They awake in the mornings to find another family has left. Half of one village, the entirety of the next have departed in the years since the water dried up — in search of jobs, of food, of any means of survival. Those who remain pick apart the abandoned homes and burn the bits for firewood.
They speak of the lushness that once blessed this corner of southwestern Afghanistan. Now, it’s parched as far as the eye can see. Boats sit on bone-dry banks of sand. What paltry water dribbles out from deep beneath the arid earth is salt-laced, cracking their hands and leaving streaks in their clothes.
Several years of punishing drought has displaced entire swaths of Afghanistan, one of the nations most vulnerable to climate change, leaving millions of children malnourished and plunging already impoverished families into deeper desperation. And there is no relief in sight.
In Noor Ali’s village in Chakhansur district, near the border with Iran, four families remain out of the 40 who once lived there. Mr. Ali, a 42-year-old father of eight who used to grow cantaloupes and wheat, in addition to raising cattle, goats and sheep, is too poor to leave. His family is subsisting on a dwindling 440-pound bag of flour, bought with a loan.
“I have no options. I am waiting for God,” he said. “I am hoping for water to come.”
The desperation in rural areas, where a majority of Afghanistan’s population lives, has forced families into impossible cycles of debt.
Rahmatullah Anwari, 30, who used to grow rain-dependent wheat, left his home in Badghis Province in the country’s north for an encampment that has sprung up on the outskirts of Herat, the capital of an adjacent province. He borrowed money to feed his family of eight and to pay for his father’s medical treatment. One of the villagers who had lent him money demanded his 8-year-old daughter in exchange for part of the loan.
“I have a hole in my heart when I think of them coming and taking my daughter,” he said.
Mohammed Khan Musazai, 40, had bought cattle on loan, but they were swept away in a flood — when rain comes, it comes erratically, and it has caused catastrophic flooding. The lenders took his land and also wanted his daughter, who was just 4 at the time.
Nazdana, a 25-year-old who is one of his two wives and is the girl’s mother, offered to sell her own kidney instead — an illegal practice that has become so common that some have taken to referring to the Herat encampment as the “one-kidney village.”
She has a fresh scar on her stomach from the kidney extraction, but the family’s debt is still only half paid.
“They asked me for this daughter, and I’m not going to give her,” she said. “My daughter is still very young. She still has a lot of hopes and dreams that she should realize.”
A few years ago, 30-year-old Khanjar Kuchai was thinking about going back to school or becoming a shepherd. He’d served in Afghanistan’s special forces, fighting alongside NATO troops. Now, he is figuring out survival a day at a time — on this day, he was salvaging wood from a relative’s abandoned home.
“They all left for Iran because there is no water,” he said. “Nobody was thinking that this water could dry up. It’s been two years like this.”
At Zooradin High School in Chakhansur, where the winds whip through the empty window frames, there has been no running water in the two years since the well ran dry. Students regularly fall ill from poor hygiene. The lack of rain, aid groups say, creates perfect conditions for waterborne diseases like cholera.
Mondo, a mother from Badghis who gave only her first name, has lost two of her children in the drought. She miscarried one child and lost another at just 3 months because the family had almost nothing to eat.
Her 9-month-old is always hungry, but she hasn’t been able to produce milk for some time. The large plots of land where her family once grew plentiful wheat, and occasionally poppy for opium, have long since gone barren.
“All day we are waiting to eat something,” she said. Surrounding her in a brightly painted free clinic run by Doctors Without Borders were other mothers clutching frail, famished babies.
With three-quarters of the country’s 34 provinces experiencing severe or catastrophic drought conditions, few corners of the country are untouched by the disaster.
In Jowzjan Province in northern Afghanistan, some who have solar panels have bored even deeper electric-powered wells and are now growing cotton, which can bring higher profits than other crops. But cotton consumes even more water.
“The Taliban came, and the drought came with them,” said Ghulam Nabi, 60, who is newly cultivating cotton.
Even after the years of drought, many speak as if they can still vividly see their land as it once was — green and plentiful, teeming with melons and cumin and wheat, river birds flitting overhead as fishing boats navigated through the waterways.
With little assistance from the Taliban authorities and international aid perennially falling far short, some say all they can do is trust that the water will someday return.
“We have these memories that these places were completely green,” says Suhrab Kashani, 29, a school principal. “We just pass the days and nights until the water comes.”
This project was supported by the National Geographic Society.
