By: Somaya Mandgar
A cold spring wind is blowing on a cloudy day in Dar-e-Ali (Ali Valley) in Bamyan’s Yakawlang district. It is the potato planting season and many men in the village are working in the fields.
Among them is a woman and her teenage daughter, sweating despite the cold. Gulandam * is a 40 year-old native of the area but doesn’t own her own land. She and her 17 year-old daughter work as farm labourers for the village landowners.
Gulandam has worked so hard that, according to one of her neighbors, it has made her old before her time.
Just five years ago, the world turned its back on Gulandam. Her husband died of cancer because they were too poor to get him treatment. And life was never the same again.
Poverty is widespread in Dar-e-Ali. In fact, most residents of this remote region are poor. But Gulandam bears the pain of poverty and back-breaking work at the same time.
In an interview with Rukhshana Media, she says she’s had to work non-stop since her husband’s death to save her five children’s lives.
For the past three years, Gulandam has been working as a farmer, doing strenuous work like digging irrigation channels with a shovel. It’s normally seen as men’s work. But Gulandam and her 17-year-old daughter must work as hard as any man. “Many times, we do things that are really beyond our capacity,” she says. “For example, I prepare the fields for crops of wheat by myself.”
Her other four children are too small to help. Her youngest daughter is just six years old.
Sometimes, if Gulandam and her oldest daughter are physically unable to do something, such as ploughing, she asks for help from the men of the village. But she has to return the favour by working twice as long for them. No matter how much Gulandam does, they still regard her as a woman who could only do half the work of men.
“For example, if we ask four men to come and shovel with us one day to cultivate our potatoes, we have to work for eight days to compensate for four men’s work for one day,” she says. “We must cultivate potatoes or work with them in weed removal season. In short, we have to compensate them twice for their loan work.
Gulandam says that if her husband was alive, she would never have had to endure such hardships and problems. “It was because of our ignorance that we did not seek treatment. Many fell sick but recovered when they were taken to Pakistan or India,” she says. “Some said it was cancer. But maybe it wasn’t cancer, even his illness was not diagnosed correctly.”
About 80% of the people of Bamyan are engaged in agriculture and their main product is potatoes. But agriculture could never save them from poverty. Now their living conditions have worsened under the rule of the Taliban.
The United Nations reported in April that since the fall of the republic the number of citizens living below the poverty line had risen to 34 million.
People in Bamyan, especially women, are at the forefront of this poverty.
Beyond masculinity
As hard as life has been since her husband’s death, Gulandam has thought about more than providing her children’s basic needs. Not only has she saved them from starving, but she’s also determined that they’ll be educated.
“I bear the pain for the future of my children,” she says. “I don’t want them to remain uneducated.”
During the wheat harvest season, Gulandam and her eldest daughter collect the wheat by hand, transfer it to the threshing machine and separate the grain. “When harvesting wheat, my daughter and I have to carry the bundles of wheat from the ground to the threshing place above our heads, and this sometimes goes on for several days,” she says. “When harvesting straw, we often fill the straw in a bigger bucket and then carry it to the haymaker on our heads.”
According to local people, Gulandam does more work than the men. She must be both a mother and a father to her children.
Ali Mohammad, 25, who lives in Gulandam’s neighborhood, told Rukhshana Media: “She has had no one after her husband died. She’s had to work hard to raise and provide for her children. She’s dedicated her whole life to her children.”
When he first heard that Gulandam had taken up the work of a farmer, he thought that she would never be able to do it.
“Not everyone can do the work of a farmer,” Ali Mohammad says. “But Gulandam has done it for three years with a lot of work and effort.”
Gulandam hopes her children will not remain victims of poverty like her. She dreams of the pride she will feel when her hard work pays off and they can lead better lives.
“Then if I was alive, I would breathe a sigh of relief that my children would be comfortable,” she says. “If I was dead, I would be comfortable in the grave.”
*Note: Names of some interviewees have been changed upon their request.
