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The nurse who was parked in the pharmacy truck in front of the hospital that Sunday, Aug. 15, arrived at work, and as she approached the building, she saw the driver standing on the side of the vehicle, gesturing to him and the other nurses to turn around. back.
“She was screaming,‘ every woman should leave, sister please go, the Taliban are here! ’” The 35-year-old nurse recalled. “At first we couldn’t understand; it seemed impossible. ‘
Wearing trunks and a blouse, wearing Western-style clothes in Kabul, she and the other women around her climbed into the back of the truck, each leaving them at home. For three days, the nurse was too scared to leave her home. On the fourth morning, she received a call from the president of the hospital: “The Taliban have no problem with women,” she recalled. “Please go back to work. Here are some tasks that only you can do; we are forced by resources, we need you. ”
The nurse spoke to BuzzFeed News to share with readers a “real picture” of being a woman working in Afghanistan right now, she said, asking for anonymity because she fears for her life.
For women workers who remain in Afghanistan, the days since the fall of Kabul have brought tremendous fear and uncertainty to what their lives will be like under Taliban rule. For months, the Taliban have publicly claimed that they have moderated their positions on women’s rights parties. On Wednesday, Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid told Kabul reporters that there was only a “temporary reduction” in women workers and that it was in the midst of the chaos of regime change for their own safety.
“Our security forces are not prepared [in] how to deal with women, ”Mujahideen said. “Until we have complete security … we urge women to stay home.”
But the early days of the Taliban’s reign in Afghanistan have only confirmed what Afghan women have said all along: that their homeland will once again become a place where women face fewer risks, restrictions and opportunities. There were women at one time said in public they have had to flee the country about their rights, the armed forces have searched their homes and offices and eradicated posters with images of women all over the capital. The young girls have been sent home from school and warned not to return. Hospitals like the one where nurses work are differentiating gender; women doctors and nurses can only talk and treat other women, and all women outside their homes should wear hijabs. Even in areas where the Taliban need to start policing women, the return to power has encouraged caregivers who have threatened women who have threatened not to wear hijabs or stay in their homes.
“We’re waiting now,” said the nurse, who has worked at the hospital for 10 years. “But we also don’t know why we’re waiting.”
For women like the nurse, who was the only member she charged in her family, going to work was never an option, but a necessity. She now dreams of leaving Afghanistan, but fears that this is impossible because of her unique situation: the nurse lives with her mother and a sister with a disability that requires constant care. Even before a bomb killed dozens of people Kabul Airport on Thursday, the nurse said she could not imagine how she could carry an elderly woman and a child through desperate crowds struggling to get limited seats on flights out of the country.
“If something happened to my sister, or if I had to leave her behind, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself,” she said.
Although the nurse did not trust the Taliban or the president of her hospital, she returned to the hospital on Thursday for duty, she said. On the street, he said, there were soldiers everywhere, wearing Kalashnikovs and watching him pass by with his hijab.
“The fear was intense,” he said. “They looked at me like I was a prey. But I told myself, maybe they’re not like before, they don’t beat women anymore. They seemed silent, not violent. At least not yet. ‘
At the hospital, the security people who usually guarded each entrance were missing and the whole place seemed upside down. He found that most of the patient rooms he entered were empty; many removed the IV and walked away from the hospital. Those who stopped – some terminally ill, a pregnant woman – seemed terrified, she said.
The COVID room, the nurse said until last week was overcrowded with at least a dozen patients, was now empty. The nurse learned from another nurse that the relatives of some of the patients decided that the Taliban were more dangerous threats than coronaviruses and that the sick relatives were taken directly to their home or airport.
“We no longer have data on the number of COVID patients in this hospital, or otherwise in this city,” he told BuzzFeed News. “The Ministry of Health is still updating COVID data, but that is not true. No one who is sick wants to leave their home and meet with Taliban soldiers.”
Some of the stampede victims were taken to his hospital for treatment, but they were male, who could not be treated according to the new hospital rules. The nurse said she learned of a new rule from a colleague, who told her that the Taliban soldiers had sent her home when they saw her talking to a man with a bloody foot.
Nurses and doctors have to go to the hospital every day to register their presence in the Taliban city. Between new policies and empty wards, nurses have difficulty motivating themselves to continue appearing at work, he said.
Many patients, in an attempt to avoid the risk of leaving home, have privately contacted medical professionals. The nurse recently gave birth to the baby when a pregnant woman appeared in her neighborhood, asking for help. The nurse took everything she could find and walked with the woman to her house, where she secretly gave birth to the baby. The nurse eventually left the woman with a list of medications she would need, but said she had no news of her.
The nurse is afraid of making too many home visits because of Taliban soldiers at checkpoints who are controlling the movement in the city, but she is not sure how to make money otherwise. The hospital’s president recently told nurses that their salaries would be suspended until the city’s banks resumed normal operations – Kabul’s banks closed on August 15, before former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled and the Taliban arrived in the capital. When the banks reopened after almost a week, it was almost impossible to get in due to the huge crowd. The nurse said she could not get into an ATM and did not know what to do if she ran out of money. If the Taliban forces women like her to stop working, the nurse said, she will have no way to feed her family.
In her neighborhood, the nurse said the soldiers were not as problematic as ordinary men on the street, who suddenly declared themselves moral guardians, telling women to return home, wear a hijab and show a bit of embarrassment by reporting beatings. if they do not comply.
A few days ago he had an argument with a shopkeeper, who regularly punished him for wearing jeans: “It’s good that the Taliban are here to take care of women like you,” he recalled. Since then, the nurse’s mother and a young neighbor have taken turns buying bread and essentials for the family.
The nurse spends most of her time indoors now, but the main sources of entertainment she has at home no longer offer the appearance of an escape: television only provides news. “All I see are turbans, beards and guns,” the nurse said. “Not the movies of Bollywood, the superstars of Afghanistan or the chat shows we loved.” The radio, he said, no longer puts on music, but only religious songs by the Taliban, “they don’t have melodies and sounds that look like a funeral.” ●
Khatol Momand assisted in the report.
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