One Brick at a Time

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This was a beautiful house," says Khalil Rahman Nasimi, standing in the ruins that were once his home. "It was the house of a colonel"—his former rank in the Northern Alliance—"the house of an important man." Around him are mere remains: the suggestion of walls, the barest hint of an orderly life. Khoshal Khan A, a street in western Kabul, was once prestigious real estate. Now it is rubble. The street was destroyed during the Afghan civil wars that raged from 1992 to 1996. Khalil and his family fled after the first rocket hit and a succession of marauders looted everything in their home: furniture, windows, doors, roofing, wiring, tiles. "For Afghans, it is a shame to touch the cloth of another man's wife," he says. "But they even took my wife's clothing."

Khalil's family moved around Afghanistan for 10 years. He fought under Ahmed Shah Massoud against the Taliban. After they fell he came back to Kabul to join his wife and six children, and for two months they have been trying to rebuild. They sleep towards the back of the property, some in a canvas tent too hot to enter during the day, the rest under a tarp. Khalil's wife Shahnaz once worked as a teacher, but she has suffered from severe depression since her father, a civilian, was killed during the earlier Soviet war. She spends much of her time in one of Kabul's few functioning hospitals, but this morning Khalil thought he could bring her home for a visit. When she arrived, she started shouting hysterically and was taken away by neighbors.

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Khoshal Khan A is a collection of jaggedly rising fragments of dismembered homes and disrupted lives, a dusty reflection of the twisted steel remains of the World Trade Center. In response to a day of destruction, New York marshalled billions of dollars to rebuild. Kabul has been torn apart for 23 years, and no such resources are at its disposal. The nascent government is struggling to establish a sense of order. The U.N., international donors and NGOs can't cover the nation's staggering needs, and their resources have been stretched by the largest ever return of refugees—1.6 million to date, the vast majority poor Afghans who have lived in refugee camps in Pakistan and Iran for decades. (An additional 400,000 are expected by the end of the year.) Of the international aid that has come to Afghanistan, 70% to 80% has gone toward immediate humanitarian assistance—food, water, shelter—according to Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesman Omar Samad. This leaves thousands if not millions of Afghans to begin rebuilding on their own, one brick at a time.

It is happening through a combination of faith, hope and desperation. At the beginning of Khoshal Khan A, Abdil Jalil, 55, pulls water from a well, dumps it on a pile of dirt, and molds mud to make a poor man's unfired bricks. His auto repair shop was looted during the civil war and then expropriated by the Taliban. Now he's selling 1,000 bricks for less than $8, working with a team of friends—but still unable at times to meet the demand.

A few hundred meters down the rutted, dirt road is Mohammed Ibrahim, a mason, working with his brother and nephew to reconstruct a house he built himself in the 1970s. They're hurrying to complete two rooms before winter—each requires 10,000 bricks—so the 16 members of their extended family will have shelter. There is a tentative sense that peace may last, due to a curious partnership of the coalition army and the divine. "Thanks to God, we have no fear," says Obaidullah, a tailor, who is rebuilding with the help of his five brothers and their wives. But when the structures are done, the neighborhood will still have no power and no clean water. "We don't know where the assistance is going," says Khalil. "We only know that we haven't received any of it."

But Khalil is certain there will be war again. Recently, he bought himself a uniform and sewed on insignia he found at a secondhand market. He doesn't want to fight, but he is a soldier, so he has applied to the Ministry of Defense for a spot in the fledgling Afghan national army. In the meantime, Khalil can't afford the pen and notebook he promised his son for school, just as the Afghan government is unable to fulfill its promises of better days for Khoshal Khan A. But Khalil keeps building, his hopes slowly rising once again from the dust.