My War at Home by Masuda Sultan

Author:Masuda Sultan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2006-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Ousi suggested that I leave the room and look around the clinic. I had been nervous about causing a disruption at first, but now felt more comfortable with the patients. In the maternity room, there was a bare table, which looked like it was made of stainless steel, along with some gadgets laid out on a table on wheels, and a cabinet with a few trays of medicine. There were no doctors in the room, or in the clinic, as far as I could tell. There may have been a midwife, but there were no sheets, nor any medical equipment. If something went wrong with a birth, there would be little the clinic could do. I wondered why women would come to give birth here if they were so horribly equipped. I learned that even this was a luxury for the women that came. The privacy of a room rather than a tent, and the availability of Pakistani knockoffs of American painkillers, were good reasons to try to have a delivery at the clinic. At home the women might not even be able to cry out during childbirth, because it would be shameful for the men to hear what was happening.

I walked down the hallway to see the waiting area, near the entrance of the clinic. As I approached I heard the echoing voices of women gossiping, and children crying and playing. When I drew nearer I saw that the hallway was overflowing with women, some breast-feeding their babies. There were also women outside the clinic, waiting in the morning sun. Some were squatting, others standing, and others sitting Indian style on the bare floor.

Women had traveled for many hours over dirt roads and alongside minefields to get here. Many, I was sure, had fought bitterly with their husbands and in-laws about whether it was immoral to leave the tents without their husbands, even for the clinic. Most had no doubt lost babies in past pregnancies, or seen their sisters or mothers die in pregnancy from lack of medical attention. Some had visible growths on their skin.

Most of the women were burqa -less, wearing only the brightly colored, ornate dresses of the Kuchi nomads and adorned in silver necklaces. Although women in Afghanistan were required to wear the burqa , Kuchi women were apparently exempt, especially because they rarely lived in the cities. Most Kuchi women never wore the burqa , because the Taliban’s religious police rarely ventured out into the wild desert areas where the Kuchis lived, and because the Kuchi nomads were so rebellious and independent that even the Taliban didn’t attempt to tame them.

This was the worst hospital I had ever seen. Looking back, I don’t know why I had expected anything more, given what everything else was like in Afghanistan. In the United States, I thought hospitals were bare. I had grown up going to New York City public hospitals for care, where there were abundant medications, high-tech machinery, lasers, CAT scans, artificial organs, computers, endless files and paperwork, televisions in the rooms, clean sheets on the beds, and vending machines.

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