By: Zewa Wafai
Rita’s life has always been difficult. During her childhood, she weaved carpet at home for half of a day, and went to school for the other half. She was married off when she was a teenage girl.
But her real problems started two years after the marriage when her husband became a drug addict. She said she had to work to feed her family, and pay for the treatment of her husband to recover from addiction.
“I took her to the hospital several times, and he promised he would quit using drugs,” she said about her husband. “But he never quit. My efforts didn’t yield any result.”
She said her husband stopped working when he became an addict, then he began selling their belongings to buy drugs. He would visit the family now and then until a year ago. It has been almost one year since he has gone missing, and she has no idea what might have happened to her drug addict husband.
Rita is now working to feed her four children in northern Mazar-e-Sharif city where they live. She said she is 30-year-old but she looks like an old woman due to the hardships she has endured throughout her life.
She said she and her children don’t have enough clothes to wear, or enough food to eat, like millions of other Afghans who are going through one of the worst economic crises following the Taliban’s takeover of their country. The family is living in a house where its roof may collapse anytime due to the rainfall or an earthquake jolt. And the family doesn’t have access to electricity during Mazar-e-Sharif scorching summer to cool down their house.
Rita isn’t her real name. She requested to use a pseudonym to protect her identity.
She said she works as a cleaner and laundress in other people’s homes and her two children beg in the streets, collecting donations and charity. The family goes hungry on days she can’t find a job, she added.
“The days I work to clean people’s houses or do their laundry, I can buy some bread to save my children from dying,” she said. “But my children can’t sleep due to hunger on the nights of those days I can’t find a job.”
Rita isn’t alone. Thousands of women face the problem she has been going through. And their future is uncertain in a country ruled by the world’s most misogynistic regime which has imposed numerous restrictions on women since seizing power last August.
