The lives of many women have been wrecked during the two-and-a-half years of Taliban rule. Our journalists asked eight women to recount their activities on a typical day living under Taliban gender apartheid in Afghanistan.
Mahbooba*
January 28, 2024
8:21 a.m.
The smell of my smoke-filled jacket makes me feel sick. All my clothes become smoky and smelly if I don’t wear a jacket when I light the fire on the stove to cook food or boil water. If the stove catches fire early, my job becomes easier, but if the firewood is damp, it just smokes, which makes me cough. It rained last night, and the firewood got wet and didn’t catch fire easily, so I had to separate the dry pieces. When I lift the bucket filled with firewood, my back hurts. This pain is always with me. At this time in the morning before the Taliban returned, I would go to the university with my backpack full of books. Most of the time, I would be late, but eventually, I would get in the taxi. Today is Sunday. No matter how hard I try to remember which topics we usually studied on this day of the week, my memory fails me.
Time changes everything, and my mind has stopped working. I hear the cows moo and sheep bleat; I must feed them water and fodder. I can’t write more than this for you; my in-laws get angry if they see me holding a mobile phone while working.
10:38 a.m.
They’ve all had breakfast – oily bread with fresh milk. I feel nauseous from the smell of cow’s milk, so I only ate a little bread with sweet green tea for breakfast. I milked one cow for breakfast. Now, my job is to milk all three cows. I keep some of it for making sweets, and I must turn the rest into yogurt. In our family, including me, no one drinks milk except for breakfast, and it spoils if I don’t boil the milk and make yogurt.
If there’s too much milk, I also make homemade cheese, and we eat it with raisins. I love cheese and always eat it. I’m pregnant, and I’m worried my child will miscarry if a cow kicks me in the stomach. I want to tell my mother-in-law to take over milk duty, but I can’t say anything.
When I had just gotten married, cows kicked me several times as I didn’t know how to milk them, and the cows didn’t know me. Like humans, cows feel insecure in the presence of strangers, so they try to keep them away by kicking, but when treated kindly, they calm down after a while and won’t harm anyone anymore.
11:25 a.m.
I’m cooking lunch. Onions are fried in oil. I’m supposed to cook shullah [rice cooked in water], but I want to eat something tasty. I’m famished. For example, today, I felt like eating bolani [vegetable-stuffed flat-bread cooked in oil. I love vegetables and pumpkin bolani. But we don’t have any good food or fruit at home. My husband can’t afford to buy them. Our financial situation is very bad. My husband earns about 10,000 afghani per month, which he uses to pay off our wedding debts. We borrowed 200,000 afghani for our wedding party and we’ve only paid off 30,000.
I hear my mother-in-law telling me to hurry up and that the bread should be baked sooner. She only knows how to give orders. I can’t say that I can’t bake bread in the oven anymore because I’m pregnant. For elderly women, pregnancy is a normal thing, and there is no reason for anything to change for a woman. The most challenging housework is sticking bread in the tandoor [bread-cooking clay oven) because sometimes it gets spoiled. I have to bake 24 loaves of bread every day. My clothes, my hands, and my eyebrows and eyelashes burn because the tandoor is very hot. Yesterday, two loaves of bread fell onto the ashes before turning golden. My mother-in-law got angry and said, “I don’t know how long we have to wait for you to learn how to bake the bread.”
3:17 p.m.
I don’t feel anything towards the child in my womb. I neither love him nor hate him. I don’t feel excited, either. I had a lot of back pain today, and I wished I hadn’t gotten pregnant so soon. When I couldn’t stand the back pain, I asked my mother-in-law if greasing it would reduce the stiffness and pain. She said, “Don’t be so delicate. Why grease your back during pregnancy? It’s harmful; you might miscarry.” I’m no longer the happy girl I used to be. I’m getting more tired, day by day.
I’ve become bent over. The Taliban did something to us – we can’t go back even if they reopen the universities. We are trapped from all sides. If the Taliban allow girls to go to university, my husband won’t allow it. Even if he agrees, his mother won’t let me attend university. She wants me to do housework and have children. In any case, I’ll never achieve what I wanted. My dreams are shattered. I’m going to be a mother now, and I have to sacrifice myself for my children and my husband. There’s nothing left of me. For example, right now, as I’m complaining about back pain and stiffness, I still have to clean the sheep’s stable and water them. After that, I have to cook dinner. If dinner isn’t ready by 7:00 p.m., my husband gets angry.
11:16 p.m.
I’m picking vegetables. Guests are supposed to come tomorrow. Tonight, I’ll be cooking one or two dishes. It’s a lot of work for tomorrow. I have to cook at least five types of traditional dishes. I’m getting very tired. I’ll try to finish my work earlier so I can rest a little. Tomorrow, I’ll have a busy day.
*Names have been changed to protect the identity of the interviewee. Mahbooba is the pseudonym for a 23-year-old woman who was a second-year education and training student at Jawzjan University before the Taliban returned to power.
