The harsh lives of Kabul's street children

Her day begins with a knock on the door. At 6am in Kabul, 10-year-old Nargis goes house to house begging for bread on the richest of streets in the Afghan capital.

The neighbourhood of Sherpur, famous for its ostentatious mansions, lies at the end of the hill where she and her family live in one room in a mud brick house. On the day I meet her, everyone who answers her knock says they have no bread to give.

"Today, a little boy has been out ahead of me. He got it all," she explains in a whisper of a voice, before returning home without anything for her family to eat.

In Afghan society sending Nargis' teenage sisters onto the streets would bring dishonour, and her younger siblings are too small. Her father cannot or will not work. He is a drug addict.

Nargis is just one of tens of thousands of street children in Kabul.
Born into a country torn by three decades of war and an economy fuelled by the opium trade, they lose their fathers to violence or vice

At the end of each day, she climbs the last hill towards her home.
A torn cloth satchel with her notebook hangs over one shoulder. A large plastic bag of useful bits of rubbish which she has scavenged from a rubbish heap is slung over the other. - Street life

The harsh lives of Kabul's street children
Street Children - Afghanistan

اجلاس صلح کابل یک بار دیگر به تاخیر افتاد
روزنامه های کابل: دوشنبه، ۳ جوزا