Aid Groups Endure Bumpy Roads in Afghanistan

MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Afghanistan —  A convoy of 50 Sputnik-era trucks labors along the desert highway, unable to keep pace with the dust ghosts whipped up from the scabbed soil by the wind. Inside are several hundred tons of wheat, seeds and household goods, as well as 1,293 refugees from drought, headed back to the land that rejected them.

They are two hours behind schedule. It is past noon, and Ondrej Zapletal, a Czech aid worker leading this ragtag exodus, watches his best-laid plans wisp away like those dust bowl specters. Already the trucks are wheezing to a halt by the side of the road. Wheels are off, hoods creak open, hammers clang against metal.

“These are not trucks; this is debris,” Zapletal says.

This is the ground war on drought and hunger in Afghanistan. In three hours since leaving the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif, the trucks have covered just 45 miles. And this is over flat, paved road. In 10 more miles, Zapletal knows, they’ll hit the sinuous 50-mile track that climbs through ravines and gulches to the 6,000-foot-high tablelands where these peasants once made a living. If darkness beats them, it will be hard to make out the red paint splashed on roadside rocks to mark minefields. After dark, Afghanistan is a land of surly militias, roving bandits and things that go boom in the night.

Zapletal heads local operations for People in Need Foundation, a shoestring nongovernmental group from the Czech Republic that is leading the effort to return the first of Afghanistan’s estimated 1.2 million internally displaced people--IDPs in aid parlance--to their homes in time to plant for the fall harvest.

By month’s end, the IDPs and about 6 million other hungry Afghans would no longer get free food from international aid organizations such as the World Food Program, or WFP, which was struggling to switch to food-for-work programs.

But even as the convoy crawls east, the WFP, the top food provider, is spending much of its time and energy--as well as $1.2 million a month--to survey villagers by helicopter and draw up a map of their hunger.

Grass-roots aid organizations that have resorted to rickety trucks and even donkeys say they need no map but could use money and better vehicles.

“The U.N. gets big money for vehicles, rent, salaries of their staff, and now they are paying $1.2 million a month for an assessment? Is it logical?” asks Abdul Saboor, a manager with the International Rescue Committee, a New York-based nonprofit group that deals with hunger and refugee issues.

The WFP contends that it needs information for the next phase of aid and that it wants to see how much conditions have changed since the last mapping, in July.

Even those critical of the WFP acknowledge that the agency staved off disaster with a massive food giveaway--300,000 tons were delivered from November through February, according to WFP spokesman Khalid Mansur in Pakistan.

As a result, the story of Afghanistan’s famine is that there is no famine at all. And more rain and snow have fallen this winter than in three previous years, greening many river valleys in the north.

But looks can be deceiving in the hunger business. Villagers throughout the north are scouring for wild spinach, various tubers and bulbs, which they have not eaten in appreciable amounts since the last drought almost 30 years ago. Many farmers have depleted their seed stocks and sold off their oxen, cows, sheep and goats. In some areas, camels and donkeys pull plows. In others, farmers crack the topsoil with hoes and spades.

Afghanistan’s agriculture, from which 80% of the population earns a living for the most part growing grains such as wheat and sorghum, must be rebuilt from scratch.

“Now it’s show time,” says Raymond Jordan, country coordinator for the Irish aid organization GOAL. “The winter has been survived. It’s between now and next winter that we have to make an impact on rural communities.”

Restoring Communities

Zapletal wants to start by repopulating rural communities abandoned in the last three years. With sponsorship from the International Organization for Migration, he gathered Japanese wheat and bought seed with Czech and American funds, packing them in trucks that the Geneva-based IOM rented for $40 a day each.

As Zapletal is learning, rebuilding Afghanistan requires improvisation and blind luck. The latter appears to be in short supply by midday. Zapletal waves the lead trucks to the shoulder of the road in a town called Sayad, where almond trees blooming beside a brook provide an incongruously lush speck in an otherwise bleak landscape. The drivers insist on lunch and afternoon prayers. Passengers scramble to dip jugs into a milky green pond and drink. Drivers refill their radiators, while others replace crushed ball-bearings, oozing grease onto the highway.

“We’re definitely going to regroup the convoy, because in the mountains there are mines, and it’s very dangerous for the trucks--if we can call them trucks,” Zapletal explains.

It is 2:45 p.m. before the last truck is repaired and the convoy gets underway, and 45 minutes later they’re on dirt roads. The convoy stretches out more than a mile, the drivers spreading out to let the contrails of dust kicked up by the trucks float out of their path.

They snake up a narrow gorge, past a burned-out Russian tank. Soviet troops fought pitched battles here with moujahedeen warriors during the 1980s. The roadside is strewn with empty mortar casings, and trenches and battlements on the high points are abandoned. Soon, telltale red slashes appear on roadside rocks, left by HALO Trust, an international de-mining group.

By 5:50 p.m., the first passengers to board have been on the trucks for 12 hours. When they stop for Asr, the evening prayers, the sun blazes dead-even with the edge of the plateau, casting lengthy shadows behind prostrate believers. Daylight can be measured in minutes; the road ahead, in miles.

More than a dozen trucks are woefully behind, broken down and in various states of disrepair. Zapletal sends a vehicle back to guide them and orders the rest to move on. Soon it is pitch dark and frigid.

It is 7:45 p.m. when the low rectangular contours of the village of Haji Mirge emerge in a starlit sky. A line of men parts from the wall of a house, where they had huddled against the cold, waiting for hours for the fellow villagers they have not seen in three years.

But there are few happy greetings. Sharp words fill the air as refugees assemble what they’ve packed--mostly blankets and clothes. Abdul Ahmad, 51, pronounces himself happy to be home. He gathers his three children, wife and four bundles of possessions and studies the silhouettes of homes.

Identifying Displaced

Four years ago, Ahmad had two cows, 20 sheep and an acre of land. A year later, he’d sold all but the land and headed with his family for the big city.

His money lasted three months in Mazar-i-Sharif before he got a job as a construction worker. When Ahmad heard that aid groups were opening up refugee camps, he brought his family to one for the free food. It has taken U.N officials and aid workers several months to disentangle the urban poor from the legitimately displaced, sending most of 290,000 camp residents back to neighborhoods of the northern city.

People in Need Foundation has vetted lists for those who immigrated to the city and checked with villagers to see who were legitimate returnees to the land.

Now in Haji Mirge, Ahmad heads off into the darkness as truck drivers circle their rigs and fire up kerosene stoves to boil tea.

In the morning, Zapletal takes inventory: Five trucks that forked off to another destination made it. But he counts only 17 trucks parked in a field in the center of Haji Mirge. Two more have gone to outlying settlements. That leaves 26 unaccounted for. Word comes by radio that 15 stragglers opted to stay overnight in a village two hours short of the destination. But the remaining 11 are strung along the road for miles. Zapletal dispatches several trucks to offload the goods from stranded vehicles.

It has not been a good night for Ahmad, who found only two walls of his house standing. “My family, when they saw the house collapsed, they became upset,” he says.

In the daylight, Ahmad’s gnarled left hand is visible--a 20-year-old wound from a short-fused hand grenade intended for Soviet soldiers. Only his pinky and half his thumb remain. He takes aid workers to see the remains of his house and a one-acre field bordered by a mud-brick wall.

There is no clinic or school in town, villagers explain on the way. When Haji Mirge residents die, it’s of tuberculosis, appendicitis, typhoid and diarrhea. Few make the five-hour ride to the nearest city.

Asked what people have been eating, villager Abdul Haq produces a small bulb he calls tosla, the size of a small leek. Another hands over a pale green weed he calls gawtarkan. “If cows eat this, they explode,” Haq jokes. “Imagine what it does to us.”

Ahmad walks across his cracked field to the two walls, which stand like an upturned bookend. His 14-year-old son, Habibullah, will help him rebuild and plow, he says. Or he will ask neighbors. Or it will rain, and the soil will become supple again. “God willing,” he says, and leads the way back to the trucks.

By 10 a.m., aid workers are still calling out names for handouts--three sacks of seed, one of wheat and a collection of pots, pans and other housewares. An angry villager waves a sharp fence pike to keep the crowd orderly and curious children at bay. Men amble forward and humbly hand over their papers. Zapletal inks their thumbs and presses prints beside their names. Then he swipes the back of their hands with an X.

It is 10:47 a.m. when Ahmad steps forward. Volunteers haul down the last sacks of free aid he’ll see. “Now I can make a new life and I can plant my seeds,” Ahmad says. “Then maybe it will rain, and in a few months it will produce.”

Gripping with his good hand, Ahmad heaves a sack onto his back. Two neighbors get the rest, but after 35 yards, the men drop the sacks and the neighbors walk off. For a moment, Ahmad stands beside what is supposed to get him through next winter and considers his options. He asks an elderly man to watch his goods. Then he sets off to find a donkey.