by DIAA HADID
In the late afternoons in Kabul, a familiar ritual takes place as Afghans head to bakeries to buy fresh flat loaves for dinner.
But since the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan last August, another ritual has emerged: Women in blue burqas settle in front of the city’s upscale bakeries, silently waiting for charitable passersby to purchase bread for them.
They include Khadija, a mother of nine young daughters. Every day, she walks with swollen feet and blackened toenails to this bakery from the distant hilltop slum where she has lived all her life. Then she waits in her tattered burqa, endlessly stitched and mended.
“My daughters cry from hunger,” says Khadija, who like other women interviewed, requests only her first name be used for the shame she feels begging. She guesses her age at about 30.
The sight of the women reflects how sharply the country’s economy has unraveled, and how its people’s resilience has been depleted by multiple crises. They have been battered by conflict, pandemic closures, three droughts and an earthquake over the past five years.
After the Taliban came to power, Western governments cut off the aid that propped up the Afghan government. Washington froze Afghanistan’s central bank assets. The banking system largely seized up, preventing traders from easily importing or exporting goods. The number of Afghans needing food aid roughly doubled to 20 million people, about half the population. These are people who have gone into unsustainable debt or have sold off assets like land and homes, their kidneys and in the most extreme cases, their children to purchase food. In one remote province, the U.N. found some 20,000 Afghans who were starving in famine-like conditions. Officials say it has only been wide-scale food aid that has prevented more from the same fate.
Yet even for humanitarian workers who were anticipating a crisis after the Taliban takeover, the speed at which Afghans descended into extreme hunger was still surprising, says Hsiao-Wei Lee, deputy director for the World Food Program in Afghanistan. “It really comes from the fact that there is a lot of reliance on the international community’s presence here and on just the general economy,” Lee says. “The people of Afghanistan really need continued support.”
But the international community hasn’t stepped up enough, experts say. The U.N.’s appeal for this year — $4.4 billion — is only one-third funded. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is diverting resources and has caused food prices to rise.
When Khadija arrives, there’s already a crowd of women waiting for breadin front of the bakery, and so the women have spilled over onto the pavement across the road. The women flock to upscale bakeries in Kabul’s city center because their customers are more likely to buy them bread: one or two large flat loaves can be bought for the equivalent of 2 cents. Some pull out tattered clothes to mend while they wait.
Khadija says she often walks back home in the twilight empty-handed. On those evenings, she says, “I knock on the neighbors’ doors to ask for spare food. I ask the Taliban at the checkpoints if they have dry bread,” she says.
Fahima, 23, began begging for bread after the Taliban’s policies made her family destitute. When the Taliban banned girls’ secondary education, her mother lost her job as a cleaner at a girls’ school. Her father was killed years ago.
Now, Fahima says, her life involves walking for hours from her hilltop slum, waiting outside a bakery and walking home with sore legs. It’s hard, painful and boring. “I tell myself, ‘What will we eat if I don’t do this?'” Fahima says. “My mother is too old to walk this far. My sisters are too ashamed to beg.”
It is not just the bakeries where signs of hunger are apparent.
National Public Radio (NPR) for more