“The vaccines aren’t being kept cool enough,” Mary said.
“It’s not my fault!” shouted the immunologist, who was Pakistani. He began barking orders. “Everything here is no good,” he said. “We don’t have enough of anything! Why won’t the Americans give more funds for the refugees?”
“Pakistan refused the aid before,” Mary said. “The Americans went ahead and spent the money on something else.”
“Well, the U.S. should manage its money better,” said the immunologist triumphantly. He stared Mary in the face.
“The women are the most neglected, the women are the most anemic, the women have the highest level of tuberculosis; the women in general are in pretty bad shape,” said Mary. “According to our standards, they’re treated pretty bad. According to their standards, they’re treated as they expect to be treated. Traditionally, the Afghan men get the best of the food, which is then passed down to the children, and the women eat last, what’s left over, if anything. There are certain long-standing taboos: women in some of the tribes won’t eat meat or vegetables, because they think they’re bad for them. So what they basically live on is sweet bread and green tea.
“A woman’s life is really less than an animal’s. A camel or a water buffalo is valued more than a woman in this society. You can’t get a husband to donate blood for his wife because if you take his blood you take his life, but if she dies he can always get another wife.
“Last week a woman delivered her baby, but retained the placenta for more than twenty-seven hours, which is a very serious — lethal — problem. You continually bleed. It was just herself and this little old lady who happened to be around. And by the time we found her she was in shock from loss of blood. We had to rehydrate her; we had to give her drugs to stabilize her blood pressure; we had to do a lot of heroics to keep this woman alive. And, you know, we stabilized her and she was on her way to recovery and her husband came in (it was the first time that we had seen him in the five hours that we were in the tent). And the only thing he had to say was, ‘How am I going to get water since she is useless for me?’ ”
But unlike me, Mary accomplished something. She had saved that woman. She taught mothers to breast-feed longer, to mash bananas and feed them to their little children…
“So maybe attempts to make them more self-reliant haven’t been a complete failure?” asked the Young Man so hopefully.
“There have been no real attempts to make them more self-reliant,” Marie Sardie said. “Any such attempts have been on the refugees’ own initiative. It’s very difficult, because in the beginning you’re just trying to alleviate your own caseload. You give them goods, like charity. You kill their pride and integrity; you make them professional beggars and parasites. When you give them something for nothing, why should they work for it? But those refugees who are interested in doing their own thing do it. They help out in the dispensaries and with the distributions; they help the staff. Because basically they’re bored. They’re fed and watered and clothed, so what can they do with their time except look at the empty space? So a lot of them have set up little kitchen gardens and shops where you can buy food and cigarettes, detergents and soap …”
After his return from Hangu, the Young Man was very sick. Mary and Levi had him over and fed him. In the middle of the meal he had to go to the bathroom a couple of times, and Mary said, “You don’t have to eat anything if you don’t want to.” Then for once he had a wonderful sense of ease and freedom. He didn’t have to please anybody and do anything, even though the Roos were said to be embarking on much construction now, in Kabul, in Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif … Bases and houses, the Afghans said. At Hairaton they were building a city of a hundred thousand people. The Mujahideen were losing control of many large cities. In Herat they were still partially in control of the airport, but Shindand was completely in the hands of the Roos. Kailagai was the place where the Russians built their weapons and bullets. It had been a muddy and dusty area. Now the whole area is covered with metal! a man told me in wonder. There are airplanes and tanks there; it had become a staging area for Soviet troops. The Roos had a factory there; they dug up entire hills to use for their manufacturing, people said. But he could do nothing; he relaxed and had a bowl of Mary’s soup and drank one of Levi’s beers and felt incredibly happy.
“There’s two hundred schools in our camps,” said Marie Sardie. “There’s thirty thousand schoolchildren going to school, and two thousand are girls.”
“That seems a little unbalanced.”
“No, response is very high; it’s higher than the local response. There’s more refugees who are going to school per total population than there is per total local population, and very much higher than in Afghanistan. The literacy rate’s extremely high. So we’re changing that structure. Many radical changes are now taking place in two years which would have taken fifty years in Afghanistan. Exposure to Western influence is very great; it’s too great. We’ve killed the tradition of Pathan food-gathering; here we give it to them. And we’ve killed the tradition of male education alone. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, no one’s going to give a judgment on that.”
“I think it will take some time to make the Afghan men understand that Afghan women are also human beings,” he said, looking out at the women at the well just outside the low baked-clay walls, where a great pale-leaved tree shaded them a little as they pumped water into old petroleum tins and milk tins, and their dresses were blue with orange flowers or red with yellow blossoms or orange or beige but they all wore veils, “and they also have the right to go anywhere they wish to get help, and they need to be educated. It will take the men some time. But a sudden change in their culture will be disastrous, because they will fight with their guns and everything.”
* Consider the simple economics of the project. He spent thousands on transportation and equipment, and raised hundreds.
† They haven’t.
‡ As was already mentioned, by 1982 Peshawar’s population had doubled since the invasion. So had that of the Kohat district to the south (178,000 locals, 178,000 refugees), where field teams of the International Rescue Committee operated their mobile medical units. These camps were closed to new arrivals, being already at their carrying capacity. Supplies of hygienic drinking water were a limiting factor: in Kohat there was at least one camp whose only water supply was a filthy trickle that dribbled onto a level space of gravel below the huts. That was also the latrine. Because it was so exposed to view, a refugee said, the women could not relieve themselves at all during the day. More refugees arrived and more were expected. New camps were established in the Northern Territory and down in Baluchistan, but many Afghans chose to remain here even though they could not register for the food allowances: everyone at least spoke their language in the North-West Frontier Province, and the factions had their offices in Peshawar. The cool mountains of the north were only a week’s walk for them and their grazing animals, and the Khyber Pass was a couple of hours away by bus. To the east, in the muggy farmland of the Punjab, stood Islamabad, the modern capital, where sometimes imported rocket launchers and cases of bullets could be bought, for increasingly inflated prices.