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One refugee family's struggle to survive
©Associated Press
© St. Petersburg Times, QUETTA, Pakistan -- At the start of their journey, the family had a small stone house, a few goats and not much food, but enough to fill the bellies of the children. By its end, they were hungry, sick, deep in debt to human smugglers and counted two cracked cups as their sole possessions. Afghan refugees are spilling by the thousands across the border with Pakistan, and for nearly all, the passage has been filled with difficulty and danger. "Every day, it seemed there was something else to be afraid of," said Bakhtnisa, a mother of seven with a careworn face and broken teeth, who thinks she is about 37 years old. "I couldn't accustom myself to it, because there was always something new and terrible." The family belongs to the Hazara ethnic group, which lives mainly in Afghanistan's forbidding central highlands. In part because of religious differences -- they are Shiite Muslims, not the majority Sunnis -- they have long been at odds with the ruling Taliban. A few nights before U.S.-led airstrikes began Oct. 7, Taliban supporters burned down the family's house, along with those of several neighbors. The family took shelter in a cave and sold their goats. Once the airstrikes began, they knew it was time to leave. Taking only a small supply of patiri, a traditional flatbread, they set off on foot through the mountains for Ghazni, a province south of Kabul where there is another concentration of Hazara. At night, they wrapped themselves in cloths and slept on the ground. Bakhtnisa and her husband, Azizullah, did not eat; they saved the food for the children, the youngest 2 and the eldest 16. Along the way, they heard the distant thud of explosions and saw fireballs lighting the sky outside Kabul, bombarded nightly by warplanes. When they saw Taliban troops, they hid; Azizullah feared that he and his eldest son, Sharif, would be forcibly conscripted. In Ghazni, they decided to try to make their way across the border to Pakistan. With two other families, several dozen people in all, they hired a smuggler to sneak them across a remote, unmarked stretch of frontier. They traveled mainly at night, on switchbacked, rutted roads that left them bruised and battered from being flung against the truck's wooden bed and bare metal sides. Packed together, the children vomited. Whenever they approached a stretch of road where they might be stopped, the families were ordered out of the truck and told to make their way through the countryside, meeting up with the driver miles down the road -- a trek that sometimes took hours. All the while, Bakhtnisa and Azizullah worried about how they would pay the smuggler what they owed. He was charging the family nearly 8,000 rupees -- $140 -- an amount of money they had never possessed. The smuggler told them he would work out payment later, but did not explain how. Once in Pakistan, they found out. Azizullah and Sharif would be indentured to the smuggler, working in a coal mine outside the border city of Quetta. It would probably take them several months to work off the debt, they were told. Four of the other children, aged 6 to 12, were sent to live and work in a carpet-weaving workshop. The smugglers arranged that, too. Bakhtnisa wonders how long her husband and son will have to work to pay off this new debt. "I don't see any hope for our lives here," she said. "I don't want to stay in this place. I think of all of us together in our home. But how can that ever happen again?"
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
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From the Times wire desk
From the AP |
