As aid dries up, food being rationed at Kabul orphanage
KABUL: Ahmad Khalil Mayan, programme director at a large Kabul orphanage, says he is cutting back on the amount of fruit and meat he gives the children each week because the home is running out of money.
For the last two months, since the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan and millions of dollars in aid suddenly dried up, he has been desperately calling and emailing donors, both foreign and local, who supported him before.
‘‘Unfortunately, most of them have left the country — Afghan donors, foreign donors, embassies. When I call them or email them, noone is answering me,’’ Mayan told Reuters at the sprawling Shamsa Children’s Village in the north of the capital.
‘‘We are now trying to run the place with very little money and with little food,’’ he said.
There are about 130 children at the orphanage aged from 3 years upwards. It has been open for more than a decade, providing shelter for those who have lost both parents or have only one who cannot afford to keep them.
Among them is 9yearold Samira, from northeastern Badakhshan province, who has been at the orphanage for almost two years after her father died and her mother did not have the means to support her or her brothers.
In the playground outside she plays with as much intensity as she studies, grinning widely as she goes higher on the swing. Despite her young age, she is already taking extra classes and wants to be a doctor when she grows up.
‘‘I want to serve my homeland and save others from disease, and I also want other girls to study so that they become a doctor like me in the future,’’ she said.
Orphanages like this play an outsize role in Afghanistan, where tens of thousands of civilians have been killed in wars that have ravaged the country for more than 40 years.
The lack of funding, which has hit charities, nongovernmental organisations and ordinary Afghans since the hardline Islamist Taliban movement took back control of the country, is forcing Mayan into tough choices.
The orphanage tried to send a few children back to relatives, but one by one they have returned.
Mayan said staff had had to reduce food portions and limit the types of food children ate.
‘‘Before we were providing them twice a week fruit and twice a week meat, but we cut those items to just once a week or maybe not even [that much].’’
Facing an economic crisis as winter approaches, Taliban officials have urged Western governments to resume aid donations and called on the United States to lift a block on more than $US9 billion ($NZ12.75 billion) of Afghan central bank reserves held overseas.
Many countries have refused to recognise the Taliban, who until recently were a jihadist insurgency fighting foreign troops and their Afghan allies.
Some governments are demanding the group guarantees basic civil freedoms, including allowing girls to attend secondary school and women to work. The Taliban have said they are working on the issue. — Reuters