The Hill That Women Built

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.