Children in Prison

I took this photo in Pul-e Charkhi prison outside Kabul while reporting a story about children who live behind bars with their convicted mothers. The little one was born in Pul-e Charkhi, as are many children of women jailed for moral crimes; often they have married the man they wanted instead of the man chosen by their family. The boy holding the baby has been in prison since he was a year old. The mother of the boy on the right had divorced her first husband and remarried; her first husband then accused her of cheating on him and committing adultery.

I lent him my pen.

In the absence of playpens, unruly children were tied to bed posts to keep them out of trouble.



These girls lived with their mothers in a prison in the western Afghan city of Nangarhar, where I went to meet Rukhma, a woman I wrote a story about who was kidnapped and raped, and whose son was beaten to death before her eyes. The perpetrator was jailed for murder, and she was jailed for running away and adultery.

The girls left the women's prison at the same time that I did. They were delivering packages from their mothers to their fathers, who are in the men's lockup next door. The girl in the red has on her head her father's freshly-cleaned clothes: It appears that the traditional role of the wife washing the husband's laundry adheres even when they are incarcerated.

Band-e Amir

We took a side trip to Band-e Amir, five bright blue lakes hidden in the mountains northwest of Bamiyan. It's another bumpy ride along slivering unpaved roads in the desert. This was our first glimpse of the lakes.

The lakes are large tiered pools that spill one into the other, as can be seen in these small rivulets from the light green lake that pour into the larger bright blue one. These are the actual colors of the waters, which seem too saturated to be real.

We hiked from one side of the lakes across to the other, stopping for a brief dip in one of the shallower pools, which were extremely chilly.

One of the larger falls between two of the lakes.

Where the Buddhas once stood

Two days before leaving Afghanistan, we took a very bumpy eight hour trip north of Kabul to Bamiyan, once home to enormous 1,400 year old Buddha statues that were blown up by the Taliban in 2001. The Taliban claimed the Buddhas were idols and forbidden under Islam. On the roads leading to Bamiyan are several ruins of towers and castles.

Barely visible here are more ruins, set atop a mountain in the center of this photo but in the shadow of other mountains in this photo.

A glimpse of the village of Bamiyan, its farmland and the niches where the Buddhas once stood. There is an eery feel about the place, all at once peaceful, yet overwhelmingly sad because of the Taliban destruction of the statues and murder of ethnic Hazara villagers in the region.

The bazaar on a street in front of the Buddha niches were destroyed when the Taliban raided the area.

A guide took us on a tour of the cave complexes around the Buddha statues. This is one passage way that leads into the rooms that once contained frescoes and statues.

The site has also been raided by looters involved in the illegal trafficking of Afghan artifacts, but there are still remnants of paint on the wall, giving a glimpse of how colorful and ornate the ceilings and walls once were.

Part of our walking tour takes us on a narrow path that would once have looked out over the Buddha's head.

After the dawn calls to prayer

Landry woke up and went out with his cameras in the pre-dawn darkness. As he left home, I could just hear the calls to prayer begin, first the trickling sounds from the mosques far away, then closer and closer, until the muezzin across the street from our house roused our neighbors for their wake-up splash of ablutions.


After the morning prayers, the sky started to brighten at 3:50 a.m., twilit by the sun as it climbed toward the mountain peaks that ring Kabul. At 4 a.m., the nearly full moon set behind him, and at 5:05 a.m., dawn peeked her rosy fingers over the mountain ridges.

This is a digital collage of five images Landry took the same morning.

The sweet here and now

Basmina, an adorable little street urchin who begs in front of my office, has been a little brightness that greets me each day at work. I've seen her perched up in a tree as she plays with her brother. I've given her leftovers to quench her hunger. I even go outside and pretend to be a grumpy old lady now and then when the kids are shouting loudly on the street. "Yar! Yar! Yar!" I mimic their voices. "Why are you making so much noise?" Basmina laughs at me.

This morning when I arrived at work, Basmina and her younger brother ran up to say hello. I pat her head, noting that she cut her brown bobbed hair and now looks like a "bacha" -- a boy. She flashed her toothy smile, her brown freckles dotting her cheeks. Clutched in her left hand was a mini-bouquet of various weeds and grasses: She and her little brother were walking down the street picking the weeds because there are no flowers. I breathed in her warm smile again before heading in to work.

About a minute later, as I was settling into my desk, I heard her screaming. I headed outside to play the curmudgeonly old lady again, prepared to pretend to yell at the kids, but Basmina wasn't there. Her little brother was standing there looking rather forlorn, surrounded by several adults, as an SUV sped away. "What happened?" Basmina had been hit by the SUV while picking her weeds. The vehicle was taking her to the hospital. I looked at the spot where I had left her on the sidewalk next to my office, and her bouquet of weeds was lying there where she had dropped them.

I went to visit her in the hospital. She had a splint from her foot up to her waist. Her femur was broken. She screamed in pain and cried aloud, but spilled no tears. She begged me again and again for water. The doctors said no water, perhaps a rupture in the abdomen. I told her the IV saline was special water. She pleaded with me to go home. I told her she needed to stay in the hospital. She speaks decent English, enough to beg from foreigners on the street, and in her wounded, confused daze, she turned to me -- wanting water, wanting to go home -- and accidentally blurted out instead, "One dollar!" Even with her broken femur and the bleeding pain in her abdomen, we had a brief giggle. I leaned close to her, touching my cheek to hers, so that she could hear my breath as I tried to fill her with a slow calm.

She was a good girl today. I had her small hand grab my thumb and told her to look me in the eyes as doctors inserted the IV. Despite the pain she was in, I managed to get her to smile at me more than once. I went back to work, then returned at 5 p.m., about eight hours after the accident, and she had just been wheeled in for surgery. I worry that she lost too much blood. I worry that in a country like Afghanistan, the operation will go awry. I worry that she will not heal well in this war-torn, impoverished country and will be handicapped forever.

I only knew Basmina from our brief encounters, but today I felt so intricately linked to her. In the longed-for before, I saw a bright and happy young girl with the possibility, no matter how dim, of a decent future. Later, as I tried to keep up her spirits in the hospital, her tiny little frame on the hospital gurney, I grieved deeply. Basmina was the drop that made me overflow.

As these events tossed about my head all day, I learned that Basmina means "fragrance." I don't have any pictures of her. I took for granted that her freckles and smile would be there to greet me tomorrow.

When life becomes unbearable

This Thai woman was imprisoned for 7 years in an Afghan prison for drug trafficking. She could get out if she paid a $6,000 fine, which she can't afford. She cries every time I meet her. She doesn't speak much English, but she has learned Dari, the Afghan dialect of Farsi, during her time in prison. She has pleaded with me to ask Thai authorities to transfer her to finish her sentence in a Thai prison.

She is miserable and has started to hurt herself. Last week, she cut deep gashes into her hand and foot. She says she also tried to overdose on painkillers. When I first met her this winter, she was suffering from the bitter cold. The second time, she had shaved her head because she caught lice. This time, the cuts.

To pass time, she strings tiny colored beads, transforming them into decorative covers for pens, cigarette boxes and lighters, as seen in this photo. She tries to maintain her sanity with the beading projects, but her mental will is failing her.

Punishing the victim

My latest story tells of women who dare to flee and complain about rape or domestic abuse, and are then jailed themselves, accused of adultery. Most Afghans believe that a woman who has run away has inevitably committed adultery because they assume she has fled to be with a man. Therefore, the Afghan justice system often charges women runaways as adulterers.

This article caused much heated debate as I reported it. Several Afghan men I spoke with (including an Afghan guy who is a human rights lawyer) insisted vehemently that it is illegal for a woman to leave home without permission from her husband, even though several other lawyers and legal experts said it was not illegal. The government has even printed a pamphlet that details women's and girls' rights, including snippets like "It is wrong to sell your daughter to settle a murder dispute," and "Running away is not illegal." Hundreds of these pamphlets were printed, but they have not been distributed because some government officials believe that the "running away" bit will encourage girls to run away.

Many Afghan men I spoke with, including lawyers, believe that more Afghan women are running away and seeking divorces because of women's rights that are being peddled by the pesky international community.

Read the story here.

What kids play with when there's no electricity

The cemetery and grounds around the Sakhi shrine in Kabul are a popular picnicking area on Fridays. There are a few ferris wheels, this one run by the guy in the red vest. Electricity is scarce in Afghanistan, so this ferris wheel is actually powered by him. He spins it by turning the turquoise wheel, similar to how a wheelchair works.


In the Asheqan wa Arefan neighborhood, we ran into this guy with the white scarf on his head, who carts around his portable merry-go-round! The kids climb into the seats and grab onto the black steering wheel in the center to turn themselves round. Another self-powered ride.


Poles are another useful form of electricity-free entertainment...


as are paper airplanes.

We asked this girl what her doll's name was, and she said it was "doll." When I suggested Najiba or Massouda or Shafiqa, she nodded her head yes to each one. She then settled on Najiba. We met the little bunnies on our way up to the Kabul wall.

They are just about 100 meters away from their house, which overlooks the city.

Around the City

Darulaman Palace, built by Afghanistan's King Amanullah in the early 20th century, sits on the edge of western Kabul.

A small structure we stumbled upon while hiking down from the Kabul Wall into the old city neighborhood of Asheqan wa Arefan.

The beautiful carved wooden windows are part of the renovation in Asheqan wa Arefan completed by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture. They have repaired at least 11 homes in the area, plus a shrine, mosque, bathhouse and several little allies, like this one below.

Paintings by Afghan Women

There is an exhibit this week in Kabul of paintings by young women, many of them students in the arts faculty of Kabul University. The show is really remarkable because until the fall of the Taliban in 2001, figurative art was forbidden, and women were not allowed to work or venture outside their homes alone without a male relative. It's not clear to me if women were even allowed to paint under the Taliban.




Afghanistan has been locked in civil war and strife for the past 30 years, and the society remains very conservative, placing many restrictions on women. Although these painters were allowed to create what they pleased, much of the imagery related to war and weaponry...

confinement or entrapment, as with this fetus locked up behind barbed wire...

and suicide or hopelessness.

Many of the painters depicted women in burqa -- the all-encompassing cloak many women are forced to wear before stepping outside their homes. Many men will say that women want to wear the burqa, but women complain it is uncomfortable and makes every day a bad hair day.


Men want their wives, sisters and daughters to wear the burqa so that other men cannot see them, otherwise those men might want to marry the women or rape them. One reason women wear the burqa is to avoid being harassed by men, but why can't the men just behave and not make cat calls?

This painting evokes entrapment and hope.

This painter describes her work: It shows how a person can have two sides -- appear perfectly normal when veiled, but maybe absolutely mad underneath.


The young women shown here spent two weeks weaving out this piece, showing the order of the world outside Afghan borders; when that foreign order enters Afghanistan, it stirs the country into total chaos, as seen in the messy ball of strings the colors of the Afghan flag.


This piece reminded me of the Taliban campaign to destroy figurative work, slashing and tearing countless paintings, many of which are still on display in a cabinet of artwork ruined by the Taliban.

This was my favorite work of all, only because of the story behind it:

The painter pulled aside my Afghan male colleague and asked him what he thought the image depicted. He said it shows the respect that men give women by letting them ride on donkeys on a long and arduous trip.

She responded, "Not quite."

She said the work shows how women are not allowed to choose their own paths, placed on donkeys that are guided by men. If the donkeys (or the women) go out of line, the men have sticks to beat them back into their place.

This anecdote perfectly depicts the divide between the Afghan sexes: Afghan men will often tell me that women are afforded a special pedestal in society and are greatly respected. The women, on the other hand, will tell me countless tales of being physically and psychologically oppressed.