November 23, 2001	Friday	Ramazan 7, 1422

KABUL, Nov 22: The Taliban may have left Kabul, but the end of their hardline rule promises little immediate relief for many impoverished families eyeing the onset of winter with a sense of increasing desperation.

The six-member Faqir Zada family live, eat and sleep in a single unheated room in one of the Afghan capital’s dingiest backstreets, where daily life is as harsh and spartan as the location suggests.

There is no furniture in the room, just a small electric stove, an oil lamp and some cushions spread on the worn, fitted carpet that serves as chairs by day and beds by night.

Barefoot and bearded with a white Muslim skullcap, Nassir Ahmed, 42, sits cradling his two-year-old son Sadom in his arms.

Until very recently, Nassir, an ethnic Tajik, had been earning just 1.5 million Afghanis a month — nowhere near enough to support his family.

“Before the Taliban came, I was working in the immigration department in Kabul. But then a year later they laid me off and I had to scrape by doing casual construction work,” Nassir said.

“For the last two months, I haven’t been able to work at all.”

Nassir rents his room for 300,000 Afghanis a month from his neighbour upstairs, “a good man” who is tolerant of delays in the monthly payments.

And he has to be. The Faqir Zada family has been unable to pay any rent for seven months.

“Life has become very difficult,” Nassir said. “The worst thing is being without work, which means I can’t keep up with the costs.”

The one blessing of the current chaos is that the delivery of utility bills has been interrupted.

Electricity means Nassir is able to listen to the radio and follow the efforts to build a new broad-based government in Afghanistan on the BBC’s Afghan language service.

There is no running water at all, let alone hot water, and extra blankets are the only way of keeping out the cold at night.

The house has a well which drought has been dry for three years and Nassir’s family, like all the others in the neighbourhood, must make daily use of a hand water pump in the street.

Food rationing is equally severe.

“We buy rice and potatoes. Under the Taliban, potatoes were 10,000 Afghanis a kilo. Now they’ve come down to 6,000 Afghanis, although we had been hoping for a larger decrease than that,” Nassir said.

Meat costs around 70,000 Afghanis a kilo — a luxury that Nassir’s family can only afford three times a month at most.

“We’d also like to get some new clothes for the younger children, but they have make do with hand-me-downs from the others.”—AFP