Poor Afghan Parents Give Children Up as Orphans

Six-year-old Mamood and his 8-year-old brother, Raqib, held hands and looked uncertainly at the grim concrete building here that was about to become their home.

The winter wind whipped the boys’ thin shalwar kameez shirts and pants as they glanced pleadingly at their mother, ghost-like in a blue burka that hid her face.

She nodded at them, disentangled her younger son’s hand from hers and pushed them toward several men standing at the doorway. One called roughly to the boys, jerking his head in an indication they should come in.

This is Kabul’s main orphanage, the last resort for desperately poor parents who can no longer afford to care for their children.

“What can I do? I have eight children and their father was killed by a Taliban rocket,” said the boys’ mother, Shamin, who like many Afghans goes by one name. “We have no money, I cannot care for them.”

Shamin was one of six parents--five widows and a widower--who had brought their children to the orphanage on this January morning hoping that their young ones would be accepted. There are about 430 boys in the building and 450 girls and small boys in another building several miles away.

Desperately poor widows and their children are one of the enduring legacies of the wars that have raked Afghanistan over more than two decades. A survey done several years ago in the Kabul area by the United Nations Children’s Fund found about 35,000 widows with an average of six children each.

With few exceptions, the widows are extremely poor. During the Taliban era, women were prohibited from working outside the home except in the most menial, low-paying jobs.

“Families have too many children, and for this reason when one parent dies it is as if they were orphaned because they are economically so poor that simple basic needs cannot be met,” said Hafiza, a program officer in charge of child protection for UNICEF in Afghanistan.

The result for children is catastrophic. They are deprived of food, heat and running water. Often they also receive little affection because the beleaguered parents have so many mouths to feed that they can hardly afford to spend time with each child.

Most children are traumatized by the loss of at least one parent to violent death and by the enormous disruptions of war. Nearly 90% of children in Kabul, the capital, have seen looting and destruction of houses and just as many said they believed they would die in the fighting, according to a 1997 UNICEF study. The same report found that 54% of children interviewed reported seeing someone tortured.

In such circumstances, parents covet a place for their children in the country’s orphanages, though the conditions inside are hardly better and at times are worse than what the children would find at home. The new administrators at the main Kabul orphanage say the Taliban directors often stole money from the budget and strictly limited the education to the study of Islam.

The term “orphan” has taken on a somewhat different meaning in Afghanistan than in the United States. Almost all the orphans here have one living parent, usually the mother, who wants to remain connected with their lives. Consequently, few of the children are available for adoption.

Several mothers waiting along with Shamin to drop off their children at the main orphanage said they hoped to get jobs as cleaners at the girls orphanage so that they would at least be near daughters left there.

Inside the main orphanage, the scene is as close to Dickensian as can be imagined in the 21st century, though the religious overlay is Muslim rather than Christian. At mealtimes the children line up in a windy courtyard and wait for the dining room to open. A man with a switch keeps the hungry children in check, swatting those who make too much noise.

Inside the dark, low-ceilinged room with its long wooden tables, the children are issued a bowl of rice, a ladle of stewed kidney beans and half a round of bread. They gobble the beans and poke at the bland rice.

Mohammed Yasin, 14, sat quietly as he methodically ate his beans. The food, he said, is the best part of life at the orphanage; before, he never had regular meals.

Like most of the children, he described his situation with a controlled detachment. “I am fatherless and motherless,” he said matter-of-factly. “My father died in the fighting.”

It turns out he is not literally motherless; he just might as well be. His father, an ethnic Uzbek from northwestern Afghanistan, was killed in fighting against the Taliban. His mother remarried, and his stepfather did not want Mohammed in his family. The boy was foisted off on an impoverished grandfather who eventually sent him to the orphanage, hundreds of miles from home.

“I miss her, but even if I miss her, she still will not come,” Mohammed said, looking away as he spoke.

Hardest, he said, is the cold at night; many of the rooms are unheated, and the damp, subfreezing winter temperatures are bone-chilling. “We are not warm at night,” he said. “We don’t have an electric stove or a wood stove or blankets, we don’t have clothes to wear. It is very difficult at night.”

But he still has dreams of something better. He hopes to have an impact on a world that has abandoned him. He smiled shyly: “I want to be a pilot or a doctor--something important.”

The girls orphanage is in a desolate, bombed-out neighborhood several miles away. At one time it was extremely dangerous because of violent fighting between Hazaras and Tajiks, ethnic groups that were vying for control of Kabul in the early 1990s. Some adolescent girls were dragged from the orphanage and raped or mutilated, according to staff members with international organizations working in Kabul.

Those days are over but the grim mood remains. Attempts to wash the floors create a thin glaze of mud in the cold winter air, and there is a fetid smell to the place, a combination of urine and sweat. The girls stay indoors most of the time, a habit from the Taliban era when they were not permitted to play outside. Thirteen or 14 to a room, they huddle around the diesel oil stove that streaks the walls black and leaves a heavy smell in the air.

Here the signs of trauma are easier to see. While many of the boys push, shout and fight to mask whatever pain they may feel, the girls are silent, their eyes glazed. They look up nervously at the stern, black-veiled orphanage mistress as they answer questions in soft monosyllables.

Frozan, 12, said she lost her mother “to the yellow-eye sickness”--probably a form of hepatitis--and then her father “lost his nerves.” He no longer recognizes her, Frozan said, and so she does not like to visit home anymore.

Many of the girls describe losing their fathers to stray bullets during the long years of fighting between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban.

One of the quietest in the room was Rayeesa, 10, who sat hugging her knees. She has a striking combination of dark hair and blue eyes and is one of the few children at the orphanage who is Pushtun, an ethnic group dominant in southern Afghanistan but not in Kabul. Her father was going to a bazaar to buy bread and was killed by “a missed bullet” intended for someone else. Then her mother died slowly of the “yellow-eye disease,” and Rayeesa and her two brothers and two sisters were orphaned.

“My uncle brought us here and then he went to Iran, so no one comes to visit us,” she said, pulling her veil across her face. What would she like to be when she grows up? “I want to be a teacher, if I am alive.”

Raihana, 9, sat apart from the other girls on one of the cots, staring out the window. She looked down as she spoke and fingered her black scarf, which sparkled with sequins. She lost her father several years ago when Taliban soldiers in a car inadvertently ran into him. Soon after, she and a brother and two sisters were sent to the orphanage. The pain of the loss has yet to fade. She wanted to describe her father to a stranger but could not find the words.

“I miss my father a lot,” she said. “He always would play with us and he laughed and he had short hair.”

Many of these half-orphaned children are victims of the Afghan tradition that widowed women remarry--often their former husbands’ brothers--and then the new husbands want to start their own family, said UNICEF’s Hafiza.

“The new father doesn’t like the children from the previous marriage, first of all because of the poor economic conditions which make it difficult for him to afford to care for six or seven children, and in addition he wants to have children himself,” Hafiza said.

Raqib and Mamood, whose mother had brought them to the main orphanage, walked uncertainly through the doors. One of the men gave them each a piece of paper--their registration forms. They were marched to the director’s office and told to wait for him to sign the papers. They looked with confusion at the office, which was carpeted and had furniture--a rarity in most Afghan homes.

Raqib’s eye lighted on the bowl of Tootsie Roll candies that were being offered along with tea to several guests. No one offered any to the children.

How did they feel now that they were entering the orphanage? Were they afraid? Would they miss their mother and their other siblings?

“No, I am not afraid,” said Raqib softly and unconvincingly as he clutched his brother’s hand.

He paused, then added: “If I am sad, what can I do?”