While few Afghans have been left untouched by 23 years of war,the capital Kabul is also a city of laughter and joy. You expect the orthopaedic hospital to be an area of darkness. Instead, in the sundappled courtyard your heart lifts at the sight of Esmail,the irrepressible five-year-old who refuses to let his useless limbs get in the way of jumping around, under and over a training bar.
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While few Afghans have been left untouched by 23 years of war,the capital Kabul is also a city of laughter and joy. You expect the orthopaedic hospital to be an area of darkness. Instead, in the sundappled courtyard your heart lifts at the sight of Esmail,the irrepressible five-year-old who refuses to let his useless limbs get in the way of jumping around, under and over a training bar.
Kabul may be a city of beggers, many of them mine and bomb victims who crowd restaurants and road crossings. But three years after the Taliban, there are as many happy faces as there are of the war-weary.
The phrase grace under pressure must have been coined for the people of Afghanistan, shaking off the desperation that marked their near subsistence living, to face life head on.
Kabul's young, in particular, are the face of the future. Streaming back to school, girls still shy away from the camera, unable to shake off the instinct to take cover after years of Taliban rule which banned girls from schools and women from the workplace.
Now, girls and boys mill around school gates where hot bread is on sale. They take on small jobs like selling newspapers,tea,cigrattes, working in tiny restaurants, and deal in lucrative foreign exchange in the city streets.
In the old fashioned bakeries, they flatten raw dough on the walls of carvernous ovens. In the countryside, they harvest produce and tend the vineyards alongside farmers. And in the picturesque Panjsher valley, children splash around in the icy cold waters of the river, their load of vegetables, nuts and fruits forgotten by the river banks;for that infinitesimal moment, a return to innocence.....
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