My journey through Afghanistan - Day 1

Oxfam’s Zahra Akkerhuys spent a week in rural Afghanistan visiting Oxfam’s team fighting in the frontline – in the battle against poverty.

Monday

It’s hard to get a handle on Afghanistan. After a few days in Kabul, where security restrictions limit movement and ex-pats are forced to spend most of their time in gated compounds, it’s so refreshing to get out of the city and into the provinces where ordinary people live.

Badakhshan, in the far north-east, is picture postcard pretty. To get there, we cross the majestic Hindu Kosh mountain range on a UN plane, landing in Faizabad, the capital of Badakhshan, where the river Kokcha runs like a necklace through the town. Badakhshan is well-known for being the one province that resisted Taliban rule and is generally accepted as being the safest province in the country. During the winter months some parts of the province are completely cut off from the rest of the world with deep snow making many roads impassable. But it’s now the summer-time and every patch of cultivated land is being farmed – wheat, barley and vegetables grow in patchwork quilt formation - but Badakhshan does not produce enough food to feed its people and the province relies heavily on food aid and imports.
 
It’s easy to idealise life in this beautiful province if you’re a visitor but I must not fall into that trap. The pace of life may be slower here away from the hustle and bustle of Kabul, but this is no rural idyll – a grim reality underpins life in Badakhshan where more mothers die in childbirth than in any other part of the world.

Today I arrived in Faizabad – a sprawling town of around 40,000 people, from where Oxfam’s Badakhshan work is co-ordinated.

Tomorrow I will visit the village of Argo, where Oxfam’s water and sanitation programme, funded by Khalifa, will give me my first taste of life in an Afghan village. The roads are notoriously bad here – and in some places you have to give up entirely on the four-wheel drive and finish your journey on horseback.

Inconvenient at worst if you’re a visitor like me, but imagine if you’re a sick or a heavily-pregnant mother on your way to hospital to give birth. It may be pretty here, but life is not easy.

Read more

Oxfam's work in Afghanistan

 The Cost of War: Afghan Experiences, in pictures

Join the petition: Afghanistan – People First