Rahim Dad had eight mouths to feed and the drought had stolen his crops, his oxen and his goats. So he sold the most valuable asset he had left: his 12-year-old daughter.
“I sold my daughter for money because of the hunger,” he says, shivering with fever in the chill of his mud and chaff house. “I sold my daughter to save the other people in my family, to save them from dying.”
And so Aziz Gul was contracted in marriage to a distant relative on the far side of the gorge that cuts off the village of Siya Sang from the outside world, for a down payment of 2m Afghanis – about £50.
This is Jawand district, a place of majestic red canyons, an awful gnawing poverty and raging tuberculosis, squarely in that swath of Afghanistan that aid agencies call the “hunger belt”.
Villages like Siya Sang will see little or nothing of the $4.5bn (£3.2bn) that America, the EU, Japan and other countries pledged for Afghanistan in Tokyo last month.
That money is for the reconstruction of Afghanistan after 23 years of war: rebuilding schools, hospitals and roads, and moulding a civil service and a monetary system.
None of these exists in Jawand. There is not a single mile of paved road. Not a single doctor. Not a single school. Not a single medical clinic. Virtually the entire population in the district of 186,000 is illiterate.
Dollar bills and Afghanis do not circulate here; the preferred local currency is food aid: wheat in denominations of 50kg sacks with point of origin in bold blue letters, USA.
But despite such appalling standards in this fourth consecutive year of drought, the international community is focused on bolstering the government in Kabul, solidifying the new Afghanistan built as the US and its allies would wish it.
“Everybody is basking in the warm glow of generosity about reconstruction. It is very important but many people won’t taste the benefits for a very long time,” says Azizullah Hakimi, the deputy programme director for Oxfam in Herat, the capital of western Afghanistan. It is the only aid agency working in Jawand.
“A lot of people in Afghanistan are going to benefit from the Tokyo money because they live in more accessible areas, but for a lot of people living in inaccessible areas affected by the current crisis of drought it will be difficult to benefit.”
It would take a small miracle for the benefits to percolate down to Siya Sang. The village lies about 168 miles from Herat. On a good day it is a nine-hour journey on a dirt track that is only negotiable by four-wheel drive followed by a 90-minute hike up and down two steep and treacherous mountain canyons.
Here, as in nearly all the 380-odd villages of Jawand, hunger and disease ravage the population, culling babies, women, and the elderly. The living stagger on, coughing their lungs and their lives out with tuberculosis. People are so weakened by hunger that even flu can kill.
Men in their 20s and 30s have the stick-like calves and upper arms of children. New mothers produce no milk. Children are shrunken and listless. Wedding rings slide off skeletal fingers and watch bracelets hang slackly from wasted wrists.
The food aid arriving now may not save them. Many people weigh less than the 50kg sacks of wheat they lug home – on their backs because their donkeys died or were sold. At least four men died on the 24-hour trek to their villages with their sacks of wheat in January.
This was the future staring at Rahim Dad when he sold his first-born daughter. He spent the money on flour, rice and tea, and the relative luxuries of soap and sweets. He says he has enough food left for 10 days. At these margins of human existence, the survival instinct rules over sympathy for Aziz Gul.
“She was crying. She was not happy that she was engaged by force. But I could not do anything, and I can’t worry about her,” says her grandmother, Yaman. Rahim Dad interrupts: “If we had not sold her, the whole family would have died of hunger.”
Among the 45 families of Siya Sang, there is no longer a stigma attached to the sale of an underage daughter, only resignation.
The graveyard that unrolls along the slope next to the village has four fresh plots. One belongs to Soraya’s husband, another to her baby girl.
They were carried off within days of each other in early December, husband Abdul Hamid by tuberculosis and daughter Tabarukh, who died before she learnt to crawl, by malnutrition. Soraya’s milk dried up a fortnight after Tabarukh was born. She tried to sustain her on naan bread crumbled into black tea, but Tabarukh withered and died, aged 10 months.
Her last surviving child, Abdul Basir, 10, is waxen-faced, with pinched features. He sits on the dirt floor huddled in the sole means of protection from the cold that seeps into the mud room: a discarded wheat sack stuffed with foam. There is no stove, and Soraya sold her quilts and kitchen utensils for food.
“I think he has got the same sickness as his father because he is peeing blood, like his father did, and he is always cold and shaking.”
Soraya is desperate with worry. Her teeth are wobbling in their gums, and her body is covered with small sores, but her energies are focused on keeping Abdul Basir alive.
I make the mistake of asking what they had to eat on this day. “Eat?”, Soraya repeats, halfway between a laugh and a sob. “Naan and chai [bread and tea], naan and chai, that is all we ever eat. We can’t imagine touching oil.”
She brightens at the thought of the approaching spring. That is when the wild grass will grow, which she will pluck and boil into a bitter porridge, and tatrun – a root normally fed to camels.
It is difficult to believe but Siya Sang was once a place of relative plenty. The rains fell, wheat sprouted and Soraya’s husband tilled his 10 acres and fed his family.
Now the fields surrounding the village are parched and brown and the mud feeding posts for the once plentiful sheep, goats, cattle, and donkeys are crumbling and abandoned. There are no animals in Siya Sang. All were eaten or sold in the first years of the drought.
It is the same story throughout Jawand, but one that will go largely untold because these mountain hamlets are so isolated and remote.
It is hard to fathom how people can go on like this. In the high walls of the canyon overlooking Char Taq, the capital of Jawand district, puffs of smoke drift from the cave shelters that are squatted by dozens of families who no longer have the strength for several days’ hard walk to their villages.
Zamar Gul, mother of eight, moved her family here from the village of Kuzak. The trek took three days. “There we did not have anything to eat. Here we can find something,” she says.
The caves are closer to the food distribution point just outside Char Taq. Zamar Gul keeps the family going by sending the older children out to scavenge for firewood to sell, and Zeba, aged seven, a stunted little girl in a grubby red dress, to beg in the village.
Zamar is deeply ashamed. “I would prefer death than to go on like this,” she says. “I don’t know how long I can stay here. If I can’t find food, maybe we will all die here.”
