Word: hawaneen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...stay or leave? It was a question Hawaneen, a hollow-cheeked Afghan with a wispy beard, had debated with his elders for many weeks, while the famine--the worst in 30 years--tightened its grip on the village. Would they stand a better chance of survival if they remained? Or should they wander elsewhere until they found help? After a three-year drought, every village well had run dry, and the goats and sheep had died. Finally Hawaneen decided it was time to go; he had fed his family the last grains of wheat he had intended to plant this...
...Hawaneen arrived at the Herat camp a month ago after selling his plow and even the tin roof off his house to pay for the journey. Now, in the barren, sand-blown camp, Hawaneen crouches against the wind and watches in dumb agony as a Muslim cleric lays the bony, starved corpse of his eight-year-old son on a plastic sheet spread on the ground and washes him for burial...
...hoped-for help never materialized for Hawaneen or for the other 80,000 refugees living in the camp. Says a relief official in neighboring Pakistan: "Afghanistan is going through its worst crisis since the 1979 Soviet invasion, and nobody seems to care." With Afghanistan's current rulers, the strictly Islamist Taliban, imposing their fundamentalist beliefs on women and giving sanctuary to suspected Saudi terrorist Osama bin Laden, few donors are willing to step forward with emergency aid, even though the U.N. estimates that more than 1 million Afghans may be at immediate risk of starvation...
During a month at Mazlak camp, in the empty desert outside Herat, Hawaneen and his family received 15 lbs. of wheat and a handful of moldy dates. When his son first became ill with pneumonia, Hawaneen waited from dawn to dusk outside the camp clinic, along with hundreds of others stricken with tuberculosis, measles and bronchitis. At last it was Hawaneen's turn. "All they gave me for my son was this," he said helplessly, clutching a plastic strip that once held 12 aspirins...
Among Afghans, readying a corpse for burial is up to the men. But Hawaneen's wife, shrouded in a burqa, is allowed to kneel beside her son's tiny limbs. She weeps quietly as her young daughter lifts a cloth covering the dead boy and kisses his forehead. Then Hawaneen and his clansmen set off at a swift pace to the rocky cemetery. "My two other children are also sick, but what's the point of taking them to the clinic? They can't help," grieves Hawaneen, letting the empty aspirin strip fall from between his fingers into the wind...
| 1 |