Winter is coming and Afghan refugees are scared

The slum neighbourhood of Charahi Qamber in the Afghan capital is growing, with the arrival this year of some 60 families displaced by the war. Among the 1,150 internally displaced families living in makeshift huts is that of Haji Dost Mohammad with his two wives and 18 children. In February, in the middle of a heavy snowfall, Mohammad said that he had escaped one problem only to face another.

Like most in the camp, Mohammad was displaced from the volatile southern province of Helmand some five years ago. But then his family faced cold and hunger in Kabul. He now dreads the return of the harsh Afghan winter, which started Thursday in Kabul with a light snow and rain.

“We are very worried. We don’t know what to do. I think we will definitively lose some adults and elders this year due to cold weather,” Mohammad tells dpa during a visit to the camp this week. “This winter, we are again fighting for our life.” “Every night is a nightmare for me. I am very afraid of winter,” he says, while trying to sell three boxes of pomegranates by the road for a businessman from Kandahar who pays him 150 Afghani (3 dollars) a day. Last winter, more than 30 Afghans – most of them children – froze to death, when the country witnessed one of the harshest winters in the past 15 years with record snowfall. Most of the casualties in Kabul were refugees living in makeshift camps. When the news broke about children freezing to death, aid agencies and the Afghan government scrambled to help the most vulnerable, but the emergency support was haphazard and mismanaged. This year, the humanitarian efforts are more organised, aid agencies say, despite the increase in the number of camps from 40 last year to 55 this year.

More than 5,200 families live in these settlements that now dot the capital. More than half of the 60,000 people in them are children. The United Nations Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) says more than 2 million Afghans throughout the country are at risk from extreme weather this winter. “The people in the camps are the most vulnerable. The priority needs are clothes, blankets, and shelter materials,” says Magdalena Babul, project manager at Deutsche Welthungerhilfe, one of the largest NGOs working among the internally displaced Afghans. She says the main problems facing the camps are the lack of clean drinking water, poor hygiene practices, health hazards due to the cold, malnutrition, and lack of proper shelter and sanitation. Another NGO worker says the humanitarian agencies have enough firewood and food for the camps to last only a few months. “We have food until January. And we have firewood until February. But not after that,” says Rachel Erskine with the Solidarites International.

The international appeal for more funds has fall short of its goal, says Mark Bowden, the resident humanitarian co-ordinator for the UN. “There is general donor fatigue,” he says. “And more so, there is also Afghan fatigue.” Only 48 per cent of the total 448 million dollars requested at the start of this year had been pledged by the end of November, according to OCHA. At another refugee camp in Ada Mazar, just outside Kabul city, Khan Murad, 60, lives with his wife, seven sons, and five daughters. He moved to this camp four months ago when his family was evicted from another informal settlement in Kabul city after the owners of the land started construction work. Around 92 families, mostly returning refugees from Iran or Pakistan, occupy the privately owned land in mud huts covered with plastic or tarpaulin roofs.

There is no running water in the neighbourhood and toilets are holes in the ground. “We are here only to survive this winter. After that, we have to find a new place,” his wife Khoja Gul says. “We have no money, no clothes,” Gul, 45, tells. “It’s getting very cold. We are afraid the days are going to get more difficult.” “It is so cold during the night, we can not sleep. We usually burn plastic bottles, waste bags, rubber tyres, and old shoes, in our rooms to keep ourselves and the children warm.”

Her face is blackened from the smoke. The parents send their children to the streets to wash cars and beg. “I usually go out myself and try and collect old coins just so I can buy tea and sugar,” Gul says. “All we want from the Afghan government is a place to stay. If we don’t have to worry about shelter, we can find a way to survive,” she says.