Hazara Nation

Scores of schools have been built in Hazarajat in recent years, mainly by aid agencies and the Bamian-based Provincial Reconstruction Team operated by New Zealand. In Daykundi's provincial capital, a group of teenagers said young people are refusing to marry until they finish school. Hazara high schoolers make up more than a third of those who take the university entrance exam, and the number—including the number of girls—is rising. Hazarajat is a deeply conservative place, but it is far from fundamentalist. Women here "go to school, they have their own pursuits, and they have their freedom," says Ryhana Azad, a female district council member in Daykundi.In time, perhaps, these seeds will bear fruit the whole society can sample, but for now families must address immediate concerns. Often that means going where the work is. In village after village you see women—wearing long skirts, blouses, and head scarves in greens, reds, and sky blues—shoveling snow off their roofs or harvesting fields by themselves, because the men are working as day laborers in Pakistan or Iran or Herat or Kabul. It's hard on those who go and hard on those who stay behind. But sometimes adapting to the landscape means finding a new one.

For many that new place is Kabul, where some 40 percent of the population is now Hazara. On neighborhood streets in the western part of the city, you see Hazara children in uniform going to school, Hazara vegetable vendors setting up their carts, and Hazara shop owners and tailors opening stores. Hossein Yasa, the editor of the Daily Outlook newspaper, notes that there are Hazara-owned television stations, Hazara-owned newspapers, and a huge Shiite madrassa and mosque complex under construction. "The middle class of Hazaras is growing very fast," Yasa says.

Watching from the sidelines, however, is a huge Hazara underclass made up of manual laborers living in west Kabul neighborhoods—Dasht-e Barchi, Kart-e She, and Chindawul—that have neither electricity nor clean water. "You are talking about ghettos," says Niamatullah Ibrahimi, a fellow with the London School of Economics.

Every day, the Hazara cart pullers are out on the main road of Dasht-e Barchi, wondering if they'll get any work. Sunup, sundown, winter, spring, summer, fall, they wait, hoping someone will hire them to use their carts to transport lumber, building materials, bags of wheat, cans of cooking oil, panes of glass, window frames, dishes for wedding receptions—something, anything—from one place to another.

Pahlawan, Baba, and Assadullah are three of many men doing this because they must, because it's all they know. They think themselves invisible, unseen, but in many ways they're the public face of Hazaras in Kabul, doing the jobs no one else wants. On a good day they'll earn 200 or 250 afghanis, four or five dollars. But they can never count on a good day. Pahlawan, "the wrestler," is the strongest, in his mid-30s, working since he was seven. "Every day we sit with our carts from morning to evening," he says. Zulfiqar Azimi is "Baba," 67, with a glass eye and missing fingers on one hand. "I have never had a moment of comfort in this life," he says. Assadullah is the youngest, quiet, handsome under all the dust. He recently returned from Iran. He is lean but moves stiffly. In his 20s, he says he used to be an expert martial artist. "Now," he says, "I have this cart."
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