The children of Shamshatoo.

• Author: Ferdous, Hasan

It seemed almost pre-historic, carved out of a deserted landscape that could have been the perfect prop for a Steven Spielberg movie, except that it was no prop and it was not pre-historic. It was Shamshatoo, a campsite set up outside Peshawar--the capital of Pakistan's rugged North West Frontier Province--for newly arrived Afghan refugees.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has set up four separate camps, now collectively called Shamshatoo, that provide shelter and basic services to some 50,000 Afghan refugees. Most of the people who have found shelter here are newly arrived, some as early as a year ago, others as recently as a few weeks. Several of them have been shifted from the much larger Jallozai refugee camp, also on the outskirts of Peshawar. Overall, some 3.5 million Afghans have sought refuge--about 2 million of them in Pakistan and the remaining 1.5 million in Iran. Afghan refugees have also found shelter in several other countries neighbouring Afghanistan.

We visited Shamshatoo on 12 November 2001, our destination being the last of the four camps. Everyone here has a story to tell and a tragedy to share. Once the individual details are sorted out, they all sound the same. Running away from a brutal war and an oppressive regime, they are here to seek shelter, food and hope. And this hope, at least for those in Shamshatoo, has come in the form of an opportunity for both Afghan boys and girls to go to school.

Abdul Haq, the father of five (one boy and four girls), came to Pakistan about a year ago from war-ravaged Mazar-i-Sharif in northern Afghanistan. He first found shelter in Jallozai; only three weeks ago he was transferred to Shamshatoo. He was a taxi driver and his wife a school teacher. After the Taliban seized control of Mazar, girls were prevented from going to school. His wife lost her job and he lost an eye in a mine explosion. He would have persevered longer in his home town because he knew quite well how perilous a refugee's life is.

But after several girls were abducted and the law and order situation broke down, he decided it was time to get out of harm's way. "My biggest fear was for my girls. I had to take them somewhere where they would be safe, even if it meant running away from home", Haq said. For him and for several hundred newly arrived Afghan refugees, home at Shamshatoo is limited to a tent that often has no plastic sheet to shield it from the bitter cold and no hard cover on...