While making mental lists for Thanksgiving, I’m watching television reports of Afghan refugees squatting in makeshift dwellings.
The plastic tents don’t shield them from anything – not rain, not cold, not dust. The flimsy tents only define their space.
I should hate them. People they sheltered attacked my people, leaving 5,000 fewer at this year’s Thanksgiving tables. That terror shoved us into recession. Upcoming layoffs are listed daily.
But as a mother, all I can see are other mothers clutching sick and dying children, with no one to help – not even those filming their despair.
Their sons and husbands – if not conscripted by the Taliban or Northern Alliance – are probably dead, unidentified corpses left in a ditch. Wives and mothers wonder, “Where are they?”
As terrorism and the Taliban came into focus, so did a sorely oppressed people.
Afghan misery has been steadily paraded through our newspapers and across our screens, interrupted by commercials begging us to buy more than we need. I am ashamed to open my cupboards. I could feed a family of 10 for a month.
The contrast between my abundance and their lack is stunning.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates Americans waste, in one way or another, 96 billion pounds of food a year. We even make sport of scrounging for food on television’s witless reality series “Survivor.” It’s not reality. Participants could quit anytime and step off-screen to a catered feast.
In Afghanistan, starvation is real for 7.5 million souls.
“I’ve never experienced such a feeling of desperation before while traveling in Afghanistan,” says Andrew Wilder, Afghanistan/Pakistan Director of Save the Children. “We were besieged by desperate people begging for assistance and food.”
Since the attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., we are in an armchair war, fed to us via video from across the world. I write letters or clip recipes as I watch. No bombs and artillery send me scurrying … my belongings and family are safe.
UNICEF, the United Nations children’s fund, says 1.3 million Afghan refugees were on the move due to U.S. military strikes. They joined two million more already in refugee camps, displaced by 5 years of Taliban brutality and 3 years of drought.
The World Health Organization says, “With massive population movement … overcrowding in the camps and insufficient health services, (they are) highly vulnerable to communicable diseases.”
A National Geographic photographer wiped his tears while filming a mother whose hollow-eyed twin babies were sick from lack of warmth, food and medicine. He stroked one child’s face, knowing they wouldn’t last the day.
The answer is easy, I thought. A few spoonfuls of rice cereal, a blanket and the pink penicillin syrup my kids hated. That mother was no different than I – except she was poor, hungry and without hope. I could provide. She could not.
The United Nations puts infant mortality in Afghanistan at 25 percent. One in four Afghan children die by age 5. Many succumb to the treatable diseases of tuberculosis, pneumonia, diarrhea and malaria.
I was irked by a lengthy wait the last time I was in for some medical minutiae. In Afghanistan, they don’t wait … they die. The World Health Organization reports one physician per 50,000 people, and life expectancy is 43 years, compared to 78 years in Europe.
Here at home, cooking commences for a meal characterized by overindulgence and invariably followed by the need for a walk. My family scampers outside with a football.
Afghanis have little opportunity to feast and frolic; although on news film, I’ve spotted childhood exuberance within the squalid camps. But anything beyond the perimeter is deadly.
According to Help The Afghan Children, Inc., the landscape is littered with 10 to 15 million land mines left by two decades of war. HTACI reports land mines explode at a rate of 22 to 25 per day, waiting to be triggered by adults, children and animals. Four hundred thousand children alone are amputees with thousands more killed.
This impoverished people has sent me an invaluable Thanksgiving gift – a profound appreciation that I don’t live there, but here in a democracy that solves disagreements without planting land mines, destroying families and starving its children.
