Bitter Roots, Tender Shoots by Sally Armstrong

Author:Sally Armstrong
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PENGUIN GROUP (CANADA)

LIMA’S IS ANOTHER UNFINISHED STORY. I met her by chance in the fall of 2002 when Robin Benger, Alister Bell, and I decided drive through the Shomali Plains looking for people who would help us to tell the story of the daughters of Afghanistan. The Shomali Plains, an area roughly thirty kilometres wide and eighty kilometres long, once were known as Kabul’s Garden, or the Breadbasket of Afghanistan. But by 2002, the area was more like a desert, ravaged by a five-year drought and thirty years of constant fighting. It was also, according to the U.N. Mine Action Center for Afghanistan, the most contaminated land-mine area in the world. On our drive north from Kabul, we can see that the tides of war have swamped the plains from all sides. The bones of Russian, British, and Taliban warriors lie here, together with the remains of their decaying bombs and tanks.

From the roadside to the horizon, the landscape is a surreal maze of crumbling village walls. Red flags signal the presence of land mines, and millions of sturdy pink dwarf tulips cover the bloodied earth. A huge tank with its gun pointing at the road, and its Northern Alliance soldiers standing guard, suggests we pull over. Commander Yassin, who like many Afghans has only one name, tells us they are guarding their village, Mavi Khatu, one of the few villages not abandoned during the many years of war. He agrees to take us to the hamlet to meet his family. The potholed dirt road with its hairpin turns, and steep hillocks on which are scattered chunks of the crumbling mud-brick walls, is a challenge for the van we are driving in. But, at last, we arrive in the village and realize that it is definitely not on the radar of the international community. Nothing has improved here. Although we are only about two hours away from the brand-new Ministry of Women’s Affairs, it is as though we have stepped into another century. Yassin’s two wives complain that there are no schools, no health clinics, and certainly no rights for women. Although we had been warned that the Shomali Plains were no place to go searching for signs of the emancipation of women, and that land-mine clearance was about the most the international community could take on, it is still disheartening.

Then a young girl attracts our attention. She is crouched over the riverbank filling a pail with water, a pail so big I wonder how she can manage to haul it, full of water, up the hill to her mud-brick house. Her name is Lima. While filming her repeated trek to the water’s edge, we try to converse with her, but she is painfully shy and frightened perhaps to engage in conversation with strangers. However, there is something about her—the girl child performing her tasks like the cog in the village wheel, the apparent piece of the rural puzzle we were after—that makes us keep the camera on her and seek out her story.

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