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It was late May 2002, and my job as a Christian photojournalist had landed me on an assignment to Afghanistan, where I was to report on the work of the Central Asia Development Agency (CADA), a branch of a larger Christian relief organization called Operation Mercy. With me were two veteran cada workers and a Japanese midwife named Tomoko* who was exploring the possibility of joining the ministry full time.

The five-hour trip over the mountains from Tajikistan's capital city of Dushanbe gave us spectacular glimpses of wildflower-sprinkled hillsides and snow-covered peaks. As our 4x4 vehicle approached the Tajikistan border, the paved road changed to dirt. The landscape changed, too, turning treeless and bleak. After choking on the dust of a truck ahead of us, our driver decided to pass. But just as we drew alongside, the truck swerved in our direction. Glass flew as the vehicle struck our front window and forced us precariously onto the steep verge. Fortunately, no one was injured and the damage was minor.

At the checkpoint, Tajik guards examined our papers and allowed us entry into a Russian-patrolled strip of "no man's land." Finally, we came to the fast-rushing River Amu that forms the natural border of northern Afghanistan. Since there is no bridge, we were obliged to climb on a barge to get to the other side. Aid trucks were often held up for days by breakdowns. Thankfully, our wait was a short one.

I had already been coached about Afghan-friendly clothes and reluctantly put on a long-sleeve shirt and pulled slacks on under my long skirt. A chador—a rectangle of material about the size and weight of a tablecloth—was draped around my head and shoulders. I didn't know how I would survive the heat as it was. Most Afghan women also wear a head-to-toe burqa over the whole ensemble, particularly in the towns. They hover around the villages like dark phantoms, peering at the world through a small mesh screen.

Mercifully, we made it across the river without incident. The aid workers grinned as we stepped on shore. "Welcome to Afghanistan! You are now entering a different world." No kidding.

After the bombs
I stared at the road twisting over the mountains in front of us. It was little more than a dirt track. Donkeys appeared to be the only means of transport, and the isolated houses were all made of sun-hardened mud. It was if we had traveled back 2,000 years to a land in the Bible.

The countryside was a patchwork of bare brown hills next to fields of green, sometimes brightened by poppies. The rains had finally come after three long years of drought. Here and there Afghans gathered the harvest with inadequate hand tools; there was no modern farm equipment here.

A few stretches of road had been improved through a "Food for Work" program offered by cada and other relief groups. I did not sufficiently appreciate these until we hit the deep ruts that followed. Occasionally the road disappeared and our vehicle plunged into a dried-up riverbed, bumping relentlessly over boulders and rocks of every size. I hung on for dear life. The aid workers said they had once lost a jeep in a riverbed when it got caught in a flash flood.

We passed no other vehicles in the few hours it took to travel over former Taliban-held territory in the mountains. The CADA/Operation Mercy base in ChaAb was located inside a typical mud-walled compound. My companion and I were introduced to Eva and Maryann from Sweden and South Africa, volunteers teaching basic hygiene in the Afghan villages. Living arrangements were basic: rooms lined with floor cushions for sleeping, a primitive kitchen area, and a bathhouse with a wood stove for heating water. An outhouse with a hole cut into the floor served as the toilet. Electricity was available from a generator, but much of the time the women used lanterns.

The next morning we headed out to one of the 54 remote villages the workers were hoping to visit. After a teeth-rattling few hours, we reached our destination and stopped at the local mosque, which served as the town center, to ask for a meeting of the women. Advance notice was impossible without telephones, but this didn't seem to matter. The arrival of foreigners was such a huge novelty that everybody dropped what they were doing. When the women and girls had gathered, Eva and Maryann set an illustrated pad on an easel, and began their class.

"Sometimes we're speechless because we cannot think of anything they can do to help themselves," they confessed to me later. "The people may not even have soap, or screens for their windows. Teachers in some of the schools don't have paper. Sometimes it just grips your heart. We've worked with the very poor before, but the people here are so much worse off."

The sad truth was that most of the world's interest had already strayed from Afghanistan. The U.S.-led war against terrorism had shifted into a quieter phase. Few people were aware that 80 percent of Afghanistan's residents suffer from malaria, and 70 percent are malnourished. Nor did anyone seem to care that only 13 percent have access to clean water. Even as I looked into the bright faces of the children, I remembered that one in every four would not make it to their fifth birthday.

To our surprise, a local midwife asked if my Japanese companion could help. A woman was in hard labor with twins. The first had been successfully delivered, she said, but the second was lodged in a transverse position. Tomoko and I followed the woman to a mud house where the young mother lay on the floor surrounded by other women, children, and flies. Since our male translator was forbidden to accompany us, Tomoko did her best to assess the situation. The baby was most likely dead, she guessed. The mother needed surgery. But the closest hospital was a day's travel away, on appalling roads. Volunteers carried the woman to a borrowed vehicle, and we watched it drive off. Could she—or her baby—be saved? We would never know.

A place to wear a cross
CADA had first set up operations in northeastern Afghanistan in October 2001. It was the lone relief organization in an area covering 85,000 people. Workers who went to survey the villages that winter found people starving, shoveling the snow off their roofs to get the beams out so they could sell them as lumber. Everything else had already been sold to buy food.

The tons of wheat, flour and oil, clothing, shoes, and blankets trucked over the border literally made a life-or-death difference. Now, visiting CADA's warehouse, I saw men patiently waiting for their family's ration of wheat. Some had ridden donkeys from villages many hours away. Others would walk home, carrying the sack on their backs.

A translator helped me to talk to some of the widows who earned money at home by sewing and stuffing quilts for CADA's distribution. They admitted that times had been hard. Some had survived only by eating boiled grass or boiled flour with salt.

I couldn't help noticing that Ben, one of the foreign workers, boldly wore a cross over his Afghan tunic. When I questioned him, he smiled. "Afghanistan is a great place to wear a cross," he said. "It's given me all kinds of opportunities to answer people's questions about my faith. People want to talk—and they love to listen to us. And praying is natural in their culture."

He told me of a man he had met in Kabul who believed that the hardship the people suffered was a punishment from God. Ben had refuted that: "It's not from God. It's the Evil One, trying to destroy you." The man thought about this. "If that's true," he said, "there is hope for the future. We can turn to God."

Back to the future
My week in Afghanistan was over. Once more we made our way to the river. Safely reaching the other side, we whipped off our oppressive chadors.

We had time-traveled 2,000 years and back within a single week. Would the Afghan people ever have their chance to move into the 21st century? The Taliban was gone, and there was new hope slowly emerging within the people. A million and a half had died during the years of war with Russia. Five million had fled the country as refugees. But now they were starting to return. And among them were a few who trusted Christ. The rains had come. At long last, there were streams for Afghanistan's desert.

A Christian Reader original article. Deborah Meroff is a London-based photojournalist.

Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today International/Today's Christian magazine (formerly Christian Reader).
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