Afghan Mine Victims Struggle to Cope
KABUL, Afghanistan. Jan. 5, 2003 (AP)

In Afghanistan you can lose a limb just walking through your vegetable patch; it happened that way for farmer Sayed Khalil. Two years later, he still struggles with the hardest part — accepting a steel and plastic prosthesis as part of his body.

"In the beginning I told them, 'I don't want this leg. I lost my own and I can't walk with this thing,'" Khalil, 47, says of the International Red Cross workers who treated him.
"They told me, 'Don't worry. Be patient. Everybody says that.'"

Nearly a quarter-century of warfare has culminated in a tenuous peace in Afghanistan, but the legacy of violence lives on — much of it buried in the soil.

Today, Afghanistan is among the most heavily mined countries in the world. Land mines and unexploded ordnance have killed or maimed at least 200,000 Afghans since 1979, according to the Red Cross.

And the United Nations says leftover ordnance still kills or maims 150 to 300 people a month — 70 percent them civilians.

Getting medical treatment can be difficult for most Afghans, who live in poverty, and hard to come by for those who don't live in cities. But having a prosthesis brings hope to victims, not only that they will walk again but that they will be able to work.

Khalil today still farms the family field where he lost his leg. He thought the area had been cleared back then, but buried in the field was an anti-personnel mine, probably a relic from a 1990s civil war.

The explosion ripped off his left leg from the knee down, hurtling it into another field 20 yards away.

Khalil awakened in a military hospital, feeling tremendous pain. He pulled off his sheets and discovered the bandaged stump of his knee. As his mother explained what had happened, tears rolled down Khalil's cheeks.

"I couldn't believe it. I said, 'What about my wife? What about my children? How will I support them?" he recalls. "I thought I'd never walk again."

Doctors at the prosthetic limb workshop in Kabul run by the Red Cross say such despair is common.

"Everybody's afraid. They think they can't walk, they think they'll fall down," says Hayat Khan, 47, as he coached several men trying out new artificial limbs.

"But little by little, they learn."

Khalil's new foot was made of wood, the shin replaced by a steel rod. The final product was fastened together with bolts and covered with flesh-colored plastic.

At first, learning to walk was intensely painful. Khalil shook as he leaned on crutches and parallel bars. Often, he fell down. But within several days, Khalil was walking on his own — with no crutch, no help and not much pain. Now he had returned to his fields, able to work them — albeit slower than before — and to support his family.

Red Cross orthopedic workshops in Afghanistan, staffed mostly by disabled Afghans, have produced over 43,000 artificial arms, legs, hands and feet since 1988.

Though Red Cross patients do not have to pay for the service, it is limited to six major cities. Those who can't access it have a tough time: Up to 84 percent of such victims go into debt to pay for treatment, the United Nations says.

Abdullah Wardak, the minister in charge of the country's disabled, said the government, already overburdened with the huge costs of reconstructing the country, was helping 320,000 disabled people, giving each a monthly stipend of about $2 — almost enough to buy one piece of flat Afghan bread a day.

"We know it's not enough, but we can't do more," Wardak said. "We just don't have the money."

Since his accident, Khalil's field was reswept by a demining team. But he still fears there might be unexploded ordnance left behind.
"I think about it everyday," he says, holding his 5-year-old son on his lap. "But we have to farm this land. It's all we've got."

Copyright © 2003 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

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