Barren fields and empty stomachs: Afghanistan’s long, punishing drought

They awake in the mornings to find another family has left. Half of one village, the entirety of the next have departed in the years since the water dried up – in search of jobs, of food, of any means of survival. Those who remain pick apart the abandoned homes and burn the bits for firewood.

They speak of the lushness that once blessed this corner of southwestern Afghanistan. Now, it’s parched as far as the eye can see. Boats sit on bone-dry banks of sand. What paltry water dribbles out from deep beneath the arid earth is salt-laced, cracking their hands and leaving streaks in their clothes.

Several years of punishing drought has displaced entire swaths of Afghanistan, one of the nations most vulnerable to climate change, leaving millions of children malnourished and plunging already impoverished families into deeper desperation. And there is no relief in sight.

In Noor Ali’s village in Chakhansur district, near the border with Iran, four families remain out of the 40 who once lived there. Ali, a 42-year-old father of eight who used to grow cantaloupes and wheat, in addition to raising cattle, goats and sheep, is too poor to leave. His family is subsisting on a dwindling 440-pound bag of flour, bought with a loan.

“I have no options. I am waiting for God,” he said. “I am hoping for water to come.”

The desperation in rural areas, where a majority of Afghanistan’s population lives, has forced families into impossible cycles of debt.

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Rahmatullah Anwari, 30, who used to grow rain-dependent wheat, left his home in Badghis province in the country’s north for an encampment that has sprung up on the outskirts of Herat, the capital of an adjacent province. He borrowed money to feed his family of eight and to pay for his father’s medical treatment. One of the villagers who had lent him money demanded his 8-year-old daughter in exchange for part of the loan.

“I have a hole in my heart when I think of them coming and taking my daughter,” he said.

Mohammed Khan Musazai, 40, had bought cattle on loan, but they were swept away in a flood – when rain comes, it comes erratically, and it has caused catastrophic flooding. The lenders took his land and also wanted his daughter, who was just 4 at the time.

Nazdana, a 25-year-old who is one of his two wives and is the girl’s mother, offered to sell her own kidney instead – an illegal practice that has become so common that some have taken to referring to the Herat encampment as the “one-kidney village.”

She has a fresh scar on her stomach from the kidney extraction, but the family’s debt is still only half paid.

“They asked me for this daughter, and I’m not going to give her,” she said. “My daughter is still very young. She still has a lot of hopes and dreams that she should realize.”

A few years ago, 30-year-old Khanjar Kuchai was thinking about going back to school or becoming a shepherd. He’d served in Afghanistan’s special forces, fighting alongside NATO troops. Now, he is figuring out survival a day at a time – on this day, he was salvaging wood from a relative’s abandoned home.

“They all left for Iran because there is no water,” he said. “Nobody was thinking that this water could dry up. It’s been two years like this.”

With three-quarters of the country’s 34 provinces experiencing severe or catastrophic drought conditions, few corners of the country are untouched by the disaster.

Even after the years of drought, many speak as if they can still vividly see their land as it once was – green and plentiful, teeming with melons and cumin and wheat, river birds flitting overhead as fishing boats navigated through the waterways.

With little assistance from Taliban authorities and international aid perennially falling far short, some say all they can do is trust that the water will someday return.

“We have these memories that these places were completely green,” says Suhrab Kashani, 29, a school principal. “We just pass the days and nights until the water comes.” NYT