Website review: Afghanistan: What hope is there for...
marielaem discovered this in Drugs
•1 reviews since May 15, 2008
drugs
•independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/afgh...
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marielaem discovered 8 weeks ago
Afghanistan: What hope is there for the lost children of the bazaar?
..... "Like pretty much everything else in Afghanistan, the rug business has been all but destroyed by invasion and civil war. Most of the rug traders fled to Peshawar, in Pakistan, and conducted what was left of their businesses from there. Now many of the rugs that are still classified as Afghan, are really made in Peshawar, sometimes by machine. But because of its talismanic importance, there were early efforts in Kabul to revitalise the rug business, and reclaim national ownership."....
..... "Three-quarters of Afghans are almost completely illiterate. Among widows, the proportion is much higher. In the old days, it was incumbent on the families of the husbands to look after the widows. Whatever one might think of the practice, in theory, at least, it provided security for vulnerable people. But this is just one part of the social fabric that has collapsed, with nothing to mitigate that loss or replace it. There are too many widows now, too many fatherless children. Widows cast out from the homes of their in-laws, and their children, have nothing, not even a surname. The mother of these girls has hands too stiff to work the threads and she leaves them at the loom while she works as a laundress. A trader has supplied the girls with a loom, brought them wool, tools and patterns, and shown them what to do. It takes the four of them 10 days to complete a square metre, for which they are paid 1,200 Afghanis per metre (US$24/£12). For the horror of their labour, and the misery of their stolen childhoods, the children count themselves lucky. Kabul is awash with street children, hundreds of thousands of them, scavenging through rubbish, selling plastic bags, repairing bicycles, labouring for shoe-makers, or asking for alms in return for sending unwelcome wafts of aromatic smoke from the tin cans they wave at likely-looking passers-by." .....
..... "The community has now been exposed to heroin, and other processed drugs, even Valium, by dealers making their way up through Balkh, which was always relatively peaceful, and is now entirely so, to the border with Uzbekistan. Often the dealers used the old trick, familiar in the West, of providing the first few hits for free. Not only is heroin far stronger and far more addictive than unprocessed opium, it is also sometimes injected, bringing addict diseases such as HIV and hepatitis C into a community that has no understanding of them. An astounding 90 per cent of the Turkmen are now addicted, and the cruellest thing of all is that their "medicine" is no longer free. Now they have to pay for it. Sometimes, now, the weavers are paid in drugs instead of money." .....
Read the whole article. If you're feeling happy, it will bring you down. If you're feeling down, it will cheer you up.
