AFGHANISTAN - Racing winter’s wrath

In six weeks, Afghanistan’s notoriously harsh winter will return. Thousands of poor, devastated by three years of drought and 23 years of war and civil unrest, will be caught utterly unprepared. For them, the immediate pre-positioning of World Vision aid can make the difference between coping and catastrophe.

Badghis Province, where most of World Vision Afghanistan’s programs are located, is one of the poorest in the country. Most families survive by subsistence farming, but three years of drought have forced most to rely on food aid from World Vision and other agencies.

Roughly 50 percent of Badghis’s approximately 400,000 population cannot obtain enough food. They are struggling to survive in isolated villages perched high in the rocky, khaki-colored mountains that have come to symbolise this country. It is not uncommon for people to travel up to three days by foot or by donkey to regional centres such as Qala-I-Now and Char Taq, where they have at least limited access to food, basic medical care, education and other necessities.

But in winter, snow, ice and bitter wind and cold will make the steep, narrow paths they rely on too treacherous for travel. For four and a half months, their access to the outside world, like the surrounding landscape, will be frozen. For destitute village dwellers like Fatema, unable to provide the basics for their families now, being unprepared for winter could have devastating consequences.

Fatema’s brow is furrowed. She is considering a visitor’s concerned query: Have you started preparing for winter?

It must seem like a frivolous question to this widow and mother of six. Just getting enough food for each day is usually impossible. It is not uncommon for the family to go hungry for three days at a stretch. “For one year we have not tasted meat,” Fatema declares.

Eventually, a kind neighbour who has heard one of Fatema’s five daughters crying will take pity and offer some wheat and tea. Some days the family has rice: Fatema’s son, 15-year-old Sadiq, buys it with the money he earned selling grass for fuel and feed. It takes him two weeks to gather 15 kilos of grass. With the earnings he can purchase one kilo of rice, about a meal’s worth. The boy is the sole provider for the family.

This winter, Fatema says, “It will be the same story for us. We have nothing.” Sadiq is stockpiling a portion of the grass he collects for warming the family’s tiny mud hut, but most has to be sold for food.

The family’s few belongings can be inventoried at a glance: a lantern, several blankets, two small woollen carpets – the things they could carry from a refugee camp they left two months ago. Fatema says she was told she would receive more food if she returned home, but so far the family has received none. In the spring, Fatema says, they at least had spinach that grows wild in the mountains. But that is long gone now.

The mother looks at her five daughters. They are dirty and barefoot. Fatema says they do not have shoes or winter coats. Sadgul, 10, is coughing. She has typhoid, but Fatema cannot afford to send her to the hospital in Qala-I-Now, three hours away by foot. The family does not own a donkey, the most common local transportation. Like most families here, they were forced to sell their animals to buy food.

For each of her daughters, Fatema chose a name ending in gul, the word for “flower” in Dari, the local language. “My daughters are my beautiful flowers. Sometimes I cry at night because I cannot feed them,” she says.

Graham Strong, Director of Operations for WV Afghanistan, is reluctant to discuss worst-case scenarios. He prefers to talk about preventing them with proactivity: that is, by pre-positioning aid now. “The worst thing that could happen is that we are reactive,” he says. “We can’t afford to be in that situation. Most of all, the poor cannot afford it.”

Pre-positioning, Strong contends, will prevent disaster. “In two months, we won’t be able to get to these people without taking extreme, costly measures. It makes much more sense to prevent a disaster now than try to respond to one down the road,” he says.

The worst-case scenario is one in which thousands of people, desperate to get their hands on food, medical care and other necessities, migrate from their homes in the mountains to regional centres to pass the winter. They likely would be unable to return to their homes in time for the spring planting season. No planting means a failed summer harvest for the fourth year in a row – and for many more months, no food for some of the hungriest people in Afghanistan.

In winter, gaining access to medical care, already extremely difficult, will become almost impossible. Most villages of Badghis province are located from three hours to three days’ donkey ride from the province’s only hospital, located in Qala-I-Now. Despite being the most advanced facility in Badghis, the hospital cannot offer even basic services like an ambulance and blood bank. World Vision Afghanistan is working around the clock now to preposition donated medical supplies in Badghis villages.

Besides food and medical care, Badghis’s poor will have many other needs this winter, Strong says. The most vulnerable won’t have adequate protection from temperatures that often dip well below freezing. They will need emergency shelter, a way to warm their homes, warm clothing, shoes, blankets and personal hygiene items.