Home and Away...

As many of you know, I absolutely adore my family. And not only because I am legally required to do so. Also, because they completely crack me up. Witness the following extracts from emails (but first, a little context…)

My parents moved house a couple of weeks ago. I still have a bedroom at their house and it is my base in Melbourne. I absolutely adored the old house and was fairly grumpy when they sold it and bought a new, smaller house – the rudeness of it all – them preparing for their age and infirmity now, at the cost of my nice big bedroom and swimming pool!!

Anyway – about a week ago, I received an email from my Aunt, with this passage in it:

I haven't been to see [the new house] yet but am looking forward to it. I will check out how small your bedroom is. I hope there's plenty of cupboard space - I know how much you'll need because I packed up your stuff from your old bedroom.

And then about three days later, this came from my sister:

I have been to the new house twice now, I have unpacked my room and am halfway through yours. So I am the person to yell at if you don't like your new wardrobe arrangement. I thought that your tactic of having more clothes than me in order to get the better room was very sneaky.


Hee!! – totally cracked me up! Was good to have a chuckle at this (and also good to know that I am nowhere near the boxes as they have to be packed and unpacked. I absolutely loathe moving, probably having done it twenty times in my life (not entirely sure and cannot be bothered counting exactly) and hating it more each time I do it.

The funniest (saddest?) thing? That there is probably only one-third of my wardrobe actually in the house – the rest is in storage along with my books and furniture – and many of my shoes.

I actually think that this could possibly be the one reason that I ultimately give up field life. Whenever I am home, I look longingly at the beautiful clothes I have in my wardrobe that I never get to wear any more (there are things there that I have never worn, having been purchased when I was home on leave and then left in the wardrobe) and I sometimes get sick of being field-frumpy. Wears a girl down, you know – the endless bad-hair days (although nobody notices under the scarf!) and the constant not-so-inner glow from the heat! It’s a good thing I have my priorities in order, hey?

Speaking of priorities – there is a fairly bad situation here right now, that overshadows much of the other work that we are doing. And that is drought. The rains have failed in Western Afghanistan this year and crops are also failing – where people should have one meter of wheat, they maybe have twenty centimeters (if they are lucky). This is a huge problem, in a subsistence farming community, and is already leading to massive hunger and social dislocation.

Communities here have several coping strategies for a situation like this. One is to send the able-bodied young men away to find work and send money back. This generally means Iran (every day the queue at the Iranian consulate in Herat stretches for hundreds of meters and moves at an interminable pace) although it could also be Pakistan, or even just Herat or Kabul. This would normally be the first strategy.

Another coping mechanism, although less likely to be openly spoken about, is to sell their daughters. The traditional dowry in Afghanistan is about US$10,000 (many of the young men in the office are saving up for this, so that they can get married) which must be paid to the bride’s father. During hard times, fathers are likely to be less picky about who marries their daughters, and also maybe to accept a discount. There is also a higher chance that a daughter will be sold, not for marriage, but for some other nefarious purpose.

A final strategy (I have left out a various range of other options like depending upon family for help or selling livestock – only available to those more wealthy families) is to move to the camps in Herat for the winter. This would mean a miserable existence on the outskirts of town in a tented community, through the bitter winter. These camps are run, I believe, by the UNHCR and the government. Naturally, the government is quite keen that this not happen, as it is a great strain on the economy to have to care for people there, and causes the social fabric to fray.

We are obviously trying to respond to this. We are working with the government to seek solutions and a call has been put out for international donors. The problem is, Afghanistan is not the focus of attention right now – there is Lebanon, renewed concern about Darfur (Sudan), floods in Ethiopia, volcanoes in Philippines (Hi Pinoys out there – still miss ya!), typhoons in China – you get my drift. The world just seems to be getting worse and worse that there simply is not enough help out there to go around.

Which leaves me feeling singularly useless when I venture out to the field. I feel so stupid, trying to talk to communities about drip irrigation kits, and all they want to talk about is the fact that they have no food at all and are starving. They keep coming back to it again and again and I feel so mean trying to change the subject and get back to the topic at hand. It is so hard to look at a woman who is pregnant, again, and has six children clutching at her skirts, and hollowed out cheeks, and not be able to give her the help she is asking you for – just to tell her that you are working on the problem. Even if we do manage to get assistance in, we won’t be able to help everyone. Sometimes I feel extremely hopeless.

We just to have faith that donors will come through and we will be able to implement the strategies we have designed to feed some people. I guess, in the end, all you can do is what you can do. But driving through the countryside, looking at one barren village after another, it doesn’t seem like very much…