Why Toronto journalist Mellissa Fung returned to the Afghan camp where she was kidnapped
For me, Charahi Qambar has always been about the people left behind, forgotten. Every winter there would be stories about children who had frozen to death because of the cold and I would wonder whether it was a child I had met.
I remember interviewing a widow at this refugee camp on the outskirts of Kabul in 2008. She had lost her husband and several children in an airstrike and was worried about how she would feed her family, how they would stay warm through the winter. I never got to tell her story. As I left Charahi Qambar, a car pulled up and three men armed with AK-47s stabbed me, stuffed me in their car and drove me away. They would hold me hostage for the next four weeks.
I wanted to go back to the camp to see for myself, perhaps hoping conditions might have improved.
I’m not nervous; maybe just a little anxious. I had long wanted to finish the story I’d been working on when I was taken. But it is so disappointing to see that not much has changed, to realize that some families have been living here this whole time.
Rain has been falling — hard, at times — for the last two days. The dirt alleys are rivers of squalor. The brown mud holds a slippery grip on shoes, boots and the bare feet of two small children running into a hut.
Their grandmother, Bibi Awa, doesn’t seem to mind. She waves me off as I remove my shoes at the entrance to her home, as if to say, ‘Don’t worry about the mess.’
“This is how we live,” she says in Pashto.
“You see.” She gestures for me to take a seat as the two children tuck in next to her: 7-year-old Nazanin and Qudrat, 9. Their father — her son — was killed in an airstrike five years ago in their home province of Helmand.
“Our situation was very bad,” she says. “Bullets were flying at us. Those were bullets. At night we would hide this way from bombs. Entire nights would be spent moving around, hiding here and hiding there.”
After her son died, she and the rest of her children decided to leave their home and take their chances in the capital. They knew there were at least a few camps like this one where they could settle temporarily.
Bibi Awa’s story is almost exactly like the one I heard from the widow seven years ago.
It was a sunny morning in October. I had come to the Charahi Qambar refugee camp to talk to Afghans who had fled the heavy fighting in the south of the country.
I didn’t have a record of her name. My kidnappers took my tape and my notes. I just remember her face, streaked with tears, wrinkled with pain. It was weathered by hardships I could not imagine. I told myself I would try to find her again.
Before I returned, I described her as best I could to my contacts at the UNHCR who would be coming with me. They prepared me with a warning that the camp had grown.
There are now more than 7,000 people living there, up from 5,000 in 2008. Many are still arriving from the southern provinces such as Helmand, Kandahar and Uruzgan, and growing instability in Kunduz and Nangarhar have added to the numbers over the last few months.
What was supposed to be temporary has become long term. The UN estimates there are now close to a million Afghans who are internally displaced, driven out of their homes by violence. That number is 300,000 this year alone, because of the deteriorating security conditions in the provinces.
The government has been working to try to control the situation, but both it and non-governmental organizations have struggled to make progress.
Instead, all they can offer are what amounts to Band-Aids: blankets and wood in the winter — and not nearly enough, according to residents.
The road through the camp, the one my kidnappers used, no longer exists. It’s now an alley, a river of mud. There is now a makeshift mosque, and a vendor selling vegetables that look weeks beyond their best-before date.
The camp is not the place I remembered. Maybe that is a blessing.
On arrival, I asked about the widow whose name I didn’t know. I was told her story was all too common here. I was taken to Bibi Awa’s hut, where the children played outside.
But she wasn’t the woman I remembered and no one remembered me — the elders recalled a story about a western journalist being kidnapped while on assignment at the camp a few years ago, but that was just another misfortune in a place of misfortunes.
In Bibi Awa, I see the same worry, the same pain creasing her kind face, hardening her features, aging her.
“I might be 100,” she answers when I asked her age. “Maybe 70.” One of her sons, Malik Juma Khan, sits next to her. He tells me he can only dream of trying to escape, of joining the exodus of Afghans trying to reach Europe.
He can barely afford to feed his family tonight, let alone pay for a passport application. Afghanistan, he says, is no longer safe.
“May God make Daesh disappear,” he says, using a slang term for the Islamic State group, which has been challenging the Taliban for territory in Nangarhar and other provinces. “They behead children, sister! They have beheaded women! They have beheaded the elderly! Is this Islam?”
He gestures toward the children — those of his dead brother and his own, now running between this hut and his next door.
“There’s no school here,” he says, “what will become of them? We grew up illiterate and our children are growing up illiterate.”
As I get up to leave, Bibi Awa says that despite the hardships, life is better here than it was in Helmand.
“We do not hear the fighting. We might not have food to eat; we might not have water to drink. We don’t have oil to cook. We don’t have fire to keep warm. We don’t have honey, tea or coffee — but we are a little happier here.”
I look around the small room. It is decorated brightly with colourful blankets and drawings Bibi Awa brought with her from Helmand. The room is not much bigger or brighter than the hole where I’d been held captive. How could she be happier here?
“Because,” she says, “we don’t hear the sound of guns.”
She hugs me as I get up to leave. I had been glad I’d come back to this place, but as I return her hug a sense of sadness overcomes me — sadness that the story I tried to tell all those years ago did not have a better ending.