Volunteers helping raise city from ruin

Emma Poole
Calgary Herald
Zaranj, Afghanistan

Iranian doctor Sorya Pordile examining an Afghan women in the very limited hospital in Zaranj, S.W. Afghanistan.

Most residents of this city have absolutely no sense of the hell that unfolded in New York on Sept. 11.

They've been too busy fighting for survival in their own ground zero, the private hell in which they've been forced to live for almost three decades.

A Soviet invasion, droughts, mass poverty, the Taliban, this city of approximately 50,000 people has endured it all.

The retaliatory bombing by the United States in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center has only worsened their already desperate plight.

The city, large areas of it mere rubble, has no running water.

There are no paved roads running in or out.

Its one medical clinic only began treating female patients two months ago, after the Taliban's demise.
For the people here, the misery of living in destitution is relentless.

An Afghan girl being treated for malnutritioned sits in her bed.

Things may change slightly for the better, however. A push by the government in neighbouring Iran to rebuild the infrastructure of Zaranj and the commitment of the humanitarian aid group Samaritan's Purse may get the provincial capital on its feet.

"(The conditions) were like this when the Taliban were here. It started with the Russians, but got worse with the Taliban," said Safar Eslami, an Iranian government official based in Zahedan, about 250 kilometres away, across the Iran-Afghanistan border.

The Soviet invasion in the 1980s was followed by bitter civil war between competing Afghan ethnic and religious groups.

And as if things couldn't get any worse, the Taliban took control in 1996 and imposed a strict and puritanical interpretation of Islam on its people.

Zaranj is only seven kilometres from Iran, but until recently, it took more than an hour to get a car from the Iranian border to the city limits due to the harsh desert terrain.

A large river, the Helmand, used to flow adjacent to the city. But now dozens of abandoned fishing boats, literally left high and dry, line the one-time banks of the vanished Helmand River, a surreal sign of prosperous times snuffed out by corruption.

Years ago, drug dealers diverted the river upstream to supply irrigation to their poppy fields. As the river dried up, dealers flooded the world drug market with opium.

Afghanistan is the world's largest opium producer, providing approximately 75 per cent of the supply.

Eslami said strife-stricken Zaranj was used as a major smuggling post for locally produced opium, which was transported over the Iranian border to Europe and North America.

Afghan drug traffickers are savvy about getting the opium over the Iranian border.

They force-feed opium to camels to get them addicted and then send them across the border to Iran with a load of the drug strapped to their backs.On the other side, the drugs carried by these "ships of the desert" are unloaded and the animals, by then craving opium, are turned loose to find their way back in Zaranj.

An Afghan boy watching as doctor Abdul Aahad setting up an IV treatment.

On Wednesday, Samaritan's Purse workers met with Karim Barahoe, the governor of the Afghan province of Nimruz, to discuss their plan to help Zaranj.

"It only makes sense for us to make this town operational," said Sean Campbell, executive director of Samaritan's Purse Canada. "We've got to do something to help these people."

Campbell envisions Zaranj as a "half-way house" for Afghan refugees living in Iran or along its border.

The organization was escorted on a tour of the city by heavily armed Northern Alliance fighters who have restored some sense of democracy to the area in recent months.

Women who had been forced by the Taliban to wear full burkas are now allowed to shed the veils for the first time in more than five years.

Men, all of whom grew the strictly enforced 30-centimetre-long beard ordered by the Taliban, have recently shaved.

Campbell said the top priority is to build another hospital in the city to serve the 200,000 people in surrounding communities.

The current health facility consists of several dusty rooms with only the occasional bed. The international aid group Doctors Without Borders arrived in town last Friday.

Bara hoe assured Campbell that Samaritan's Purse staff will be safe while working in Zaranj in coming months.
A new road is expected to be completed in the next few weeks.


Herald reporter Emma Poole and Herald photographer Mikael Kjellström travelled through Afghanistan as part of a humanitarian aid project with Samaritan's Purse. They covered the distribution of 3,500 gift packages packed by Calgary kids for Afghan kids.

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