Imagine living with your entire family, wife, brothers, sister, children, their wives and husbands, and children, in a tent the size of a car trunk. Imagine that tent is a waist-high from made of sticks and scraps, sacks, blankets, has no floor and no sides so that the freezing wind and dust storms find it no opposition at all. Imagine no money, no food, no firewood and no water except for a black, stinking roadside ditch that bears all the plastic wrappers, oil, excrement and soap from the city and daily carries off camp neighbors who starvation and exposure do not take away. Then imagine your reaction as two well-dressed men, one a foreigner, pull up in a taxi, stride over to your hovel and start asking questions. Your name, how you came to be here, what it is like watching friends and family dies and whether, really, you have any hope at all. You'd think: "Foreigner." You'd think: "Money." You'd think: "Salvation."
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nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu)
Reporting the humanitarian crisis in Northern Afghanistan, I have been begged by fathers to take their children, angrily led by the hand by a husband to see his wife lying unconscious from malnutrition, and, again and again, asked to explain why the aid isn't coming. On Monday the mere sight of my health reduced a 75-year-old man to tears. My translator and I have found we can only stay for an hour or so in a refugee camp before the crowd becomes hysterical with need. In every visit, there comes a point when it becomes too dangerous to stay, when we have to flee the pressing mob in fear, it seems, of being eaten alive.
And what do we do to part the sea of beseeching hands? We lie. We lie our heads off. I become a mute, signing that I don't understand, as if anyone could fail to comprehend what they're asking of me. My translator makes great speeches about how we're going to see what's holding the aid up (true), how there's huge problems in its distribution (true) and how we're going to rail against the aid agencies, the Afghan authorities and the governments of the world, and, if we have to, physically force them to bring food here (absolutely false). And then we jump into our taxi and speed away, leaving a trail of screaming children in our dust.
We tell ourselves the truth must out, my translator and I. Tell the world and help should come. Stumbling over graves, interviewing the hopeless, taking pictures of the dead. That's the discipline. That's my training. There's a steely war reporters bravery to that. Strange, because it feels like perfect cowardice.
