In what is certainly an unusual piece for the Washington Post, on Jan. 8 a writer reporting from Kabul described, with representative pictures and profiles, “a large, newly impoverished urban working class” whose households are, at best, buying a very little fuel or a very little food each day, and gradually freezing and starving. “Many lack solid shelter and money to heat their homes at night,” feeding shavings from one or two logs, or just some cardboard, into a stove to try to survive the night with temperatures well below freezing and getting colder. The home described and pictured with several children, is “frigid.” But the reporter quotes a seller of wood and coal in Kabul, who says, “People can’t afford to buy now, and we can’t afford to sell. The government has collapsed, people have no salaries, and the economy has gone to zero.” In other winters, “even ordinary people would take home 100 kilos [of wood] at a time. Today, I will be happy if I sell 20 kilos by dark.” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/01/08/afghanistan-winter-crisis/)
Most of the urban desperate, writes reporter Pamela Constable, don’t meet the criteria of the UN High Commission for Refugees, the main aid distribution agency besides the World Food Program. A spokesman says, “They’re not refugees. They haven’t been driven from their homes, but they have lost their jobs, they have no savings, and their life systems are in collapse.” In other words, they are being killed by the pen in Washington, D.C. “They are not on our lists, but they come and wait outside the distribution sites, saying `What about us?’”
