Public service announcement for the hearing impaired.The city is beautiful.
The cruise ship looks terrifying.
Desperate Afghan parents are selling their kids to pay off debt as poverty levels deepen following Taliban takeover: report
Excerpt:
Some desperate Afghan parents are forced to sell their children to deal with poverty….
A house cleaner in western Afghanistan named Saleha, for example, sold her 3-year-old daughter to a man to whom she owed a $550 debt. Saleha, 40, receives 70 cents a day from her job, and her husband doesn’t work, the Journal said.
“If life continues to be this awful, I will kill my children and myself,” Saleha told the Journal. “I don’t even know what we will eat tonight.”
“I will try to find money to save my daughter’s life,” husband Abdul Wahab said.
Khalid Ahmad, the lender, told the Journal he had to accept the 3-year-old girl to settle the debt.
“I also don’t have money. They haven’t paid me back,” he said. “So there is no option but taking the daughter.”
…Within a year, the poverty rate in Afghanistan will hover at a whopping 97% or 98%, said Kanni Wignaraja, UNDP’s Asia-Pacific Director.
“Afghanistan pretty much faces universal poverty by the middle of next year,” Wignaraja said. “That’s where we’re heading — it’s 97-98% no matter how you work these projections.”
…Over the past two decades, Afghanistan made significant economic gains that are now in danger of collapsing because of political instability. Afghanistan faces “a crush on local banking” because of the Taliban takeover, Wignaraja said. That instability is only worsened by the pandemic.
The Biden administration, in an effort to limit the Taliban’s resources, froze nearly $10 billion in reserves in the country’s central bank — most of which is reportedly held by the Federal Reserve Bank in New York. The move has been criticized as misdirected and will ultimately hurt Afghans more than the Taliban, Shah Mehrabi, a senior board member of Da Afghanistan Bank, told Bloomberg.
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It is uncivilized that children are treated like chattel and used to pay off debts, but this article again ignores the “poison” in the Afghan land and that is Islam. No economic assistance or sending money to them will change a dang thing. 20 years in Afghanistan and the West has learned nothing.