Crying over spilt ... eggs

Driving through Kabul’s dusty roads a week ago, I watched a swarm of people buzz by. The fabric of blue burkas billowed lightly as women walked by, some balancing overflowing trays on the curve of their heads. Old, rickety wooden carts lined the streets, their oranges, carrots and onions providing much-needed splashes of color amidst the clouds of dust rolling out from under the wheels of passing cars. Three young boys, no more than ten, passed in front of our car, their backs bent under sacks twice their size, full of red plastic watering cans. The smallest turned and wagged his finger, scolding my driver for having driven so fast and come so close. I chuckled, suddenly seeing the disapproving expression of an old man somehow transplanted under the dirty skin of this young boy’s face.

My eyes wondered down the street, inspecting the goods being sold in open store fronts. Here were all the mechanics’ stores. Empty blue, red and green gas containers hung above the entry ways. A man sat bent over an old engine, his hands and arms dyed charcoal by the oil. Outside the neighboring store, another man perched the sole of one foot against a machine and strained unsuccessfully to start it by pulling on a long cord. Two stores down yet another mechanic bent over the bonnet of a car, twisting, turning and tweaking the car’s innards unconvincingly.

A little further down the road, the blue-black of mechanic’s stores turned to the red of butchers. Large cuts of meat hung in lines. Whole fat-tailed sheep, skinned and ready for consumption hung upside-down, their fatty bottoms drooping in unappetizing wrinkles.

Between the store fronts a small alley curved round, lined on either side with the mud-brick walls of homes that stacked themselves one on top of the next up the side of a mountain. Lines of clothes crisscrossed between houses, flapping out colorful brushstrokes upon this canvas of grey. The small portrait of a woman zigzagged up an invisible path, following the mountain’s craggily surface to her home.

The world outside was filled with the busyness of life in all its wonderful contradictions. I thought to myself again how much I wanted to leave this mobile metal box and walk out into the craziness and action. Too often I feel like I am watching this country on some semi-interactive live television, displayed through the screen of my car window. Security means that I do not walk, but drive, between locations and that much of my life is lived behind the compound walls of my office and home.

Much as I have repeatedly read and heard Afghanistan’s devastating statistics, I find my heart has not yet grasped the humanity behind the numbers. I am not broken by the injustice as I think I should be. I do not really understand what it means that 1/5 of all children born die before the age of five, half of those before they reach their first birthday. I do not comprehend the full significance of the fact that the maternal mortality rate is among the three highest worldwide, parts of Afghanistan giving mothers a one in seven chance of dying from a maternal death. My brain can’t seem to grasp the consequences of the average life expectancy being 45, putting me beyond my mid-life. And the numbers go on … Perhaps they are too big and what I need is just one woman or child, one story, to give these figures a face.

The closest to discovering this face behind the numbers came a few days ago while driving home from work and watching the craze of action and life rush by my car window. Struggling against a cold that had kept me under the weather for about a month, I sat dazed and hazy, cursing the traffic and generally feeling sorry for myself at the back of my driver’s car. As I stared out mistily into the bustle that surrounded me, my eyes landed and focused on the hunched figure of a small boy, crouched with the arch of his back leant against a dirty cement wall. His arms lay crossed over his tucked-in knees. His little head was buried into the crook of his elbows – crying. Between the fan of legs that passed between him and me, I spotted the source of this little boy’s tears, the tragedy that had just taken place. By the boy’s side was an empty cardboard egg carton. Strewn in front of him were the broken white shells from which crept the yellow-white contents of his daily wages.

It is strange that in a country with such staggeringly bad statistics it would be a small boy with a few broken eggs that would bring me close to tears. I pictured the boy arriving home with no money and no eggs to face his family. Would they be angry? Did he have a father to punish him or had his father been killed during the years of conflict? Would they have money to eat that night or would he go hungry? The questions filled my head and I nearly jumped from the car, wanting to do something – to buy his broken eggs, to stop the tears, to make it better. And then suddenly, the traffic parted and my car lurched forward between two cars and around the corner. I craned my head to watch the curved figure of the boy disappear and knew that I had encountered some of the humanity behind the numbers.