The Underground Girls of Kabul by Jenny Nordberg Read Free Book Online Page A

breast-feed her baby boy to become healthy and strong. She iselevated to a higher status among women. She who can deliver sons is a successful, enviable woman; she represents both good luck and a good wife.
    If a daughter is born, it is not uncommon for a new mother to leave this delivery room in tears. She will return to the village, her head bowed in shame, where she may be derided by relatives and neighbors. She could be denied food for several days. She could be beaten and relegated to the outhouse to sleep with the animals as punishment for bringing the family another burden. And if the mother of a newborn has several daughters already, her husband may be ridiculed as a weakling with whom nature refuses to cooperate, a
mada posht
. Translation: “He whose woman will only deliver girls.”
    One kind of child arrives with the promise of ownership and a world waiting outside. The other is born with a single asset, which must be strictly curtailed and controlled: the ability to one day give birth to sons of her own. She, like her mother before her, has arrived in whatthe United Nations calls the worst place in the world to be born.And the most dangerous place in which to be a woman.
    “W E ARE THE Pashtun people.
We need the son
.”
    Dr. Fareiba emphasizes each word in hoarse, broken English. It should not be too hard, even for a foreigner, to understand this fundamental fact of her country. As with many women here, her weathered face betrays no precise age, nor will she offer a number. But she will gladly speak of everything else in short, assertive bursts with one corner of her mouth perpetually turned into an upward smirk. She has brought me through a back door into the disinfectant-smelling, bare-bones hospital for an education on the need for sons after extracting a promise that I will not attempt to speak to any of the husbands outside, which could alert them to the presence of a foreigner and endanger the hospital.
    Dr. Fareiba’s patients share many circumstances with the majority of Afghanistan’s women, whose lives are far removed from that of Azita and others in Kabul. These are the invisible women, now onlytemporarily out of the view of their husbands. For some, it is the only time they are allowed to have contact with people outside their own family. Most are illiterate and very shy, even in front of other women. Some hold hands and hesitate to step up to the examination table for the first time, where bulging bellies are carefully touched by doctor’s hands.
    Dr. Fareiba is known by reputation. She is greeted with respect as she sweeps around the corridors in her work uniform: a burgundy leather coat and a floor-length velvet skirt. She peeks into every room, where women nurse their newborns under thick polyester fleece blankets, or line up along the walls to see the gynecologist. Some smile; others hide their faces. The children, who have come with their mothers, do not smile. Much of the donated brightly colored clothing they wear is either too large or too small. None of them have anything resembling overcoats, and they, too, wear open sandals on soil- and dust-blackened feet. Only one little girl has a pair of red rubber boots. She looks to be around six years of age, with a matted mop of brown hair. Her pale gray eyes quietly follow the movements of the younger siblings left in her charge while their mother is seen by one of the doctors.
    Dr. Fareiba asks a few questions of each patient, smiles, and then turns around to give me a matter-of-fact summary. Each contains a life story:
    “The husband left her after three of her babies died. Now married to her nephew, as his second wife. She is twenty-five, and pregnant again.”
    “Seventeen. First child. Married to her older uncle.”
    “Twenty-one. Three children. Her husband is a powerful man, with many wives.”
    Birth control is available for free at the hospital. The doctors urge patients to wait at least three months between pregnancies for a