A Fragile Life

Living in Afghanistan, one tries to make sense of it all, to try to put the country and society in a context that can be understood. Without some context, the things that happen seem to be totally unique and without reason.

I have come to believe that living in Afghanistan in 2009 must be a bit like having lived in rural  America 150 years ago and before. Yes, some people have cars and cell phones. But for the most part, people still live overwhelmingly in rural areas, isolated by space and the lack of communications, trying to eke out an existence by farming a small plot of land and raising a few sheep or goats. Like Americans during our agrarian past, they have large families where boys are valued for their back more than their mind, and girls are valued not at all. The illiteracy rate in the rural areas, depending on the source, averages 70%-90%.

Another similarity is that life here is very fragile. The average longevity for both men and women here is in the low 40s, and while war is not a particularly healthy thing and impacts the average, people simply die here of getting sick or getting hurt. The fact is, there is no real medical care to speak of, so the survival rate from illness and injury is very low, just as it was in the US in the early 1800s. Have a problem delivering? It is common that either mother or child—or both—die. Illnesses can be devastating. And kids, for whom accidents and illness are common place, are among the most vulnerable.

And so it was the other night, when the 9 year old son of our cleaning lady was opening the gate to his family’s compound and the driver of the car hit the gas and not the brake and crashed into the mud wall or iron gate (we are not sure which, as due to translation problems and the story being retold endlessly, there are at least 2 stories regarding all tragedies in Afghanistan, and usually a lot more) and the wall/gate fell on the boy and crushed him.

As the mother worked for Americans, she was lucky enough to get access to the docs at the local military base, who stabilized the boy long enough to have the military fly him to Herat, a city of over 500,000 that can only dream of the medical care provided in a third-world country. There it was decided that he had to go to Kabul for treatment, which was as accessible as Vienna, and so it was there he died.

The word tragedy implies something unique and major, and my MS Word thesaurus tells me it is synonymous with disaster, calamity and catastrophe. Had this happened in Walkerton, Indiana it would be an apt definition. 


But it happened in Farah, Afghanistan, where other synonyms, like heartbreaking or misfortune are more appropriate descriptors. Yes, we feel sad, but no one is surprised or alarmed, as this is Afghanistan, where death is very much a part of life, and there is a very precarious separation of the two. So while we are pained by the loss of a young child, we also brace for the next death, which will sadly, inevitably, come too soon.