Afghanistan, Where God Only Comes To Weep

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1990s: The struggle of day to day life in Kabul

ISBN: 978-0712623391
Genre: Non-Fiction

What you need to know before your trail

Shirin-Gol was just a young girl when her village was levelled by the Russians’ bombs in 1979. After the men in her family joined the resistance, she fled with the women and children to the capital, Kabul, and so began a life of day-to-day struggle in her war-torn country. A life that includes a period living in the harsh conditions of a Pakistani refugee camp, being forced into a marriage to pay off her brother’s gambling debts, selling her body and begging for the money to feed her growing family, an attempted suicide, and an unsuccessful endeavour to leave Afghanistan for Iran after the Taliban seized control of her country.

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Travel Guide

Kabul

Told truthfully and with unflinching detail to writer and documentary-maker Siba Shakib, and incorporating some of the shocking experiences of Shirin-Gol’s friends and family members, this is the story of the fate of many of the women in Afghanistan. But it is also a story of great courage, the moving story of a proud woman, a woman who did not want to be banished to a life behind the walls of her house, or told how to dress, who wanted an education for her children so that they could have a chance of a future, to live their lives without fear and poverty.

Life and children in Kabul

He made her first child a son, so that her husband could feel like a real man, and wouldn’t have go knock her teeth out or divorce her, or take her back to her father’s house.

Then God though about Shirin- Gol’s Mother and gave her three daughters in a row. That meant she finally had some help with al l the work she had to do for her husband and her three sons, tiling the field, baking bread, sewing clothes, tending the sheep…

Kabul of the past

In the Kabul of those days, when the Russians had not yet invaded Afghanistan, when the rich were rich and the poor were poor, the powerful had power and the weak obeyed

When the fountains in the squares and at the crossing of the city had water that danced in the air. When colourful lights decorated the shops and the stalls.

Where there was still not a hunt of war, no one was afraid they might at any moment stand on a mine, non one was afraid they might at any moment transgress arbitrary laws and be arrested. Back when God still held his protecting handover Afghanistan a and the people still had all their price and all their dignity. Back then.