Mother's Day Series: The Fight for Life in a Taliban-run Maternity Hospital
Dispatches on Mothers in Crisis and Conflict
Afghanistan
On a cold morning in the dawn months after the U.S.-backed government fell to Taliban rule, I venture into the mottled, rundown walls of Kabul’s Indira Gandhi Children’s Hospital. Three male doctors with greying hair and sad eyes shuffle in and out, unable to keep up with the unbearable load.
Wrapped in thin blankets, Nafisa struggles to open her fluttering eyes. Although she is only five months old, she carries the air of an old woman—her pink skin split and stretched around her gaunt frame, deprived of the fullness that should chart every little baby’s cheeks.
A doctor named Ahmadullah examines her chart and pulls his shoulders back, putting on a brave face in a job that should be filled with light.
“Nafisa has swelling, edema, her stomach is upset, and her muscles are wasting,” he tells me sluggishly. “She is five months old, but she looks a year old. Children with malnutrition age very fast.”
A young mother, shy and almost wasted to the weight of a child herself, looks on with a kind of numb exhaustion.
“She has lost her appetite. She lacks blood,” the mother tells me flatly from beside her small cradle. “It has been six days here.”
Baby Nafisa is hardly alone in her fight for survival. Three wards of the state-run facility overflow with the desperately ill and the needy.
“There is no medicine. There is no food,” laments Dr. Ahmadullah continues. “We have 360 beds, but we have more than 500 patients daily. And if we do not have the right medicine, a child will die.”
