Housing for widows

Zakiyah found her four-storey house completely burnt down after six years when she, her six orphaned grandchildren and other relatives returned to their destroyed town of Mir Bacheh Kowt, about 25 km north of the capital, Kabul, last month. Hundreds of other houses like Zakiyah's had also been set on fire by Taliban forces when Mir Bacheh Kowt found itself on the front line between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance (NA) in 1998. "We were forced to leave Nasir Bagh camp in Peshawar [northwestern Pakistan] and had no choice than to come to these ruins," the 60-year-old-housewife and head of her eight-member family told IRIN in Mir Bacheh Kowt. Zakiyah said food and shelter were the most critical needs of thousands of returnees, who were living on top of one another with no employment or other source of income. Mir Bacheh Kowt is a badly damaged district in the Shamali plain area north of Kabul, with 98 percent of its houses completely burnt down, according to locals. "There are 20,000 houses destroyed, most of them completely burnt down," Mir Ghulam Jilani, the district’s community elder, told IRIN, noting that while 60 percent of the 210,000 population of Mir Bacheh Kowt had returned, most of the families were living in very difficult conditions, sharing with others rooms with no facilities. In assisting the most vulnerable among this group of desperate returnees, the United Nations agency for housing and shelter, UN-HABITAT, has started helping 100 widows rebuild their houses and their lives. "Reconstruction of houses is a serious problem in the area for most of the returned families," Abdul Qayum Nezami, a technical adviser for UN-HABITAT, told IRIN in Mir Bacheh Kowt. Japan was supporting the initiative by funding timber, windows and doors for the beneficiaries to reconstruct their houses. According to UN-HABITAT, the project contributes materials costing a total of US $350 per household, while the average reconstruction of two rooms costs the beneficiaries between $500 and $600. "We have to prepare labour and other raw materials ourselves," said Nafasgul, one of the beneficiaries. The 40-year-old mother of four claims she cannot afford to pay a builder and labourers, so she and her two sons aged 18 and 15 were working on the reconstruction of their house themselves. "My sons do labour work for others four days a week to earn money for our own raw materials, and we work on our house the other two days,", she told IRIN. Although some dwellings can be rebuilt, many are totally destroyed and need to be reconstructed from the foundations up. "Clearing the rubble of the traditional typical four-storey mud houses would cost more than reconstruction," said Zakiyah, underlining that there were many families like hers who could not afford to clear the ruins of their buildings to make way for reconstruction. "Ours cannot be repaired, nor it can be removed," she said, pointing to a huge three-storey building, its 12 rooms completely burnt. So she will have to build two rooms from scratch in another corner of her yard, leaving the rubble where it lies. Once she completes 50 percent to 60 percent of the construction work, she will be given UN-HABITAT’s package for the rest of the work. While over 3,000 houses have been reconstructed in Mir Bacheh Kowt since the beginning of repatriation early last year, the community elder said a great many more were urgently needed. "Around 2,100 houses have been reconstructed by The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and 1,100 by HABITAT," said Jilani, emphasising that another 16,000 or so houses needed to be reconstructed to ensure a sustainable life for the people in the area. He warned that many other things were needed over and above housing. "Employment, water supply, agriculture and projects should be undertaken too," he said, pointing out that a great number of youths who had returned after having been in Pakistan or members of armed groups fighting the Taliban were all jobless.