‘Please, God, Let Me Keep One’

Abdul Majid stood in a hillside cemetery, staring at the four little mounds at his feet.

“When I look at them,” he said, “my children suddenly appear before my eyes.”

His neighbor Palwasha paced a ruined courtyard with dusty baby clothes in her hands.

“Allah, Allah, Allah,” she softly cried.

In market towns like this one, the streets are usually teeming with kids flying kites, playing soccer and trailing visitors. But Wednesday, there was a strange hush in Nahrin.

The children were missing.

A day after aid workers and government officials arrived in this earthquake-devastated region of northeastern Afghanistan, there was still confusion about the number of fatalities from Monday’s earthquake, estimated at between 800 and 2,000.

But one thing was clear: Most of them were young.

In one village, 20 of the 23 victims were younger than 16. Farmer after farmer told heart-rending stories of watching roofs crash down on their families and being powerless to dig them out.

In another village, six children died in one mud hut.

“I would say 80% of our victims, maybe 90%, were not yet 15,” said Sayed Askar, an elder in Nahrin, the hardest-hit town.

Children here, in this wheat and melon farming district 105 miles north of the capital, Kabul, tend not to venture out of their mud-walled compounds after dark. When the magnitude 6.1 quake hit Monday at 7:30 p.m., most were in their homes, probably with a plate of rice and a slice of nan bread in front of them.

Some didn’t understand what was happening. Others were unable to scramble to safety and were felled by bricks that wouldn’t have stopped an adult.

“A child’s steps aren’t so long,” Askar said.

No one knows exactly how many children died. The interim government is sticking to its initial estimate of 1,200 fatalities, adult and children, although Nahrin village elders said the total is closer to 2,000. U.N. officials provided a much lower figure of 800 but acknowledged that they had surveyed only 42 villages out of 78, in one of three districts affected.

“We are not getting the high casualty counts we had feared,” said Farhana Faruqi, the U.N. coordinator for northern Afghanistan. “But there’s entire areas we still need to assess.”

The relief effort kicked in Wednesday as 200 aid workers busied themselves scheduling food drops, making assessments and handing out the first tents and blankets, using the bazaar area of Nahrin as a base.

Afghan soldiers dynamited several boulders blocking roads. A team of U.S. Army troops stationed at the Bagram air base, about 60 miles south of here, swooped down in two helicopters and unloaded dozens of boxes of medical supplies under armed guard. The majestic snowcaps of the Hindu Kush mountains glowed behind them.

The earth continued to ripple, and one magnitude 5.3 aftershock Wednesday toppled more buildings, leaving some areas of Nahrin, such as Shahr-i-Kohna, “the old city,” a wasteland of loose bricks and flattened houses. Two mosques and the main school also were destroyed.

More than 10,000 villagers are homeless, and aid officials said one of the top priorities is finding them places to live.

There are some things, however, that nobody can replace.

Every time she feels an aftershock, Palwasha, a pretty woman with rich olive skin and flashing eyes, relives the moment that four of her five children were crushed.

She had just laid out a dinner of rice, cabbage, bread and tea when her 2-year-old daughter, Selsela, reached for the cabbage.

Suddenly, she heard a huge crash, “like a storm from the sky,” and the roof of her home cracked open over her head. Her children were instantly buried. It wasn’t until she pulled out her 8-year-old son, Rohulamin, that she knew that any had survived.

“Please, God, let me keep one,” she remembered saying.

The boy had fainted, but a neighbor massaged his chest, reviving him.

She will be sad for the rest of her life, her brother said as Palwasha, who uses one name, retreated into a corner of her yard. There, next to a smashed lantern and dented pots, was a pile of children’s clothes.

She wouldn’t let go of them.

Some people here believe that God was punishing Nahrin.

“When people don’t worship, these things happen,” said Mohammed Allam, a top military commander here.

Nahrin sits on queasy ground, and every year there’s at least one earthquake. Earlier this month, a magnitude 7.2 quake shook neighboring Samangan province, killing 100 people. Although Monday’s quake was of a lesser magnitude, the U.S. Geological Survey said it was relatively shallow--about 40 miles beneath the surface--and therefore more dangerous.

When asked about home construction and why heavier beams aren’t used to support mud walls, Allam dismissed the question with a wave of his hand.

“We are not Americans,” he said. “We can’t think of such things.”

He also said that most villagers are too poor to afford metal roofs, which would be much safer than thick, crumbly mud.

When the quake hit, many people said, there were no warnings, no tremors, just the roaring noise of homes imploding. Majid, the father who lost four children, snatched up his two youngest but was unable to reach the others in his hut.

Three died instantly. But his 7-year-old daughter survived the initial quake, sheltered in a cavity in the ruins of his house.

“With all my voice, I yelled to my neighbors, ‘Help me, help me, help me!’ ” remembered Majid, a 45-year-old laborer.

But the dark night was haunted by frantic parents shouting: “Where is my son? Where is my daughter?” and nobody came to his aid.

A violent aftershock leveled the remains of his home, killing his daughter.

Helping people like these is one of the first crucial tests of Afghanistan’s interim government. Several officials have visited the area, including interim Prime Minister Hamid Karzai, who flew in by chopper Wednesday afternoon.

“I express my condolences for the people who lost their children and their beds and houses,” Karzai told a group of men gathered in a field. “We will not forget you.”

Then he flew away.

With Afghanistan so in the spotlight, many countries, including the United States, Russia and Iran, have pledged to assist the people of Nahrin. But aid givers face a distinctly Afghan set of problems, such as land mines, impassable mountain roads and serious ethnic tensions.

On Wednesday, a group of ethnic Pushtun elders swarmed the tent of one of Karzai’s aides, saying they were being cut out of relief efforts by the ethnic Tajiks who control Nahrin. Karzai is a Pushtun. His aide, an ethnic Tajik, denied the claim.

Then there is the bigger issue of people simply too frightened to return to their homes.

As Majid stood over the four fresh graves dug into the hillside, he vowed to live in the fields for the rest of his life.

“Never again under a roof,” he said.

A friend tried to cheer him up. Foreigners are here, the friend said. Much food will be coming.

Majid looked at the ground.

“For whom?” he asked sharply. “My mouths don’t need to be fed anymore.”