A couple of heavy snowfalls in Kabul guaranteeing that a drought won’t hit Kabul this year, made life all the more harder on its poor people. Already battered by war waged by the foreign forces and Taliban, poverty and cold mercilessly put people on a test for survival. The prices of fuels rose like every year but the prices of food items skyrocketed this year as Pakistan has closed the most used trade route.
Even in the snowfall people are begging on roads. Most women are beggars from the 30 decades of war who have no other option but to beg in streets to feed their children. Zareen Gul, a woman in her mid-thirties said she had lost her husband in the brutal civil war of Kabul (1992-1996) and had two young daughters to take care of. “In the cold days life gets harder. I can’t skip a single day, even if there is a storm because we will have to spend the day in hunger and cold,” she said tearfully.
Small children have to continue working and picking garbage or they will suffer just like Zareen Gul. Mohammad Rishad, a little boy hardly ten years old, was cleaning shoes in his little shop in the corner of a road. He had three younger siblings and his father’s salary at the mechanic’s isn’t enough to take care of them all so he had to shoulder the burden. “Now we have holidays so I don’t worry about missing school but during schooldays I have to skip many days because I will not be able to earn the same money if I work part time and there are just too many difficulties,” he added.
Walking through the streets of the capital city, nobody can possibly imagine this is a country that has received more than 60 billion USD in aid. The ultra-corrupt, Mafia government has gobbled the money not leaving a trace of it for the poor of Kabul. In Kabul a famous saying goes “Kabul may as well be without gold, but not without snow.” People are now saying they may live without anything, if the puppet government of criminal fundamentalists and traitors is annihilated and foreign occupiers to came to give us welfare and reconstruction leave as quickly as they invaded our country.