistan has been stolen, said Catherine Bertini, World Food Program executive director, who passed through Kabul this week.

The people of Afghanistan need other foodstuffs as well. “They need lentils, sugar and oil, but they’re difficult to pack,” program spokesman Jordan Dey said.

Despite their hardships, some villagers were cheerful as they waited to pick up their rations the other day. They chuckled as a donkey, pushed by Yaqub to go forward to pick up the wheat, inched backward. A crowd laughed uproariously when a foreign visitor asked if the donkey had a name. Afghans rarely name their dogs or horses, let alone donkeys.

Abdul Razeq, 56, has no land of his own and only occasionally can find work farming or laboring for others. His village, Wesha, was mostly destroyed in fighting, and his family members live out of a few rooms they’ve managed to fix up in their house.

Razeq walked five hours to get here but left his two donkeys behind because he wasn’t sure he’d be able to get any wheat. But there he was, struggling to carry the provisions on his back for even a few hundred yards. He hoped to haul the grain as far as a friend’s house a bit farther up the mountain, and return for it with his animals the next day.

In nearby Parwari, the people “haven’t yet died [of hunger], but they’re half-dead,” said village representative Ghulam Farouk.

“It’s very good to get [the wheat]; it meets the people’s needs,” he said, calling those passing it out “good people, behaving well.”

About half the World Food Program’s wheat comes from the U.S., but the grain in this distribution was from Pakistan. Rips in the shabby burlap bags, perhaps caused by rodents, perhaps by warehouse workers looking to skim something for themselves, left trails of grain around the village.

The spillage was a bounty for 5-year-old Mohammed Hasrat, who was picking up grains to “give to the chickens.”

Abdul Kamir, 40, weary from walking up the mountain with one of the huge sacks, sat on the roadside catching his breath. Like many other villagers, he wore no socks inside his simple rubber shoes.

Despite the hardship of lugging it home, he was deeply grateful for the wheat. “Instead of eating bullets as we used to,” he said, “we’re now eating bread.”