Dear David:
Ten years ago, Begum [a pseudonym], lived with her youngest son in a remote village in Afghanistan’s Bamiyan Valley. She was 40 and her husband had gone to Iran for work. Her two older sons were in Kabul to get an education. Begum stayed behind on the family farm, working long hours housekeeping, tending cows and sheep, and growing crops.
Herding animals is an arduous task, especially running after the sheep in the hills. Cultivating crops is even more difficult, requiring strength and endurance. Begum had been ploughing farmland using a shovel and pickaxe for many years to provide enough food for her family and the livestock.
Village people both envied and pitied her because she worked like a man.
Begum was married at the age of 13 to a husband twelve years her senior who beat her and tortured her because she did not know how to do domestic work like cooking and growing crops. She gave birth to nine children, but many died early in life.
Poverty and a lack of opportunity compel women like Begum to bear such adversities all over Afghanistan, where about seventy percent of Afghans live in villages. Still, she once had aspirations. Her goal was that her three sons would be educated so that they wouldn't have a life as difficult as hers. She hoped they would work for the government and not have to go illegally abroad to find work like many men, such as her husband.
In her dream for the future, the government wages her sons would earn could also mean that she would eventually be able to stop working and be comfortable during her sunset years. But for her, life didn’t turn out that way.
Three years ago, Begum's husband returned after ten years in Iran. Her older son graduated, and found a job, but not with the government, and not enough salary to change anything for Begum, because the money was needed to pay for his little brother’s education.
Now at the age of fifty, Begum is bent and pains in her knee, foot and waist. She drags her body out to care for the sheep in the hills. Her dreams perished with the Taliban's takeover.
She now believes that education will not bring welfare to the family because Afghanistan is not safe any longer, and there is no capital, nor jobs. Just as she feared, her sons will have to go abroad illegally, placing their destiny in the hands of smugglers.
Her worst nightmares are already coming true. Three years ago, she dispatched her second son, 15 years of age, to Iran. He traveled by foot for a week in the mountains, where he was arrested by the Iranian police, badly beaten and deported back to Afghanistan. He was ill for about a month.
Nevertheless, she sees no option now but for all three of her sons to try again to escape to Iran, despite the danger they will not survive.
Begum has never seen the spring of her life, and now winter is coming.
Begum is my mother.
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