With jobs scarce and poverty deepening, dozens of women on the outskirts of Shiberghan, the center of Jawzjan Province, have taken to working in brick kilns, laboring under the sun alongside their families to earn a meal.
Many of the women have come from neighboring provinces, driven by hunger and the collapse of basic services. Families say they live in open fields near the kilns without shelter, medicine or clean drinking water.
Nazbano, 37, said she moved from Sar-i-Pul Province with her husband and 10 children. “We came to Shiberghan to make bricks, so we could have a piece of bread,” she said. “We have no doctor, no medicine, no school. Our children wander in the scorching sun with nothing.”
Sabira, another woman at the kiln, said her family sleeps in the open desert. “If we get sick and recover on our own, we survive. If not, there is no doctor and no medicine,” she said.
Workers describe meager wages that barely cover food, with any additional income consumed by medical costs. “I have spent 50 years working in mud and water,” said Qamar Gul, a resident. “Day and night we are hungry. Whatever we earn cannot even buy bread. There is no clean water. We are starving and thirsty.”
Others voiced frustration that their children have no access to education. “It would be very good if a school and a clinic were built for us,” said Sitara, a mother. “The people are in a difficult economic situation, and the government should pay serious attention.”
Many families migrate to Shiberghan from remote districts of Sar-i-Pul during the summer to work in the kilns, returning home once the cold sets in. But aid groups warn that Afghanistan’s worsening economic collapse is forcing more families, particularly women and children, into desperate forms of labor.
