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| Haunting eyes and tattered garment tell the plight of a 12 years-old girl who fled her native Afghanistan for a refugee camp in Pakistan in 1983. Photograph by Steve Mc Curry |
| On this cold November night she is busily preparing food for the six mujahidin, Afghan freedom fighters, who have escorted me across the Pakistani border to Afghanistan’s embattled Paktia Province and into this small village in the Jaji region. But in the darkness and snows of December, sometime around the fifth anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, she will give birth to her tenth child. If the child comes in the safety of the night, it will be born here, in this earthen house warmed by an iron stove. If her baby comes in the day, she is likely to be in the damp bomb shelter hewn into the ground under the fields outside the village, her birth pangs accompanied, perhaps, by the roar of jets and bombs. She pauses to pour me a glass of steaming black tea. “When the planes come, I can’t run very fast to the bomb shelter any more,” she says. “I am too big and heavy. What can I do?” She speaks in a lilting accent, the rhythms of her native Pashtu carrying over into the Dari, or Afghan Persian, that she learned in Kabul before the war. Few families remain in this region, where frequent bombings have destroyed both villages and crops as the Russians attempt to close this important route to the interior. Most of those who remain share food and shelter with the mujahidin (“holy warriors”) who pass through, many from across the frontier in Pakistan. |