AN STYLE="font-size: 75%; color:#990000; font-weight:bold">Friday, January 11, 2002 Abdul Majid sits on his wooden shoeshine box on a winter's afternoon in Kabul, shivering in his shawl as he scans the passersby for business. His eyes miss nothing -- he cannot afford to. At 12 years old, Majid is the principal wage earner for a family of seven. On a good day, Majid's cheerful smile can bring in $1.50, enough for bread and potatoes for all. On a bad day, they eat only bread.
Majid is one of some six million Afghans who have lost their homes in the long years of war -- nearly one quarter of the country's population. About four million live in refugee camps outside the country; another two million internally displaced people eke out an existence on the streets of Kabul and other towns. The war against the Taliban may be nearing an end, but the battle against poverty in Afghanistan is only beginning. According to United Nations figures, annual per capita income is $178, malnourishment afflicts 70% of the population, and life expectancy for men is 43. Currently U.N. food aid is reaching only half of the six million people who need it. "There is now a huge crisis in Afghanistan," says Mercedes Tatay, emergency crisis coordinator for the French charity Medecins sans Frontieres. "But it is not new, it has been happening for years."
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Majid's family was forced to leave their house on the Shomali Plain north of Kabul five years ago because of fighting between the Taliban and the opposition Northern Alliance. Now the seven of them live in one room in the poor neighborhood of Qala Musa. His father has gone blind, his mother is deaf, and only one of his other siblings works -- Abdul Matin, 15, who earns 50 cents a day weaving carpets.
So every day for the past two years Majid has walked the streets of Kabul's upscale Wazir Akhbar Khan district, his shoeshine box hanging from his shoulder on a loop of rubber fan belt. "When I started I was too shy to ask people to do their shoes, but I am older now, and I know the people around here, so I feel safer," he says. Like Rudyard Kipling's boy-hero Kim, Majid is street smart beyond his years, brought up in poverty, learning about life in the bazaars, fighting off the other boys who try to steal his money. With his light brown eyes, long lashes and bashful smile, Majid can soften the hearts of the most war-weary citizens of Kabul. Even the policeman at the main intersection in Wazir Akhbar Khan pays him five cents to do his shoes, and the food-stall owner on 15th Street lends him money for food when he cannot find any shoes to shine.
Majid is, in Kipling's words, a "Little Friend of all the World", and people on the streets fondly call out his name as he passes. But despite his boyish charm, Majid is always one step from destitution. He is undersize for his age, his hands are dried and cracked, and he has a hacking cough that has been with him since last winter. A few more years cleaning shoes will suck the life energy right out of him.
His prospects, like those of Afghanistan as a whole, depend on international aid. Before Sept. 11 he had been going to a school run by the HOPE foundation, an Australian aid agency, to learn English and math a few hours every morning. His English is already quite good, but his school, like most foreign aid projects, has been closed for the last three months. Majid hopes they will reopen soon -- ultimately he says he wants to learn to be an engineer. "I want to build up my country again." Most Afghans hope that with the Taliban effectively vanquished and a new interim government agreed upon, security will return to their country, and with it economic development.
Majid doesn't understand much about politics, but he does know the difference on the ground. As he walks the streets he points out the houses of the Arabs, Pakistanis and the others that lived here during the Taliban era. "They didn't have their shoes polished, and some would shout at me to go away," he says. He is glad they are gone. Now some Westerners are moving in -- journalists and a few aid workers -- so business is improving, and Majid gets to practice his English more. But whether he becomes an engineer, or stays shining shoes, depends on how quickly Afghanistan, with international help, can rebuild itself. For the "Little Friend of all the World", everything is now in the balance.
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