Photographer Wang Jing: Attention for Afghanistan
Updated:2012-01-16 15:57
(chinadaily.com.cn)
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KABUL, Afghanistan – That was one early morning in August, 5:50 am, children bold enough risked to step up on roofs of their clay house thickly dotted on hills of the Kabul city. They were looking at a giant, black cloud rising from the city’s ground not far away. Five minute ago, a car boom and sporadic gunshots ripped through the quiet morning. Right on the same roofs, children were flying kites and smiling to China Daily reporters’ cameras a day ago. According to the first-ever survey released late November on mortality by the Ministry of Public Health, one Afghan child in ten will die before their fifth birthday. Around half of deaths of under-fives were caused by respiratory infections or infectious and parasitic diseases, the survey found. Nearly a quarter of city dwellers and half of the rural population do not have access to clean drinking water.The survey does not have to elaborate that millions in the country’s drought-hit North are facing starvation, air strikes by NATO keep injuring civilians and children carrying automatic guns on streets were still recruited by insurgency. We even undoubtedly believe that younger ones will hardly reunite with their moms if they got lost – because a large number of women remain wearing the identical, unrecognizable, blue burqa that wraps the whole body. Children can be seen striving for a living everywhere. They help wash cars on congested roads, vender shampoos in small package at lakeside or simply beg around the old king’s house that was wired and surrounded by dried poppy.
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