Where Go the Outcasts? (Afghan Conversation 49)

 This is the latest in a series of conversations I have been having with an Afghan friend about conditions in his country since the Taliban took power in August 2021.

Dear David:
I have been living with my relatives in Helmand for four years now. But it is very difficult and uncomfortable to live in somebody else’s house, so I decided to look for a place of my own. I called a friend who has an empty house but he said he cannot rent it to someone who is single and lives alone. 

Next I asked a man at one of the local markets who has a house available. He said that he has, but “sorry, our houses are only for families." I visited several other places in recent days, but always faced the same answer – no houses for a single person.

These days, Afghanistan is a bad place for anyone who is different from the perceived norm, especially anyone who is from a religious or gender minority. I, of course, am Hazara, a minority despised by the Taliban. It is almost impossible for people like me to settle here unless they choose the religion and lifestyle of the local people. For example, according to the old men, in the past more than a thousand Sikh families lived in Helmand province alone, and they had many shops in Lashkargah city. 

But now not one Sikh family is found in the whole city of Lashkargah, because they got tired of the oppression they faced. They left Helmand one by one. Gurban, who is now 60 years old, says that during the first rule of the Taliban in 1996, the Sikh people were persecuted mercilessly. The Talibs believe that Sikhs are dirty, and some people did not eat food with them, and when people passed by the Sikhs, they would spit on them. 

The same problem plagues people with alternative gender identities. One day, I was walking in one of the busy streets of Kabul. In front of me, a group of eight or nine teenagers were walking behind a handsome young boy and laughing at him. It seemed that they were teasing the boy. The boy was wearing stylish men's clothes, but his behavior and movements suggested he was LGBT. After that incident, wherever I saw that boy, I greeted him in a friendly way, but people's sharp looks and nasty laughs were always surrounding him. 

In the Taliban’s Afghanistan, the bullies are in control. The rest of us are at their mercy.

LINKS:

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• Rising sea levels could swamp the US coastline by 2050, NASA predicts (Space.com)

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• DoorDash, the food delivery service, and Kraken, a cryptocurrency exchange, which both have headquarters in San Francisco, announced that they would each lay off over 1,000 employees. (SFC)

• Teen brains aged faster than normal from pandemic stress, study says (WP)

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• Herschel Walker Quietly Asking Around For D.C. Abortion Clinic Recommendations (Onion)