The Yak-a-Toot savings group meets at the community center in its village. Members have been saving about 1,000 Afghanis (US$20) a month per family toward construction of their homes.

Coming Home
With Habitat's help, resilient Afghans are rebuilding their lives.

Story and photos by Lynn Gardner

Mazar-i-Sharif

At 4 a.m. in summertime in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan, the sun is up, the roosters have called in and shopkeepers are opening their stores. The heat is hovering at 34 degrees Celsius (93 degrees Fahrenheit), and the mountains are barely visible behind the shimmering dust. Workers are already loading bricks, shoveling, hammering. Children are carrying water from neighborhood pumps to their homes. Schools start at 6 a.m. to accommodate three shifts of students.

After a quarter century of fighting and destruction, Afghans in this northern city of 750,000 are eager to reclaim their lives. Thousands who fled the Russians, the mujaheddin and the Taliban are returning home.

Home, however, is not as they left it. Sometimes it is not even where they left it. The wars have changed the landscape of this South Asian country.

Displaced persons are living in tents. Roads and sidewalks are gutted and unpaved. Camels, donkeys and horse-drawn carriages share road space with automobiles and bicycles. There are no signal lights, but the traffic snarl does not seem to elicit road rage, and traffic accidents are minor. There is no running water, and electricity is erratic. The still-new government is struggling to coordinate the needs of its people and to keep the specter of returning Taliban at bay. The cultivation of poppy has been substantially diminished, but not eradicated.

Above all this chaos, heat and dust, the Afghan people are optimistic and hard-working. Their pleasure at being free again seems to make their deprivation more tolerable.

"The first thing I noticed when I crossed the border from Uzbekistan into Afghanistan was the billboard thanking Americans for their help in driving out the Taliban," says my husband, Stephen Kutzy, Habitat for Humanity's national director in Afghanistan.

In 1974, Stephen, a fresh graduate of the University of Massachusetts, joined the Peace Corps and was assigned to Laghman, in southern Afghanistan. The village was simple and undeveloped, with no electricity or running water. The classroom where he taught English was under a tree, the blackboard nailed to the trunk. Rainy days were especially challenging, but the students wanted to learn and were willing to put up with any inconvenience. Stephen developed a great respect and admiration for the Afghan people and their indomitable spirit.

Thirty years later, as our youngest child was finishing college and tuition payments were coming to an end, Stephen decided the time was right for him to help others again. He had spent 25 years in the construction business, most recently as director of purchasing for Sabatello Construction, a luxury home builder in Palm Beach County, Fla.

With his building experience, his knowledge of Dari (the language spoken by the people of Afghanistan) and his continuing interest in returning to the country that had so heartened him when he was a young Peace Corps volunteer, Stephen contacted Habitat for Humanity and asked whether it had an interest in his developing a program there.

Indeed it did. Today, we are living in Mazar-i-Sharif.

Habitat for Humanity's first in-country Save and Build program began in the village of Yak-a-Toot in November 2004. Located within the city limits of Mazar-i-Sharif, Yak-a-Toot is a small, close-knit neighborhood of narrow, dusty streets, open fields, crumbling mud houses, small shops and public wells. Few trees remain, most having been harvested for firewood. The village's people are mostly day laborers, cooks, masons and shopkeepers. Most are members of the Shia sect of Islam which was brutally persecuted by the Taliban.

Nearby is the municipal football stadium used during the Taliban reign for public executions, stonings and lashings.


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