The Hill That Women Built

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              "text": "Aneesa hangs up clothes to dry by her home on Tapahye Zanabad. In the background is the magnificent, desolate Hindu Kush range. When she first arrived at the hill, stray dogs outnumbered the houses.",
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              "text": "Photographed through a window, with its reflection of a curtain, the surprisingly geometric layout of Tapah-ye Zanabad looks like the modern version of an ancient archaeological ruin. But it’s not a ruin: it is a tenacious township still in the making. Of late, men, greedy for readymade property, have been moving in.",
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              "text": "The frame of an old Soviet machine of unknown provenance becomes an improvised swing, part of an integrated playground system for the children of Tapāh-yē Zanābād.",
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              "text": "Sitting on a rough wood-and-jute beseter, Bibi Amenah goes through paperwork while children surround her, serious as grown-ups. She runs a small business as a seamstress.",
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              "text": "Two children are tied to a tin chest by their <em>mader bezerek</em> (grandmother) Bibi Amenah to prevent them from leaving the house and landing in trouble. Her husband, a grocer, died in a rocket attack during the pre-Taliban second civil war (1992-96). She has tried her hand at tailoring, selling jewellery and weaving prayer rugs; these days, she also presses mud bricks for other widows building or extending their houses.",
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              "text": "Relatives had told Noorzia to move from her home in southern Afghanistan to Kabul where, they said, there was a place made for, and by, widows. After a year of travelling and living off the charity of distant relatives, Noorzia found the hill.",
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              "text": "Meeru, long widowed, stands on the house she built. The resident widows of this steep-sided hill say they feel safe here; lack of water and minimal electricity might be a bother, but it keeps other people from coveting their homes.",
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              "text": "The ‘dead’ military hardware left on the hill can still occasionally show its teeth. A child who cut his head while playing in the remnants of old Soviet military equipment left to rot in place after the Soviets quit the country in 1989 is given medical attention by women.",
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              "text": "A boy runs down the steep, slippery hill to go to school in Kabul City. As is evident, this vast hummock of houses doggedly built by hand is one of the driest places in the semi-arid steppe of Kabul Province.",
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              "text": "Children at Tapāh-yē Zanābād, all of them too young to have experienced the first civil war (1989-92), use the debris of Soviet military equipment as a makeshift jungle gym.",
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              "text": "Aneesa wipes sweat from her brow while scouring earth from the hill to make bricks to build her home. There is earth in plenty here, but there are no kilns, no bricklayers, and certainly no masons.",
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              "text": "Aneesa, her giant spade jammed into the loose earth, examines the quality of the raw material that she will use to press bricks. Her spade is a hefty man’s spade, but her husband died in the late 1990s fighting in southern Afghanistan, leaving Aneesa with almost nothing. She spent years squatting in abandoned homes before finding Tapāh-yē Zanābād. But her struggle is hardly over.",
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              "text": "With a spade blade almost as large as her torso and heavy to boot, Aneesa digs up loose earth from the hill to make bricks to add a room to her home. Houses are extended as and when needed, with no government permissions necessary.",
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              "text": "A widow swathed in an Afghani <em>chadri</em>—a full burqa with a grille over the eyes—is helped by children down the precipitous, gravelly gradient of the downhill walk to Kabul City.",
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On A HILL overlooking Kabul, children fill plastic jugs from a hose connected to the groundwater supply. After a short steep hike to a rocky hillside, they carry these containers to a very special community that has made its home on a slope above a cemetery 13 km east of the capital. More than a decade ago, among the ruins of a fort and rusting military machinery, and with little access to electricity or water, a group of women with help from their children began to build their own houses using the land beneath them. They created a ‘monument’ to the men fallen in battle, and built a community known as Tapāh-yē Zanābād (‘District of Many Women’).

After 2001, widows from across Afghanistan left the shadows of their harsh lives for what was rumoured to be a utopia in Kabul. Widowed in the violence of the previous three decades, they were left without a place to live or the means to take care of their families. Many were forced into prostitution and lived in constant fear of the Taliban’s strict, misogynist interpretation of Sha’ria law. The United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) placed the number of ‘war widows’ in Afghanistan at more than two million—a result of conflict and civil war. In Kabul alone, there are an estimated 30,000-50,000 widows—many of whom are uneducated, illiterate and lack basic job skills—leading secluded, poverty-stricken lives.

In Kabul—with a population of four million, Afghanistan’s largest and most modern city and the fifth fastest-growing city in the world—while the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, established in late 2001 by the Afghan Interim Administration, and several women’s advocacy groups have championed the rights of women in the country, there has been little respite for these widows of conflict.

The hill is now home to more than 1,000 women. The abandoned government property they live on—once a Soviet military aerie—was developed by the women in a loosely cooperative fashion. Early squatters had to hide from the Mahāli (local) police and work by dark to build their mud hovels by hand on the slope. This small community slowly grew into a crowded neighbourhood of women with its own artesian wells and an erratic electric supply.

But many of the women who hang on so precariously to the hill have noticed a decline in the Afghan government’s authority and its ability to keep men away from their doorstep. A widows’ association was formed in Tapāh-yē Zanābād, and began holding meetings and cooperating with other widows looking for a safehouse. However, the problems of Afghan society are so deeply ingrained that change is hard to come by. With little help from the government or international donors, the hill can only offer mere refuge to these women.

The photos in this essay were taken in July 2011.