Monday, 7 March, 2005, 13:57 GMT
Aid is not getting through. Photos: Veronique de Viguerie
Death and disease for snowbound Afghans
By Tom Coghlan in Ghor province, Afghanistan
Our two-car convoy ground to a halt in the snow, high on the Janak Pass.
The Toyota pickup from Catholic Relief Services was the first to give up the unequal struggle.
Following in the aid group's 4x4 we could smell its clutch burning out as its wheels spun, despite snow chains.
We were at an altitude of 3,000 metres and the snow on the Janak Pass was higher than the roof of the car.
Lamplight
At the end of January, all access was cut to the impoverished province of Ghor in the central highlands of Afghanistan by the worst winter for 15 years.
Please tell the world about our suffering and ask the aid agencies to set up some work schemes in our area
Head of O Ghab Khaneh village
Such messages as reached the outside by satellite phone from district officials spoke of widespread child mortality because of disease and cold.
Some estimates put the death toll in the thousands.
We accompanied the first aid workers to try to reach the interior.
The local commander, a genial former Taleban member named Mullah Moustafa, had 50 villagers cutting a path ahead of us, but with night drawing in we transferred to horses and reached the 75-household village of Gar-e-Hasar in darkness.
In the village they told us seven children and six adults were dead.
As we sat by lamplight with the village elders, they carried in a little girl expected to die within hours from pneumonia.
Bibi Gul was two, but looked very much younger.
Her pinched face had a waxy pallor; her fragile limbs showed the signs of chronic malnutrition.
Dr Shoib Fayez, an Afghan doctor accompanying us, told us quietly that he thought her too weak to respond to medicine.
More in hope than expectation he gave her a dose of antibiotics.
When we left in the morning she showed small signs of improvement, though her fate remained uncertain.
The doctor treated six other children suffering pneumonia in Gar-e-Hasar.
The villagers said that no aid workers had ever visited them before.
Their knowledge of basic medical care and hygiene left the doctor despairing.
Many children were half-naked despite the snow.
A village elder complained the medicine he had been taking for months because of severe headaches was ineffectual.
The pills turned out to be for diarrhoea.
Time-warp
Ghor has seen almost nothing of the billions poured into Afghanistan by foreign donors since the fall of the Taleban government in late 2001.
The province remains in a medieval time-warp
Many simply have too little to protect them from the elements
A 4x4 from one of only two international aid groups to work in the province managed to access a remote valley for the first time last June.
The inhabitants of one village they reached had never seen a car.
Some of the children started crying.
A group of villagers collected grass and tried to feed it to the vehicle.
The absence of development was everywhere apparent, as were claims of a terrible death toll to the weather.
During our visits to more than 20 villages in the Tulak and Shahak regions, villagers told us of infant deaths that averaged between five and 10 per village.
It seemed that the cold had combined with malnutrition and poor hygiene to let in a host of respiratory diseases.
Some villages were without toilets of any kind.
To reach one particularly poor hamlet we had to negotiate a carpet of human faeces around its circumference.
Payment refused
Yet despite the abject poverty we encountered, the people of Ghor were everywhere scrupulously welcoming and generous despite their own desperate shortage of food.
Children have particularly suffered in the extreme conditions
The men of O Ghab Khaneh, which means The Eagle's Nest, worked for 10 hours to get us over the Gow Kusht Pass.
Our horses had to be periodically dug out of the snow.
The locals refused any payment.
"Please tell the world about our suffering and ask the aid agencies to set up some work schemes in our area," the village head said.
Studies by aid agencies in the province have shown a worrying dependence on such schemes among villagers, in the absence of any other employment opportunities.
One district official we spoke to conceded that some villages were not clearing the snowbound passes into the province because they hoped that if they waited long enough an aid agency would pay them to do so.
The seven-year drought in Afghanistan has hit Ghor particularly badly.
The marginal land of the province has turned to dust and many families have left.
Coming hard on its heels the winter of 2004/5 has hit a population weakened by malnutrition and underdevelopment.
People told us that they ranged up to six hours a day looking for wood.
Some cut down the fruit trees they rely on for summer food, others ate their seeds and livestock for the coming year, or burned parts of their houses for warmth.
With the weather showing signs of improvement, the infant mortality crisis may be over, though aid agencies are warning of a flood risk in the coming weeks.
One small note of comfort for the farmers is that the heavy snowfall has broken the drought for the time being.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4325591.stm
