Word: shinwari
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Dates: during 2001-2001
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Farras Khan Shinwari starts work early, before the sun has risen over the red plains of Karkhla, 15 km east of Peshawar in northwest Pakistan. After a meager breakfast of tea and dry nan with his brothers, he starts sprinkling water on the mound of red clay they will mix and form into bricks. All around him on the plain, hundreds of illegal Afghan migrants squat barefoot in the clay, forming bricks with their hands for less than a dollar a day. Even the pittance they get here is more than they could make at home in Afghanistan. Farras will...
...superpower struggles and their own tribal and ethnic feuds, reduced to fleeing to neighboring countries to do menial work for a beggar's wage. Afghans are on their knees, and only international aid can help them back to their feet. "There is nothing in Afghanistan," says Ibrahim Khan Shinwari, Farras' father, who brought his family from the village of Battan in Afghanistan's Nangarhar province two years ago to make bricks for the GI Brick Co., owned by a relatively well-off businessman from nearby Hayatabad. "We are waiting to go back, if conditions get better...
...kneel down and pray in the field. Tomorrow they will start the same routine over again?mixing clay, molding bricks and drying, stacking and loading them onto packhorses to carry to the kiln. The product of their labor goes mostly to build merchants' houses in Peshawar or Hayatabad. The Shinwari family can only dream of the day when bricks made by their hands can be used to rebuild their own shattered country...