View photos of Camp Shahraqi Mawjirin.
CAMP SHAHRAQI MAWJIRIN — The salt-frosted desert outside the settlement curves into the horizon, as though the refugees here needed another reminder that they live on the edge of the earth. We walk out of the camp and head northeast, toward where the world ends.
A hundred or so paces away from the last hut of crumbling mud brick, a colorful, shiny playground rises out of the barren earth, like a twisted joke played on the 145 families dumped in this forlorn wasteland.
Because who needs a playground, asks Fateh Mohammad, his mouth contorted into a warped smile, when there is no food? Who needs a playground when the houses are falling apart?
Who needs these two red and blue metal slides, four swings, two soccer goals, and a seesaw, Fateh Mohammad demands as the smile fades from this man's sun-browned face completely, when the children are dying?
The cemetery is not far from the playground; you find it easily if you follow the curve of the earth along the periphery of the camp.
There are 10 graves. They are unmarked, elongated mounds of clay. Seven belong to children. It is not difficult to tell them apart: They are half the size of the adult graves. They are decorated with rocks, cheap trinkets, rainbows of broken glass bracelets, a shard of a plastic salad bowl. The salt that cakes the desert floor percolates to the surface of the mounds above the dead children, like dry tears.
The one on the southern edge belongs to Fateh Mohammad's son, Amir. He died last winter; he was two years old. He had been sick, incessantly coughing the frightening, dark cough of poor children from the slums.
Next to his grave is the grave of Nurkhan, the grandson of Meher Ahbuddin, the village elder who wears a watch on each wrist. Nurkhan died around the same time as Amir; he was 4. Meher Ahbuddin thinks the weather killed him. It was a cold winter, so cold that the generator-operated pump froze, and the refugees had to collect ice from frozen puddles on the road and melt it in their pots for drinking.
"We had no warm clothes," Meher Ahbuddin explains. "One morning we woke up, and he did not." Ajabkhan, the grandson of Abdul Samat, a tall man with a tribal tattoo on his right wrist that looks like Tamashek writing, is buried two graves away. Ajabkhan was a year and a half when he died, of some disease no one can explain to me.
The cemetery is marked by a tall, uneven wooden pole flying a green flag, planted there by the refugees. The playground is marked by a large billboard, planted there by government contractors.
"Title of Project: Creating Livelihood Opportunities for Refugees in North Afghanistan. Project Code: 02 AFR. Component: Play Ground and safe Play area," the billboard proclaims in blue letters. "Donor: Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration (United States of America)."
What the billboard really says is that the international aid that is supposed to help rebuild Afghanistan is tragically failing.
I came here from Mazar-e-Sharif, about 15 miles to the south. Like Afghanistan's capital, Kabul, Mazar-e-Sharif has blossomed in the eight years since my first visit: Internet cafés jostle for space with fancy pizza parlors, old turbaned men sell cell phone scratch cards on street corners, scarlet and pink roses bloom in the medians, and there is electricity most of the time. Today, many Afghan cities are like this.
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