Tamanna Taban
Life is hard for Mahrokh’s community in the remote central highlands of Afghanistan. Every winter, they risk being cut off by deep snow and unable to access the city for crucial medical services, trade and other essentials. So last year, they decided to take matters into their own hands and build a proper road.
For more than a month Mahrokh, who is 54, dug into the hillside with just a shovel and a pickaxe, working alongside the men as part of an extraordinary community roadbuilding effort.
“Right now, our route to Kabul and Bamiyan is very long and exhausting. In winter, it’s often blocked due to snowfall, and we have no way of reopening it,” she says. “Travelling to Kabul and Bamiyan in winter is a nightmare for us — at any moment there is the risk of death.”
The tough physical work left her hands callused and her clothes covered in dust. Yet Mahrokh – who we are identifying only by her first name — was not the only woman in her community who volunteered to help. Residents say that around a third of the 300 people who have worked on the project to connect the central provinces of Daikundi, Uruzgan and Ghazni to the capital, Kabul, were women.
As members of Afghanistan’s historically marginalised Hazara ethnic group, the women here are doubly discriminated against and the initiative, funded by benefactors, has won praise on Afghan social media for its egalitarian principles.
Taqi Rahimi, a 52-year-old from the small village of Chochan in Daikundi province, says women have played a more significant role than men, preparing food and tea for the workers as well as wielding shovels themselves.
Among them is Zinat (a pseudonym), 25, who says the road will cut travel time to Kabul from 24 hours to 10. “What greater blessing could there be for those of us who have endured years of isolation?” she says.
Afghanistan’s former president Ashraf Ghani described the central highlands region as a “natural prison” because of its harsh winters, poor roads and lack of facilities. In recent years, many of the construction projects – building dams, schools and even clinics – in this area have been community-led. People here cite a lack of will on the part of successive governments to develop the area and say discrimination has impacted them more than geography, leaving them economically marginalised. That’s what this project aims to change.
Mohammad Hussein Tawhidi, a local elder and one of the project’s pioneers, lives in Chochan, where he says people are more deprived than ever. Neither livestock nor crops have traditionally thrived here because of the harsh cold. People used to migrate to Pakistan and Iran for work, but that has dried up since those countries began deporting Afghans after an influx following the Taliban’s return.
“Levels of poverty and unemployment in this region are now so bad that between 80 and 90 per cent of people can’t even afford the basics of survival,” he says.
Work on the road has stopped now for the winter. Much of it has been completed, but the volunteers have done as much as they can by hand. Finishing the job will require modern machinery that the community does not have access to, according to Tawhidi.
One way or another, Mahrokh is determined that the project will be completed. “We understand that if this road is built, not only will our lives become easier, but generation after generation of our people will benefit. That in itself gives us motivation and hope,” she says.
