It is commonly understood that men and women live largely separately in homes across Afghanistan. A western woman may, on occasions, be allowed in both areas of the house as she is seen almost as a third sex, but even this is relatively rare. It was therefore with some surprise that our entire trekking party, both men and women, were invited into the home of Malang and his extended family in Qazideh, a village a few miles east of Ishkashim at the western end of Afghanistan's Wakhan Corridor.
We were ushered from the street through a wooden door and into the courtyard of the family's mud-wall compound. The grandmother, a wrinkled lady of almost 80, was minding two of her grandchildren in the corner, and a straggly chicken pecked at the dirt floor. We were happy to await our host here whilst he arranged his belongings inside, but instead were promptly summoned through a low-lintelled doorway and into the pitch-black corridor beyond.
Inside everything was black. This was not just from a lack of light but also from a dense, pervasive soot that coated every surface. The floor had been swept clean - this was a house maintained with pride - but it was if the floor, walls and ceiling had first been painted with a black paint.
The corridor soon opened out into a large, square kitchen and this is where the family gathered. The cooking fire was buried in a pit a foot below the floor and the smoke it emitted rose up through the room and escaped through a square hole in the roof. The same hole also let in the room's only light. A kettle boiled over the fire and within a few minutes we were served hot black tea and hunks torn from a large, round flat-bread.
The darkness and the smoke from the fire made it difficult to see how far the room stretched or if indeed there was another room beyond it. I think probably there was not, in which case this kitchen was the core living space for more than a dozen people. Everyone was dark-skinned from the soot and bleary-eyed from the smoke but the whole family had turned out to greet the visitors. I couldn't count the number of children, nor identify who they belonged to: babies were passed from arm to arm and small children bounced off the seating area and central block that served as a kitchen unit.
Seeing this home and this family was an eye-opener. At first glance they had nothing: a soot-blackened mud hut home with neither electric nor running water. There were few material possessions and it would not have looked out of place in a reconstruction of a Viking or Anglo-Saxon village. The longer I sat there, however, the more I understood that they had everything they needed. They were, by local standards, relatively wealthy. The house was large enough for the extended family to live together, meaning that a number of incomes contributed to its upkeep and the feeding of the family. The house was warm, dry and, although inevitably sooty and dusty, otherwise clean. The children were everybody's responsibility, and so were the guests. The family were proud of what they had, and I felt humbled.
