Rain drips down slowly through the porous concrete ceiling of the abandoned hospital into the dark bedroom. Outside a thunderstorm deadens the flat landscape, shrouding the ploughed fields in mist, late on a freezing winter’s morning. Burying his head under the torn, unwashed blanket, sixteen-year-old Nazir tries to get warm. Reaching out an arm and finding his mobile phone wet from the puddles that have formed on the bare floor, he lets out a loud sigh. Nazir closes his eyes, preferring to bed down on a piece of old polystyrene than face the day.

Derelict for over a decade, the old hospital on the outskirts of the down-at-heel agricultural town of Thiva is home to hundreds of lone young Afghan men and boys. Unable to afford the €4,500 price tag the smugglers are demanding to leave Greece or the €5 a night the middlemen are charging for rent in Athens, lost travellers are forced to head out to the city in search of jobs that seldom pay. Stranded on their journeys west, the building is one of the many crumbling shells of surrounding farms and factories that have become islands for the forgotten on the edge of Europe.

Shivering in a shawl he has worn since his journey began in Laghman some two years ago, Rehan crouches next to a fire of smouldering rubbish, lit out of the wind in the corner of a semi-open ward. Around him, the blackened pockmarked walls full of gaping holes resemble the bombed out ruins left standing in Kabul following years of war. Picking their way through the pools of water, a group of boys come past, carrying bundles of dried twigs as they prepare to cook a communal lunch. Rehan follows along the corridor, heading to what has become a kitchen amid the dense undergrowth that has now consumed the hospital. Aged between thirteen and seventeen the boys gather around half of an oil drum that has been adapted as a tandoor. Sitting on old car seats or on their heels to avoid the filthy floor, they throw forward their hands to be licked by the flames, trying hard to keep warm.

Boasting to the others that he is leaving town shortly, Rehan in reality has nowhere to turn. Orphaned after returning to Afghanistan following a young life spent growing up as a refugee in Pakistan, he has no place in Asia and is panicked that he will ever find the life he is looking for in Europe. Scanning over the smoke-stained Quranic verses scrawled on the walls around him, his eyes rarely stop to focus for a minute. Around the fire, he kicks at the build up of ash with his flip-flops aggressively. “I thought that I would work in Greece and save some money for the UK but now I have nothing. I can barely afford to eat so I have to take loans from the local shopkeepers. Mostly I work with the onion crops, digging in the fields and packing and loading vegetables… Now the rains have come it’s been a week since I found any job. The conditions here are worse than in Afghanistan and my mind tells me that I’ll probably end up stuck here for the next two or three years”.

On a tiled worktop, boys take turns to roll out rounds of floured dough, cooking the thin, un-nourishing bread on the flat end of the dirty oil drum. Becoming increasingly listless, Rehan disappears back to the over-crowded room where he sleeps. Protected from the outside world by plastic sheets covered in heavy raindrops, a group of thirteen Afghans sit frigidly under sleeping bags against the damp walls, coughing repeatedly. In the middle of the floor, the youngest of the group spreads himself out on a piece of flea-ridden carpet. Leaning on one elbow he colours-in the petals of sketched flowers in his diary using a set of felt tips carried with him from Athens.

In each of the boarded-up rooms around the hospital, boys such as Nazir and Rehan tell the same stories. Too shy to admit their fate, most have been tricked by the smugglers, deported from Europe after paying out extortionate fees or have given up after months spent trying to escape from Greece. None dare breath a word to their families.

Giving up after a year spent trying to jump on haulage trucks bound for Italy, Qasim left the camps around Patras Port behind, retracing his steps as he tries to get back on his feet again. Soaked through under a thin child’s turquoise rain jacket, the sixteen-year-old returns back to the ruins of the surgery where he squats, looking for refuge from the gathering storm outside. Waiting by the railway station since first light in the hope that he will be offered a day’s work, he risks arrest and deportation each morning to prolong his stay in Europe. “Six weeks ago I was on the farms picking onions, potatoes and tomatoes and was getting paid eight Euros for twelve hours work but now the winter is coming there is no way to make money. Still every morning I go out and wait in the stations and on the roadside looking for work but the police are always coming to check my papers and beating me… I just want to leave from here to any other European country but it’s too difficult. If I want to cross the border it costs more than €4,000 and I know many Afghans are dying trying to cross the sea. I would feel to shameful now to ever go back home because I owe the balance of the debt and the people would say bad things about me”.

It has been close to a month now since any of the migrants and refugees in Thiva found regular work on the surrounding farms and many have left for the orange orchards on the coast. Those who remain have been at the hospital for months and even years. Owed money by the landowners, they sit out the winter among the numbing desolation. There is nothing to do and little joy.

Two hours walk from Thiva, the brown, fallow land becomes increasingly isolated. Set back from the farm tracks, a group of shacks lay hidden away from sight in a shallow depression, surrounded by pylons. Keeping out of the harsh winds that whip down from the bleak mountains, fifteen-year-old Qais shelters in one of the tents along with twenty of his fellow workers. Sat under plastic fruit wrappers that hang down from the ceiling, the sheets covering the walls billow around the group as a rusted, graffiti-covered door bangs violently against its frame. Doing his best to distract himself, Qais half-watches over a card game that he doesn’t join in with.

His face now chapped and dirty after three months working in Thiva’s sweeping fields, Qais is one of seven unaccompanied minors to have become marooned on the remote farm. Bonded to the farmer who has kept his workforce unpaid since spring, they must sit out the cold winter months, hoping that their fortunes improve when work hopefully materialises again. “This is the first time in my life that I’ve beein working and it’s very hard for me because I’m small so sometimes the others have to help me. I wake up at six in the morning and go straight to the fields. I do all kinds of different work; I pick onions and then put them into cartons and we use a machine that cleans them and divides them by size. If it rains, we can’t work so we don’t get paid. It’s so dirty here. I wash my own clothes with a little water from the well but it feels like snow when I take a bath”.

Getting up gently from the grimy floor of the main shack so as to avoid the flakes of mud and vegetable peelings, Qais pulls his jacket tightly around his chest, heading out into the chill of the evening. Responsible for his family in Nagahar following the death of his father in a bomb blast, the slight, intelligent boy left war behind in search of an education not accessible to him in Afghanistan. After a month spent alone travelling by foot to get this far, Qais has lost his confidence. Making for his bed that is housed in an improvised shelter he can barely stand in, Qais stops to take off his wet socks. Barefoot in his worn shoes, he joins the others his age outside as they prepare to make a dinner of potatoes on a fire that won’t light.

“When I have any money I buy phone cards so that I can try to call my mum because I miss her very much. The last time I spoke with her was ten days ago but I don’t tell her all the problems that I’m facing here. If I faced these conditions in Afghanistan then at least I would be happy because she would be with me. I know my mum is praying for me everyday that I can leave Greece. I think a lot about my home and my country but it’s impossible for me to go back because of the war. I would rather die here, so for now, I just have to suffer”.

©Alixandra Fazzina | NOOR

Thiva, Greece, November 2011

At the very city limits of Lahore, where entry taxes are collected in tollbooths at the Ravi River crossing, some of the most polluted land in Pakistan is unofficially home to approximately 17,000 Afghan refugees. Beside the Saggian Bridge, a sprawling slum of ramshackle shelters blends with a landscape of dust covered rubbish. Pitching camp next to the city garbage dump in 1999, the marginalised community who escaped war in Eastern Afghanistan eat, sleep and pray on the landfill site. Bordered by water blackened with effluent from the factories upriver, the residents of Saggian have nowhere else to turn and no other means to survive outside the filth they live in.

At the heart of the squalor, camp elder Haji Asal Khan sits in the shade of a mud built hut, entertaining complaints one by one that he can do nothing about. From outside, the loud crashing of glass makes it hard to talk as a group of teenagers work away, picking out coloured fragments from a deep pile of broken bottles with their cut, bare hands. As his eight year old son Hamidullah returns from home with his satchel, Haji Asal strokes his frizzy beard he looks down towards the floor, “We have a school here in the camp but it’s in danger of closing. There are only two teachers for three classes and one of them is an eighth grade student himself so the pupils will not progress much. Before the children used to study in six rooms but now the rent has not been paid so they have to sit out on the rooftop of a local factory. There is a complete lack of money, books and pencils and almost no incentive anymore for the parents to even send their children to school”.

“Two generations have grown up at Saggian Pul (bridge). When a child is born here they have only one destiny in life and that is to be in the rubbish. Whenever they reach the age when they can sling a sack over their shoulder, they start work in the dump collecting garbage. When they get a little older they are promoted to separating glass or labouring in the go-downs (depots). What they earn depends on how hard they work and what they can sell to the scrap dealers who come here”.

On the dirt road that skirts the bridge on its way to the landfill site, children chase after trucks, running in the path of their belching exhaust fumes. Heading down to the steep riverbank at dawn each morning, boys and girls as young as four years old trail oversized hessian sacks behind them on the ground. Standing back for a few minutes as the dumpsters shed their load, they compete with the flies to dive into the lorry’s stinking cargo. Small hands pick out scrap metal, paper, leather, drinks containers and anything plastic. Ignoring the whirring of machinery, the children risk their lives, darting around the machines as they grab feverishly at the best of what the city residents of Lahore have thrown away.

Their infections and insect bites concealed under a layer of dirt, most of the children at Saggian’s dump have remained unwashed for days. With just a few points from which to access the unsafe ground water supply, no latrines and their shacks full of the rubbish they bring home each evening, disease at the refugee camp is rampant. Mothers complain of diarrhoea and hepatitis, unable to seek even basic help for the ailments their children suffer from. Some have even watched their children die. “Children of ten years old here have paralysis. We don’t know why because we can’t identify the sickness and can’t afford to visit doctors. Accidents are of course frequent and many boys and girls get injured doing their work but we just have to get used to it”.

Flattening cartons that her daughter collected yesterday, Gul Bibi sits out under a thick plume of toxic smoke in the harsh winter sun. Beyond the ragged purda that surrounds her tent, a five hundred metre high hill of garbage tumbles down with the wind into a pool of now rancid stagnant water. Working away quietly with her sisters-in-law, Gul Bibi is in mourning. Ten days after the death of her eldest child, she can do little else but to keep on sorting through bags of rubbish to distract her mind. “My fourteen year old son Baz Gul became really sick two weeks ago. He was complaining of pains in his stomach and abdomen and couldn’t stop vomiting. In the end we had to take him to hospital and he spent two nights there. The doctors tried really hard to save him but there was nothing they could do. Sixteen people have died altogether of dengue fever in the camp lately, both adults and children. We are surrounded by dirty water and although many people have come here and promised us help, it seems we Afghan people are forgotten”.

In each of the 1,200 households at Saggian, the residents dream of escape. Evicted over a decade ago from then official camps on the frontier, their status and rights as refugees have become increasingly eroded. No longer in a position to make choices, life under the bridge is still considered a better option than their home country.

Young Afghans such as Khudadad continue to arrive in Lahore, hoping to find a better future. In a dingy shed at the go-down where he has spent the past year sleeping with twelve other boys, the fifteen year old stops to eat the lunch he has bought with his wages from a nearby canteen. Sent to Pakistan following successive droughts in northern Afghanistan, Khudadad is doing his best to support his family who have been plunged further into poverty, “My family desperately needs money. Several other boys from my village in Takhar have tried going to Iran but they’ve been deported from the border. If we could go to Europe we all would. There are no opportunities for us in Afghanistan or in Pakistan because there is constant insecurity. I can’t seem to get rid of death but I wish I could get away from this rubbish”.

Back at his hujra, Haji Asal sends his son out to work now that the school day has finished. Sipping weak green tea, he dreams of a way out for Hamidullah, “There is a trend in Afghanistan of sending our boys away to countries such as London or Europe but not from here. We can barely feed ourselves and so it’s impossible to pay the agents. In this camp if the youth had a way out they would leave but this place is just for helpless people”.

©Alixandra Fazzina | NOOR

Lahore, Pakistan, December 2011

Climbing up onto the bed, Fatima rummages through a large trunk in the corner of the room, pulling out plastic bags full of books from beneath Hekmatullah’s now redundant computer. Surrounded by her seven remaining children, Fatima eases herself back down on to the floor. Sitting cross-legged in a delicate blue dress that covers her heavily pregnant bump, she begins to slowly unpack the belongings of her recently deceased eldest son. Sixty-five days after Hekmatullah died while on the journey with smugglers in Greece, she summons up the courage to look back through his short life.

Carefully untying each bag, Fatima begins to weep, taking heavy breaths in an attempt to suffocate her sadness. An A grade student, Hekmatullah’s small, neat handwriting in English, Pashto and Urdu fills the piles of exercise books. As sounds of a wedding celebration filter through the mud walls from the sewage-filled lanes of the refugee camp outside, Fatima fingers the pages slowly with her hands, tracing the outline of words she cannot read. Between the books, certificates in computing, English and graphic design chart the path of a studious boy. From inside pages of penned poems, Fatima holds a photograph up to her eye level. On a sunny day, Hekmatullah poses in front on a newly constructed apartment block in Greece with his childhood friend Bilal and a newfound companion. The group of boys squint, smiling into the camera. Sharing the image with her youngest son Rizwan, the three year old kisses the picture; pointing to the brother he calls Gulalai. Fatima nods, “He was a flower. Since the day he was born, I called him my beautiful flower”.

Escaping from the Russian invasion among an exodus of millions, Hekmatullah’s family fled from Afghanistan more than thirty years ago, leaving behind everything they had. Crossing into Pakistan from easterly Nangahar province, they moved between the refugee camps along the border, eventually settling down on the edge of the sprawling Kababian slum in Peshawar.

Having never had the opportunity to study himself due to war, Hekmatullah’s softly spoken father Shafiullah now works as selling vegetables from a handcart on the city’s streets. Across from his wife in the mud built living room, he looks into her tearful eyes momentarily, separated by the pile of books and papers that now cover the floor. “I wanted to give my eldest son what I never had. He wanted to be a civil engineer and every spare Rupee was spent on his education. Nobody in our family has ever been so determined like him. From when he was very young he showed great promise and was in love with his study. Every morning he would start his day with nimaz (prayer), then go to school, on to the English language centre and straight home again; his was a calculated life. He grew up as a refugee but wanted to break free and be successful”.

“I told him a year or so ago that he should go to Afghanistan and find work as a translator with NATO but then people told me it was far too dangerous. He never spoke about leaving for Europe. In the end, everything was all very sudden. Hekmatullah and his closest friend Bilal had this plan in the morning and then started their journey by the evening. They were only sixteen and seventeen”.

“When he broke the news to me that he was travelling to Europe I couldn’t agree but he talked to me calmly and explained that he was going for a better life so that he could support the family. He told me that you father are the only one of us earning and should let me go for your own sake. Hekmatullah explained that he hadn’t paid anything but when he reached to France or Belgium he would find a way. Whatever his pleas, until the very last moment I just couldn’t concede. In the back of mind I kept thinking how clever he was and that he must be choosing the right path. I loved him so much that in the end I decided I shouldn’t stand in the way of his future”.

“When he left home, the whole family was gathered. He was kissing us all and was really crying. He told us that he wasn’t afraid of the hardships that lay ahead of him and said no matter what he faced, he would be thinking of us all the time. For the next thirty-five days he called us whenever he had the opportunity. He spoke to me about all the difficulties on the way; crossing jungles, rivers and mountains. He was arrested twice in Turkey and had to spend time in gaol. I think he even felt embarrassed at his own situation but said that he had no other choice but to continue on the path he had chosen”.

“In Greece he started work as a labourer but was not being paid by his employer. He said he had become stuck there and in all spent about seven months near Athens. Without any wages he had no money and because of the bad weather, it was too hard for him to even continue his journey. He was complaining that there wasn’t anywhere decent to stay and in the end I ended up sending him one and a half Lak Afghanis (€2,300) just to help him survive. Eventually Bilal received €5,300 from his family to cover the fee the agent was asking and somehow he convinced them to take Hekmatullah along with him. They set out for Italy”.

“At one thirty in the morning on the night they were leaving, Bilal’s father Gulbuddin received a call from Greece. Bilal told him that Hekmatullah’s dead body is lying in my lap. He said that they were travelling with the agent in the mountains and because they were driving so fast there was an accident. They were lucky that their vehicle had not fallen down the rocks and into the sea. Bilal was in a terrible state with a head injury. His ribs and legs were broken and he was badly in need of medical treatment. Out of the forty-eight on board the small bus, he told his father that fifteen had died”.

“Bilal was taken by ambulance and spent three days in hospital. As much as his family tried to persuade him to come home, he refused because he said that he had gone through too much. I was put in touch with the Afghan community in Athens who were very kind. They took Hekmatullah’s body to a Bangladeshi mosque and collected some money even though they are very poor themselves. I had to take a loan and with what we managed to raise, they sent the body to Istanbul and then on to Kabul. Hekmatullah was received at the airport and taken for burial at our ancestral village. You could say it was the third time that he was ever in Afghanistan”.

Wearing a pakal that compliments his closely trimmed greying beard, Shafiullah looks austere but behind his façade he is a shattered man. Retreating to the almost black corner of the dark room during a power outage, his eyes well with tears. The children sit in a circle in absolute silence.

“When the people get helpless and have economic problems, it pushes them to go off in search of work or education abroad so that they can at least have a decent life. When they turn to the smugglers they are never told about the problems they will encounter on the way. I’m sure if they knew the real facts, they would never have set out on this journey. I feel so angry towards the agents. They are nothing but criminals who have spread lies throughout the whole Afghan community. Any boy who wants to go to Europe and follow in the footsteps of Hekmatullah will find nothing better at the end of the road. Nobody should take this step”.

“I was scared when he left but this kind of incident happening never crossed my mind. All I can do to ease my  conscience is to think of Hekmatullah’s passing as God’s will. I’m trying hard to be strong but the whole family are still in shock. His death has had such a strong impact, not only on my wife but all the children. In this house, we are sick from sadness”.

Still sifting through the piles of papers, Fatima locates a hidden photograph of Hekmatullah. Taken at the mosque in Athens, he lies dead in a coffin. Shrouded in a green hospital sheet, a smear of dried blood on his face is partially covered with a piece of sticky tape  wrapped around his forehead that bears his name. “It was such a hard time when we found out Hekmatullah had been killed; like the most frightening dream you can imagine. It was as if a great distance has opened up between the earth and the sky that I could not longer even reach out to God. My whole life stopped. I can’t forget my son and feel that I can’t go on living without him. I am a mother; you can only imagine my pain”.

Clutching the gruesome picture to her heart, Fatima cries out, “Gulalai! Gulalai!” Slowly returning it carefully to the place in the note pad that is its hiding place, Hekmatullah’s picture rests among some of his own last handwritten thoughts. Transcribed as Charbetas (Pashtun stanzas), many of the short poems in the book speak of a teenager lost in romantic thoughts. Others eerily speak of a young life lost, now echoed in Fatima’s tears as she packs Hekmatullah’s possessions away back into the trunk.

I am crying in loneliness

I wish you would come to me!

I died alone with no one next to me

And now because of my death, you also cry alone

©Alixandra Fazzina | NOOR

Peshawar, Pakistan, April 2012

Pegging up his black holdall onto the wall, Farshad ducks down next to a bukhari stove, keen to get warm after his chilly transit through Kabul. Inside a mud-built mosafer khana, the boy from Logar is surrounded by travellers, all hunched in the centre of the large carpeted room. In sweatbands and a leather jacket, Farshad squints in the golden evening light, scanning his surroundings where the next eight hours or so will be spent holed-up. He nods at a small boy who comes over with a green enamel pot of tea and a round of diamond shaped sweets before slowly settling down. Having spent the last five years growing up on the road labouring in Iran after the death of his father, Farshad is once again making the clandestine journey out of Afghanistan. This time however, he plans to go further afield, “Europe is the place, it’s much better than Asia. Fifteen of my friends are there now; five in France, four in Norway, some in the UK and the rest elsewhere. They tell me there is education, work and law in those countries so now I’ve also made up my mind to go”.

Outside the inn, a steady stream of passengers continues to arrive in shared taxis. Steering themselves around the rutted ground, they pick their way on foot along the Wardak Road, avoiding the ice and deep muddy puddles as they seek out shelter at one of the numerous hotels that surround the Company district bus station. Located on the very edge of Kabul city, Company is the sole point of departure for buses headed to the southern borderlands of Kandahar and Nimroz. The gateway to Pakistan and Iran, the majority of the mosaferin who converge on the dirty terminal each evening are making their first stop on the long and sometimes deadly passage with smugglers.

As the light begins to fade and the mosafer khanas fill up, the activity at Company moves inside. In a place notorious for kidnappings and robberies, it is now time for the passengers to wait out the night nervously in the sanctuary of their chosen hotels. Using their baggage as pillows, groups from provinces across Afghanistan spread themselves out as best they can. Hard as it is to relax in a place where even the piles of shoes left by the doorways are stolen, most sit solemn faced. Touts, hawkers and ticket sellers do the rounds leaving only the moneychangers and phone card salesmen stranded outside under lamps at an impromptu traveller’s bazaar. Respective landlords, who charge for food not board, sit feeding pounded meat onto skewers as kebabs are prepared for the communal dinners. Up on a wooden platform that makes for an extra sleeping level, a group of eight boys who are paid up with the smugglers until Turkey play with their mobile phones. They anticipate that the journey they are embarking upon will take around seven days although their plan is to continue further and “inshalla’ah”, make it to Europe. Aged between fourteen and seventeen it is the first time they have ever left their homes in Baghlan alone.

Just a few of the young mosaferin who arrive at the terminal each night are sure of their destinations. Hundreds of other children, some as young as eleven, have simply been sent forward by their families to go in search of work abroad. Camped among gangs of fellow villagers their future is at best unpredictable. Slumped against the wall, boys like thirteen year old Niamatullah are barely able to keep their eyes open. One of three minors among his travelling party from Badakshan, Naimatullah’s neighbour Abdul Naser to whom his destiny has been entrusted, acknowledges that his journey is unlikely to end in Iran, “Twenty years ago there were no roads, transport or facilities so the people did not wander so far. These days however the travelling is much easier and most people leave for Iran or go on to Europe. Sometimes the boys never come back”.

Starting out in business under the Taliban regime after fleeing to Quetta, smuggler Shaheer has seen thousands of young passengers pass through Company under his watch. Smoking a cigarette laced with hashish to accompany his glass of chay, he like his charges, looks tired and despondent, “There are so many people doing this job you can’t count them. Most of the agents in Kabul are just guys out to take commission and although they promise that they will look after the travellers for the entire way, they quickly hand them over so they should never be trusted. Us smugglers never tell the truth about all the risks ahead on the journey because maybe then the boys wouldn’t travel. The ones who are deported and know everything, well, I have no idea why they still go. I suppose after three decades of war they are just in search of freedom”.

After a two Dollar meal is served along long, narrow plastic mats unfurled across the hotel floors, the coloured fluorescent lights are dimmed. For those without sheets, flea-ridden piles of blankets are distributed under which the mosaferin crawl, spread out like parcels as a few hours sleep are snatched. Only the watchmen and a few wayfarers stay awake, watching flickering television sets or chatting in hushed whispers. By midnight, Company falls silent. Lost in dreams of faraway places, the features of the passengers become contorted by slumber; the only sound their rhythmic breathing.

As the hour approaches one-thirty in the morning, the innkeepers check their watches. It is time to raise their temporary lodgers. Kicking gently at the soles of feet or peeling back the covers, the mosaferin are woken to the chants of “Kandahar! Nimroz! Kandahar! Nimroz!” Bleary eyed, the travellers wake-up, some momentarily unsure of where they are. Picking past a row of babas as they say last minute prayers ahead of the journey, Farshad takes down his bag. Readying himself for the plummeting temperatures outside, he zips up his jacket and fixes his scarf across his nose. Breathing wisps of cold air, Farshad joins the exodus of ghost-like figures that make their way through the darkness of Company, heading towards a fleet of around fifty parked coaches. While some stop quickly at a market selling hot milk and last minute snacks, Farshad and groups of teenagers walk around in the damp, showing their ticket stubs to the bus drivers in the hope that they can locate the seat they have paid for. In an hour’s time, the buses will start their engines. Beeping their horns as they pass the police lines, they depart Company in a long convoy. By the time the sun rises, the road south towards Kandahar will enter its most perilous stretch where the mosaferin become vulnerable to IEDs or attacks by bandits and Taliban insurgents.

Leaving Afghanistan for the third and what he hopes will be the last time, Farshad says his goodbyes to Kabul. Aware of all the risks that lie ahead of him on his migration to Europe, he feels compelled, “The travelling is very hard and dangerous. If it’s summer you can’t even find water to drink sometimes and if the army see us they shoot. Many people die in the cars and trucks because the smugglers are driving so fast. What I’m really worried about though is the water between Turkey and Yunan. I don’t feel good because I should stay in my own country but really there is no choice in life for me but to leave”.

©Alixandra Fazzina | NOOR

Kabul, Afghanistan, March 2012

Cooped up in a dark, tiny room of a three-storey mosafer khana in a suburb of Kabul, fifteen year old Ghulam Mustafa sits squinting as he reads an English language study book. The light blocked out by faded newspapers glued to the windows, the dirty hotel is just one of the backstreet dives where the orphan from Bamyan has spent the past six months in hiding while on the run. In fear of his life, Ghulam is trying to find a way out of Afghanistan, “Since I came to Kabul I’ve been thinking to travel to another country because my uncle is trying to kill me. I want to go to Greece; I’m just trying to search for the money and a way out”.

Ghulam retreats into the warmth of his leather jacket. The room that is shared by five boys has no heater and without a bathroom, the only place to wash is at a well in the courtyard outside, now covered with snow. Trembling, Ghulam is visibly shaken. “My father was killed when I was four years old during the fighting with the Taliban. I don’t remember much about it myself because I was too young and nobody ever talked to me about him or his life because I suppose they didn’t want to depress me. I am an only child so after my father’s death my mother and me moved to my uncle’s house in the same village. Six months later, my uncle killed my mother. I never knew that at the time so I continued to grow up with his family as there was nowhere else for me to go. He would persuade his children to study but made me do back breaking labour. Since I was seven years old I’ve been working in the stables with the animals and on the land. When my nieces and nephews would come home he would not allow me to be in the house and just sent me to the mountains or out to do some work. Most of the time he was so aggressive and it was only occasionally that he would be kind to me on the days he didn’t hurt me. Hitting me was his everyday activity. One day he even broke my arm and I never knew why. He was such a tyrant and no one was able to stand up to him or stop his ways”.

“Soon the people started to talk and I began to find out about what happened to my mother. Then one day last year I decided to confront my uncle. I went right up to him and asked him, the people are saying you killed my mother, please tell me why? He slapped me hard around the face and said if you don’t keep quiet I will kill you too. That very same day I decided I had to leave for my own safety. He had gone out to the fields so I ran as fast as I could from the village and took a taxi through Bamyan. I carried nothing with me in case anyone became suspicious and the whole way to Kabul I was terrified. First I went to a garage where some of my friends were working. They lent me some money and managed to get me a job unloading trucks at a depot. I’m still scared now because even my friends have been approached by a man who is looking for me and if my uncle manages to find me in Kabul then for sure he will carry out his threat and kill me”.

While his roommates are out at their morning English course at a college up the road, Ghulam tries to keep up with his own studies, immersing himself in the text books that sit piled up under a prayer mat. Unable to afford to attend classes regularly, he is doing his best to make up for his lack of education and learn something of a language that may help him on the road ahead. From the back cover of a level two vocabulary book filled with colourful drawings of everyday objects, Ghulam produces a letter he has written in misspelt English, “I am was 4 years Taliban kill my father. Me and my mother went in uncl home. After 6 months my uncl kill my mother… My uncl always beat me and have decision to kill me. I escap become Bamyan then become Kabul. I live here hide… Not have exact address. Live severl place because I am have enemy [sic]”

Following in the footsteps of so many other Hazara boys from Bamyan and Kabul, Ghulam hopes that he can make it out of Afghanistan and show the note to somebody on the way so that he might get help, “I’m in constant fear of my life and unless I can escape, I don’t know what will happen to me”.

©Alixandra Fazzina | NOOR

Kabul, Afghanistan, February 2012

Taking a break to meet with some friends, fourteen year old Khalid wanders off from his father’s stall amid the squalor of Peshawar’s Board Bazaar to nearby basement. In the dark, half-derelict space he stands watching a class of young Afghan refugees warming-up for a karate class. As the group of teenagers around him stand on tip-toes, huddled together as they peek over the windows into the martial arts school, Khalid hangs back looking tired. A month after being deported from Turkey his days in Peshawar are long, “I wake up early to go to school and at midday I go to the help my father at his stall selling vegetables because he’s sick and can’t manage on his own. At five o’clock I go to college to study English and then have to go back to the market to help pack up. When I get home in the night I have to help look after my six younger brothers and sisters”.

“One year ago when I was thirteen my father asked me if I wanted to go abroad and when I agreed he just handed me over to the agent. I had listened many times before to the people discussing the whole route and it’s as if going to Europe has become like a custom around here. When I’m working in the bazaar everyone is talking about it and when the people come back they tell us all kind of fantasies so most of the teenagers are ready to go. I was thinking at my age it would be a good thing and never once thought I was too young”.

“When I started on my journey I tried not to be sad. The agent took me from the Haji Camp bus stand and from there I went by coach to Karachi. It took twenty-four hours and when we finally arrived we just had time to take a meal before we set off for Quetta. All the way we never stopped to sleep properly. We continued to Iran in a pick-up with twenty other Afghan passengers over hilly areas and mountains and desert. We didn’t use the official border crossing and the route we took was not safe. The guides didn’t care if anybody fell down and there was a big danger of death. All the way to Turkey we had to obey the agents instructions and any boy who protested was beaten harshly. It was a very difficult journey; we spent whole nights walking and many times we had to go without food”.

“In Van the agents gave me the Iranian passport of a fifteen year old boy called Haroon, only it had my picture on it. A car dropped me with five others on the road and we were put on a bus going directly to Istanbul. We set off at five in the afternoon but at one in the morning the police stopped us. When they boarded the bus and began searching I though I was OK because I had memorised everything on the passport and I could even remember what my father’s name was supposed to be. The trouble was that one of the other Afghan travellers was not so smart and he couldn’t remember anything so because of him they became suspicious and we were kept at a check post for the whole night. The next day we were transferred to a gaol in Istanbul. They took my fingerprints and entered all the information about me like my age and my nationality in the computer before putting me in detention. I was kept up in the second storey of the prison and out of all the refugees I was the only child. For sixteen days they didn’t let me out of the cell. Finally I was taken downstairs for an interview with a translator and he asked me all sorts of questions so I told him my whole story. I was really sad at that point and spoke to the man about how I spent so long travelling here and that I was really tired but there was no room for negotiation. I was taken straight to the airport and put on an Ariana Airways plane along with four men who were also being deported to Afghanistan. I had never been to Kabul before in my life but luckily when we arrived one of the passengers who had come from Turkey helped me to find my way to Torkham so that I could cross the border back to Peshawar. It felt very strange coming back, as if my whole journey was in vain. I was just thankful to be alive”.

Running home to fetch his books, Khalid navigates his way through the narrow, sewage filled lanes that zigzag between the mud-built houses of Sarkhodiana Camp. Dressed up in a bright pink lipstick for the Nowruz holiday, his mother greets him with a kiss as he enters through the ragged sack that serves as a purda across the doorway built from wooden crates. In their tiny yard, his thirty year old father Raz Mohammad lies wrapped in a blanket on a charpoy, keeping warm in the last rays of sun on a winter’s day. As songs of prayer waft through the camp, the family stay pinned down, too ashamed of their poverty to be celebrating. Leaving his little brother a strawberry chew that he places next to his father’s medicines on the table, Khalid does not stay long. Raz Mohammad waves him off proudly, “I was thinking for a long time that since I’m in very poor health Khalid should go abroad and get a proper education so that he could help the family. I’ve been taking medication for the last ten years because I have problems with my nerves. I constantly have to go to the hospital and find it hard to work or even to deal with my customers at the bazaar. Some other children from the camp were leaving for Norway so I thought that Khalid could go with them. I don’t have any money so I made a deal with a smuggler that if he reached Europe we would pay something then. I thought because he was thirteen he would be accepted in another country and could start school there at a good age. It’s almost now the custom of Afghans to send their children away for a good life because we have nothing here. Now even some of the elders want to go but still it’s the young ones who are the priority. Khalid is still a child and he went through many hardships on the way to Turkey. He was so close to his aim and it was his hard luck that his destiny was taken away from him. He wants to go again now and I will support him. I just have the hope that he can help us”.

On the dusty road outside the Afghan run Pamir English Language Centre, Khalid stands apart from his classmates as he waits for his lesson to begin. “Now I really want to go back. My dream is to be a doctor in Afghanistan but I think my only hope in life is to try again to go to Europe. Here in Pakistan the conditions are really tough because we are refugees. We have nothing in Afghanistan and the district where we come from near Tora Bora is all Taliban so we have nowhere to turn. If I could get a good education then I might have a chance to be somebody and be able to help my father. My world seems really small now in Peshawar”.

©Alixandra Fazzina | NOOR

Peshawar, Pakistan, February 2012

Located along Patras’ La Manikos Road, the smoke stained derelict shell of an abandoned café is now home to a group of twenty young Afghan refugees, all desperate to make the difficult crossing to Italy from the nearby international port. Run by a twenty-three year old Panjshiri middleman, sun loungers and makeshift beds are hidden under old cookers and shelving displays to keep the young residents dry from the rain that drips in from the holes in the corrugated iron roof. “It’s too cold here in Greece in the winter. We wear two pairs of trousers and jumpers to sleep in and even under two blankets we still freeze in the nights”. Burning palettes and wood salvaged from building sites, fires that smoulder in the remains of the kitchen are the only source of warmth when the boys from the old café are not out at the traffic lights on the edge of town waiting for the remote opportunity to board a truck that could be on its way across the Ionian Sea. “We thought that when we came to Greece it would be easy to leave but now we are in Patras we realise that it’s much more difficult. Three weeks ago a few people here had twenty Euros or so in their pockets but now we are just collecting bread from the garbage. The police and the Greek people don’t want us refugees here but all we can do is to hope that we can each find a way out”.

©Alixandra Fazzina | NOOR

Patras, Greece, November – December 2011

“All I have in the world is my sister Mariam. My mother died in hospital while she was pregnant during my birth. My parents had other children before us but they all died of sickness when they were young. Six months ago my father Abdul Ghafoor was killed by the Taliban. A group of fighters came knocking on the door of our house shouting Ghafoor la la! Ghafoor come here! When he answered they just opened fire on him”.

Five flights up at the top of a dark, narrow staircase, sixteen year old Mahmood sits slumped against the wall of a pink painted, furniture less room. Taking a break from collecting rubbish he has come to check on his sister Mariam who lies in pain on the carpet. Under her tousled hair, she winces, staring into space as if the life has been drained from her young body. Arriving in Istanbul two months ago, the siblings have nobody to turn to and no idea how they came to end up here on their perilous escape from Afghanistan.

“I come from a small village and the Taliban have been there as long as I can remember. My father was not a rich man and he could not send me to school so I grew up helping him to plant our lands with potatoes and wheat. My sister Mariam is less than a year older than me and she looked after the house, cooking, cleaning and washing. In the nights I always heard fighting. I remember the sound of voices, of bullets and bombs. When I was young I was really frightened but as you grow up you get used it and sometimes you even stop caring about the war. There were even moments when I used to go up to the rooftop to watch the firing. Now the situation in Wardak is getting worse and worse. There are a lot of people who work for the government by day but when the dark comes they arm themselves and become Taliban. My father even stopped me going to the mosque because that’s where they recruit people during speeches and hatams and most of the teenagers go with them because their minds are easy to change. I remember that the fourteen year old son of my neighbour was taken by the Taliban and he was convinced to join them and fight against the foreigners. After one month they brought his body back to the house. I don’t know if he became a suicide bomber or was shot but his mother died of a heart attack when she saw his him dead. Many people in Wardak had fights because those on both sides were constantly trying to take our lands by force. The reason my father is dead now is because he had a dispute with somebody and of course he, like most people, was associated with the Taliban. In my mind the Talibs and the government are all killers and criminals. A Muslim shouldn’t kill another Muslim but in Afghanistan everyone is dying”.

“At the time my father was gunned down, Mariam was sleeping in another room so I ran to get her and we escaped over a lower section of the back wall of our yard. We ran and ran across the fields to a road and tried in vein to flag down a car but nobody would stop. In the end we jumped on a truck that was going to Kabul and found a place to stay in a hotel with the help of an uncle there. Mariam still wasn’t sure that our father was dead at that time and I couldn’t bring myself to tell her. I had to try so hard to keep my emotions from her. I constantly felt like crying and had to keep putting my head in my hands or resting my face down on the table so that she couldn’t see my eyes. I kept wondering to myself if anybody else was even praying for my father or if I would ever know if or where he had ever been buried. I never even knew about my mother’s grave”.

“Our uncle took us to Zaidan in Iran and the whole way on the journey he didn’t say one word. Then he just left and said that he would follow us soon. Some smugglers took us and we went from one mosafer khana to another. We didn’t even know where we were going or if we were supposed to carry on to Turkey or Europe with the other travellers. After we reached Tehran we went to Urumia by bus and after that the agents took us to a small village by car; the two of us were in the front seat, four were in the back and one in the boot. For one hour after that we travelled in a blue van across hills and mountains and then the walk began. We set off in a big group and horses were given to all the women to ride on except to my sister. There were Pakistanis and Indians but mostly there were Afghans, even whole families, and it was as if the number of people was covering the whole mountainside. We went on foot for ten hours and the entire way was thick with snow and very difficult. Kurdish guides were leading us and they were very powerful, giving signals with lights at certain points on the route. Using only the moonlight it was very easy to get lost and at times we could see nothing in the valleys. I often had to give my shoulder to Mariam because it was as if she couldn’t walk anymore. After we finally crossed the border lots of vehicles came and took us and at about five or six in the morning we went to a place where cows and sheep are kept. It was really dirty in there. We were given blankets to share between two people and a man handed out yoghurt and bread but we were too tired to even think about eating. After some time a car arrived and took my sister and three other women away. I was told I had to walk and there were even more mountains before we reached to Van and I saw Mariam again. We spent the night in a half constructed building that was freezing cold. The agents took our photographs and gave us some papers that said we were Iranians before a taxi took us to a place on the road outside the city where a bus was waiting for us. It was twenty-four hours to Istanbul”.

“When we arrived here at the terminal we wanted to get off but we weren’t allowed and were made to stay onboard the bus with twenty-five of the other travellers. We continued driving to a place where more agents were ready to take us; nine of us got off then and the rest carried on. We went to a kind of mosafer khana that was in the basement of an old Turkish house and were put there with three other Afghan families. I’m not sure where it was but all of the houses around were like that. The next night we were dropped in Zeytinburnu outside a public call office. At that point we weren’t even sure that if we were still in Turkey or not. We had no idea what to do and it was only when we heard some other people speaking Dari that we managed to stop and ask them. We were just desperately wandering around in the dark, wondering what to do and where to go. We met an old Turkish man and a woman in the street and we were lucky because they helped us and have let us stay in their house these past weeks. All in all it took one month to come this far and it was so hard. When a man is travelling alone it is easier but Mariam was so weak all the way and there were times I thought she was dying”.

With nothing warm to wear to protect him from the cold as temperatures in Turkey plummet below zero, Mahmood is out on a Sunday night in a zip-up sweatshirt. In a pair of red cotton gloves provided by his boss, he drags behind him an oversized sack strapped on to a crude metal frame, scouting the pavements. “Now we have to work just to find food. I was talking with another Afghan boy my age called Nizam and he helped me to find a job at a depot collecting rubbish with a cart. I walk the streets for fourteen hours each day, seven days a week looking for plastic, wood, metal and paper. I get paid by the weight of the garbage and usually manage to earn about ten or twenty cents a day for two cart loads. There are many Turkish boys who also collect the rubbish in Zeytinburnu and they are always shouting and swearing at us. Often we have to give them some of what we find or they will beat us and several times when we have been out the people even knock us down with their cars”. As the weekly bazaar shuts down at eight o’clock, Mahmood entrusts his cart for a few moments to his newfound friend as he ducks between the stalls on the look out for discarded boxes. It takes twenty minutes for him to return with just five pieces of cardboard that he quickly flat packs, crawling down inside his filthy sack to compress his hoard. The two boys zoom off on routes that take them on steep, narrow cobbled streets, avoiding their young Turkish competitors on what is the most lucrative night of the week for the garbage collectors of Zeytinburnu. His eyes focused only on the rubbish, Mahmood and Nizam rarely speak, instead they gesture each other on, efficiently salvaging what they can. Before midnight, they make the long run back to the depot where their carts are weighed and sorted. Mahmood collects fifty Liras from his boss who sits backed by a flag under the dim glow of a strip light with the petty cash box. The boys head out on another round. “Mariam found work in a textile factory as a helper, carrying the clothes from one machinist to another but now she has become really sick again with fever and has not been able to go. We don’t know what to do and are literally eating the money I earn so I have to keep going. It’s cold and dirty but I have no other choice”.

“We never had a mother and just come from a small village. We have no papers here, no place to stay and no way to go to school. We are really alone in the whole world and this is a fact that we’ve had to accept. For now we are just worried about each other. If anything happened to either of us we wouldn’t be able to make it by ourselves; we couldn’t survive. It’s hard to cope as we are and some days, life feels like a punishment from God. I don’t know where we will go now. Life is too difficult in Turkey and I would like to find a place somewhere we could at least have some rights. Afghanistan took everything from us”.

©Alixandra Fazzina | NOOR

Istanbul, Turkey, January 2012

Under the hum of fluorescent strip lights, sixteen year Danesh stands wielding an oversized pair of sheers, snipping away a small pieces of animal fur in the freezing cold basement kargah that has been his home for the past two months. Just before midnight, the whirring motor powering the industrial sewing machines adds to the din as the group of illegal young men work on in their masks and aprons, trying to beef up their quotas of waistcoats as the week comes to an end.

From war-torn Kapisa province, the boy who’s name means knowledge, stays constantly alert absorbing everything that the others say and do, “There was war in Afghanistan so I never went to school”. With every member of his family killed, Danesh has educated himself on his travels, spending four years alone on the road west that his brought him to this far to the dirty factories of Istanbul. “My whole family is dead. I have no one. In my mind, I can remember only bits of what happened because I was small. My father and brothers and sisters died when a rocket fell upon our house and exploded; only my mother survived because she was in anther place then. After that she remarried but my stepfather was killed in the fighting. Then one day I was out with my mother on the roadside going to the bazaar and I had gone down to the river to drink some water when a lorry came from the other side. She went under the truck; the people had to collect up all of the parts of her body and there was no way to recognise her. At that moment of the accident a person closed my eyes with their hands because they wouldn’t let me see. I was less than thirteen then.

I was taken by a relative to his house and spent some time living with him as there was no one else to look after me. I was just working in the streets selling small things like sweets and socks when a stranger who had been told I had no family came up to me. I think he was a Taliban because he was a man with long hair and a turban on his head and although he looked dangerous, he treated me very kindly and told me he had all the money to give me for the rest of my life. He gave me a weapon like an AK47, grenades and a big bundle of bank notes. The first time I fired the gun I fell down from its power but the man just told me to be stronger. I was young then and didn’t really want to cooperate but there are many Taliban in Kapisa because the war still continues there and everyday the rockets are continuously fired on the villages. I had heard before about the kidnappings of children and many were even taken from around my house.  I remember my uncle once warned me that they take the organs of the children, their stomachs and their hearts while many teenagers are taken to be trained for the fight against the government. That day when I went back to the house I was really happy because I had money but my relative got angry and told me to throw away the weapons and everything. After that he forbid me from leaving the yard and so I just sat there for two months like a prisoner. During that time the war was quiet for a bit and when the attacks decreased for a few days, I was ordered to leave with a family that was headed to Iran.

One night at four a.m. a car came to the village and I was sent off with the husband, his wife and their three children. We drove to the Company terminal in Kabul and from there we took buses to Kandahar and Nimroz. All the way there were Taliban and we had to keep hiding. In Nimroz we slept at a mosafer khana where all the other people were also travelling to Iran but when I woke up at the hotel the next morning the family were gone. I stayed there for two more nights helping the owner to wash dishes but then when he demanded money, he slapped me two times and told me to go away. I was sitting crying in the street when someone asked me why I was so upset and so I told him my story. The man was called Nik Mohammad and he said that I could come to Iran with him; he said that I don’t know what will happen on the way but it will happen to us together and that’s how I came to leave Afghanistan.

We crossed the border with a large group of travellers and spent one week walking across the mountains. Sometimes villagers gave us food on the way and sometimes Nik Mohammad had to carry me because it was a really long journey. When we reached to Zaidan a kind Afghan family gave us shelter and they showed us a guide who could help us to continue our journey. Three days later we went in a car to another house two kilometres away but we were told that there were too many checkpoints on the road so we would have to walk and it was seven or eight days before we reached Bandar Abbas. The man had some friends there working in construction but I was young so I could only take a job cleaning in a kitchen. After three months Nik Mohammad suddenly told me that we would leave to Tehran but when we went to take the bus the police caught us. Luckily we had already discussed a before about a story if anything like that should happen. In the gaol we were separated and I was put in a place for under eighteens but Nik said that I was his brother and I kept saying that he was my brother so after two weeks we were released together.

At first in Tehran I couldn’t work because of my age but quickly I started helping to make brick walls on a building site. Then Nik Mohammad decided it was time for him to go back to Afghanistan and I was left alone again. I started working in a bazaar at a place that sold fruits where I earned $100 a month. I had applied for a refugee card but before I could get it I was caught once again by the police and this time when they beat me I had to go to hospital because I was badly injured. All that time during those two long years I was just growing up, watching the other Afghans come and go and earning money. I saw lots of people arriving like ants and leaving for Europe. Before I came to Iran I’d never even heard about other places or countries. Then one day in the market I met a boy called Abdul Baset and he had the plan to go to France. I trusted him and since I’d managed to collect around $700, I was convinced that we would go to Turkey together. The agents were asking for $1,100 so we agreed that someone in Tehran would keep hold of my savings and when I reached Turkey he would hand over the money and I would pay the rest as soon as I found a job. I was betrayed.

When I reached to Van the smugglers kept me locked up for ten days and told me that I had to pay all the money plus the costs of my stay with them. I was imprisoned in a basement without windows and there was no escape from there. After that they increased the pressure on me and I was put in another room underground that was really cold and wet and there they started to beat me. I was lucky because Abdul Baset managed to talk to the kidnappers and he convinced them that I am a reliable person and I would pay as soon as I started earning money. The agents took me to Ankara and put me to work for a month until I had paid them as much as I could but still I have debts to them. After they set me free I headed to Istanbul and one month ago I found a job at this kargah where I cut fur for around $200 a month”.

Danesh jokes that the scraps of animal fur he stands among each day with his sheers are used by rich people in Europe to sleep on. His new found friends at the factory shrug their shoulders and he heads up, climbing a steep flight of metal steps half eroded away from the damp wall. Like many of the young Afghans in Istanbul desperately trying to work their way west, Danesh sleeps in the clandestine space where he works, fearing to walk the streets too much due to the ever present threat of deportation. Above the sweatshop floor in a makeshift room covered in cardboard boxes and pink paper, he makes a pot of chai on a portable gas stove surrounded by old blankets and towels. Working for fifteen hours a day, the blacked-out hovel is his only sanctuary. With only a dirty toilet to bathe above, Danesh hangs an oversized overcoat above his flimsy mattress that he puts on to cover his dirty clothes for prayers. As he glances over to a Bollywood film flickering on the television, Danesh wakes up a fellow traveller slumped in the corner as he begins giggling to himself.

“The life of all Afghans is bad; we get sick if we spend too much time thinking about the tragedies. Many people are advising me now that my future will be better in Europe and so many others have gone. I’m thinking about first paying back the money I owe to the smugglers and then I will begin saving for the next stage of my journey. All my family have been killed and because of this I’ve been forced to travel and find my way. One day soon I would like to stop and have a safe and calm life without any adventures. By seventeen I’d definitely like to be growing up somewhere in Europe”.

©Alixandra Fazzina | NOOR

Istanbul, Turkey, January 2012

Still wearing his gold and silver medals, fifteen year old Mohammad Ali stands waiting at the busy Mazari Chowk as he changes buses on his way home from a karate competition. Growing up as a refugee in Hazara Town, Quetta after his family escaped Afghanistan’s civil war, Mohammad is back in Kabul for the second time in seven months after his deportation from Turkey. Determined to support his family, he does not plan to stay long, “It’s hard to be in transition and now I need to be prepared for a new life again”.

Two kilometres up the road from the chowk in the Hazara district of Dasht-e-Barchi, Mohammad and his nineteen year old sister Mina are squatting together in the basement of a hospital that is now their new home and business. “My only other brother is deaf and dumb and my father’s eyes became weak and stopped working so even though my family wanted me to study, I never really had the chance to go to school. Where we lived in Quetta it was not very developed and the people were looking down on us Afghans. My sister Mina was a karate champion in Pakistan and even though she won thirty-two international medals nobody was happy that she was doing sport. Our family decided to sent the two of us to Kabul to open a gym”. Newly arrived in Afghanistan, it is taking time for Mina’s notoriety to draw the crowds they had hoped for among the area’s youth. Sleeping behind a curtain alongside their baggage in the unheated cellar, the brother and sister open at eight o’clock each morning, spreading out the red and blue floor mats hoping that newcomers will sign up for the classes, “Now we have seventy students at the gym but even after nearly seven months it’s not enough to cover the rent”.

Out on the streets of Kabul, Mohammad is lost in his own world, staring blankly at the teenagers gathered around a milkshake stall. Compelled to support his family, he wants to move on from karate and fight for a better chance, “Two years ago I left Quetta for Iran so that I could try and reach to Sweden. I talked to some friends and asked them how I could find work so I escaped without permission to try and help my family. Five of us left as part of a big group with an agent through Taftan. The smuggler gave us fake Pakistani passports and we went to the border and waited until after dark to cross. We walked all the night but then the Iranian police began firing on us. When the shelling started a few were killed and many injured but we just managed to keep on running through the desert and eventually lay down flat on the ground and just prayed that they wouldn’t find us. In the morning, I went back to Pakistan and spent two more days at the border until I found another smuggler. I paid $1,300 and this time the man told me that I would go by another route and it would be much easier but we came under fire again because I think someone informed on us. I never expected the journey to be so dangerous.

When I reached to Isfahan I spent one month looking for work because everybody said that I was too young. Eventually I found a job as a stonecutter and was earning $6 a day, which is much better than anything in Quetta. The work was from seven in the morning until four but I preferred to do overtime because I got paid by the hour so most days I was working until midnight. I was only thirteen then and it was very exhausting for me. I think I worked harder than all the men but it was a big obligation for me to send money back to my family and all the time I was still trying to save up so that I could go to Europe. I had a very small pillow in my room and used to hide my wages in there and even though the others used to kick it around, I never let on to anyone. One day I got a call from home to say that someone was sick in my family so I sent back everything I had but it felt good that I could be responsible.

After nearly two years I had made many friends and so I started asking them how I could find an agent in Iran. I met with a smuggler and after some discussion I paid him $2,500 to take me to Turkey. It was another $1,000 to Greece but I thought that I would find some more work on the way or that my relatives might even send me the extra money. I travelled up to the mountains in Urmia together with a group of sixty people. Two Kurdish men led us and we set off at seven in the morning and walked until nine o’clock at night. The snow was up to my knees and my feet were freezing. Eventually we reached to a road in Turkey and a bus was waiting for us but then we were stopped by the police and put in gaol. In the morning they took our fingerprints and sent us back to Iran on the very same bus. In Urmia, we were caught again by the police and put in another prison for one month. The conditions were very bad but when I tried to complain I was beaten and the guards would just abuse me and call me Donkey Afghan. Eventually they took us to Tehran and painted our hands and arms red before we were sent back to the Afghan border. It wasn’t until I got back to Quetta that I found out about the story of the sick relative. My father had never told me the truth because he didn’t want to upset me but in reality one of my sisters and my grandfather had been killed by a landmine on a trip back to Afghanistan. I was so stressed; I had lost all the money and was so sad for my family.

Now I’m planning to go again. At nights I get very nervous and the gym can’t support my family. I’ve talked to Mina and told her to be ready to run the business because someday very soon I’m going. First I’ll go through Iran again but this time I’ll cross through Nimroz because even though it costs just as much as from Quetta it will be easier from Kabul. Then I just hope that God will help me and I can make it to Sweden this time. In Afghanistan it’s different; there is no one to take care of me and we don’t even have a real house. There are nine people in my family and I’m the only one who can look after them so I’ve got to find a better future and a better way. I’m fifteen now and all the things I’ve gone through are because of life’s obligations. Other boys my age don’t do the work I do but my family has so many problems. I know my father is upset because his dream was for me to study but when I get to Europe I will tell him that the reason I am doing all of this is because your eyes don’t see anymore. I have the power and I have to be a man”.

©Alixandra Fazzina | NOOR

Kabul, Afghanistan, December 2011