In a workshop with soot-covered walls, feeble rays of sunlight struggle against the dust in which 11-year-old Nasser stirs a basin full of sweets destined for other children living, like him, in poverty in Afghanistan.
Nasser is one of several youngsters who, with dirty cheeks and unkempt hair, toil under the supervision of adults making sweets in a factory which, without electricity or running water, resembles a scene from the Middle Ages.
As Nasser sits in a corner of the Pakiza sweet factory separating different sweets, eight-year-old Mohammad, his tattered trousers tied at the waist with a rag, pours on drops of syrup to gloss the confectionery.
”Five children work here, they make a little money to survive and help their families. They have very difficult lives, there is one who lost two parents under the Taliban and who sleeps on the street,” says employee Sayes Azim, who looks much older than his 32 years.
Many Afghans lost family members under the repressive regime of the hardline Taliban militia which executed swift and brutal punishment for minor violations of their extreme interpretation of Islamic Sharia law.
The short life of Pakiza’s child employees, who huddle around a blackened oven melting sugar over the embers, has until now been a journey of suffering thanks to the legacy of 23 years of war in Afghanistan which ended with the fall of the Taliban regime late last year.
In Kabul, which has a population of two million, more than 37 000 children live in conditions of extreme poverty, according to Afghan non-government organisation (NGO) Oceana.
”We are concerned with the children we have registered, but there are many more,” says Oceana director Yussuf, who like many Afghans has just one name.
According to French NGO, Action Against Hunger, 47,6% of children in Afghanistan suffer from chronic malnutrition, which has dire consequences for their life expectancy.
In Kabul many children take on numerous small jobs to earn money, weaving rugs to sell to foreigners or wandering through traffic jams selling newspapers to drivers.
At the Pakiza factory, behind basins battered by years of work, sacks of sugar imported from India and trays of cooling sweets, owner Mohammad Azra laments the end of ”the golden age of the communist regime of Najibullah.”
Installed by the Soviets, president Najibullah was overthrown in 1992 by mujahedin fighters who controlled Kabul until the Taliban seized the city in 1996.
”During this era, we made sweets in a proper factories equipped with machines, and we had electricity all the time. The hygiene conditions were very strict and the sweets were much better,” he says.
He draws on the palm of his hand a sweet in the shape of a flower, which during the communist period was a favourite among Afghans who loved its apple flavour.
Azra still longs for the days when he could make better sweets, including chocolate.
”Now we are reduced by poverty to making sweets for the other poor, because our sweets cost less than half a dollar per packet.”
Meanwhile Nasser stacks 50 gram packets of orange and melon sweets before getting ready for school.
”I want to be an engineer, but if I don’t become one, then I would like one day to have my own sweet-making business and get rich,” he says.
Once packed in their transparent bags, Pakiza sweets are sold mainly in a market built on the dry bed of Kabul’s river and in shops in the city’s meat district.
There they offer a moment of sweet relief to the bitter lives of many struggling in the devastated surroundings of the Afghan capital. – Sapa-AFP