Post by asiaticdarkperson on Jul 22, 2013 1:28:06 GMT -5
Meet Mohamad. He is an Afghan man working in Iran to feed his wife and two children back in Afghanistan. He works two jobs. During the day he works as a gardener for a city park/woodland. He is one of 45 Afghan laborers at his workplace. At night, he sweeps the streets of Tehran. These kinds of jobs are what Afghans generally do in Iran. Mohamad lives a lifestyle that would put Tibetan monks to shame. He spends only enough money to survive and be able to work, and not a penny more, so that he'll have more to send for his family.
Mohamad tells me he doesn't know how old he is, because he was born during a time of war, and also because practically everyone around was illiterate, so his date of birth was never written down anywhere and thus forgotten. Mohamad can't read or write. His pride was quite apparent as he talked about his 9 year old son, who is in the third grade somewhere in northern Afghanistan near Tajikstan.
One day we were talking and he described to me how he had witnessed a horrible car accident at 3AM the night before as he was sweeping the streets. The crash, which involved only a single car, had severely injured the young man who was driving. Mohamad explained that accidents and sickness are very common in the lives of people whose actions displease God. My response was naturally to indicate that very evil men were prospering everywhere in the world in our time. He simply said "there is a day for everything." He repeated this statement three or four times as it gradually sunk into my head. Then he said "Everything is transitory."
On another occasion Mohamad talked about how the world has no worth to him. He said "Who says the world has worth? Only rich people." The level of poverty that Mohamad endures here is quite literally inconceivable to a western mind IMO. Mohamad claims that anyone who stayed behind in Afghanistan went broke and became really wretchedly poor. According to him anyone who has anything in Afghanistan today, acquired it by working abroad. He indicated that there was no money in Afghanistan, and that all the money comes from Afghans working in other countries.
According to Mohamad, there is no work for him in Afghanistan. There are millions of Afghan men aged 15-50 years old working as manual laborers in Iran. Mo claims that many companies from the NATO countries and also from Iran are working to develop and modernize Afghanistan's economic infrastructure. Roads, water, gas, electricity, phones, literacy, etc. is spreading through Afghanistan at an astonishing rate these days. Mo says these foreign corporations very rarely, if ever, employ Afghans. Afghan men are illiterate, so the only work left for them is peon labor, but according to Mohamad, Bangladeshi laborers have taken what little work there is in Afghanistan. So naturally, the Parsies in their country went to Iran, where there was plenty of work to be had after the Islamic revolution had nationalized the country's wealth and resources. The Pashtuns (the true Afghans) however, are still very poor.
Mo says he's sure the NATO-coalition will leave. He says "The soviets stayed for a while, but they left. The British before them also did not stay."
Mohamad is for lack of a better term, an old school person. I find that the configuration of his psyche is an earlier version compared to ours. I find his thoughts very fascinating. Mohamad is an old school Muslim too. He doesn't look like the stereotype of the Arab Muslim though. He has the typical Mongolo-Iranian features of all Farsi-speaking Afghans, dark brown hair, asiatic brown eyes, a very sparse beard, etc. He looks like he could be a descendent of Genghis Khan.
Mohamad tells me he doesn't know how old he is, because he was born during a time of war, and also because practically everyone around was illiterate, so his date of birth was never written down anywhere and thus forgotten. Mohamad can't read or write. His pride was quite apparent as he talked about his 9 year old son, who is in the third grade somewhere in northern Afghanistan near Tajikstan.
One day we were talking and he described to me how he had witnessed a horrible car accident at 3AM the night before as he was sweeping the streets. The crash, which involved only a single car, had severely injured the young man who was driving. Mohamad explained that accidents and sickness are very common in the lives of people whose actions displease God. My response was naturally to indicate that very evil men were prospering everywhere in the world in our time. He simply said "there is a day for everything." He repeated this statement three or four times as it gradually sunk into my head. Then he said "Everything is transitory."
On another occasion Mohamad talked about how the world has no worth to him. He said "Who says the world has worth? Only rich people." The level of poverty that Mohamad endures here is quite literally inconceivable to a western mind IMO. Mohamad claims that anyone who stayed behind in Afghanistan went broke and became really wretchedly poor. According to him anyone who has anything in Afghanistan today, acquired it by working abroad. He indicated that there was no money in Afghanistan, and that all the money comes from Afghans working in other countries.
According to Mohamad, there is no work for him in Afghanistan. There are millions of Afghan men aged 15-50 years old working as manual laborers in Iran. Mo claims that many companies from the NATO countries and also from Iran are working to develop and modernize Afghanistan's economic infrastructure. Roads, water, gas, electricity, phones, literacy, etc. is spreading through Afghanistan at an astonishing rate these days. Mo says these foreign corporations very rarely, if ever, employ Afghans. Afghan men are illiterate, so the only work left for them is peon labor, but according to Mohamad, Bangladeshi laborers have taken what little work there is in Afghanistan. So naturally, the Parsies in their country went to Iran, where there was plenty of work to be had after the Islamic revolution had nationalized the country's wealth and resources. The Pashtuns (the true Afghans) however, are still very poor.
Mo says he's sure the NATO-coalition will leave. He says "The soviets stayed for a while, but they left. The British before them also did not stay."
Mohamad is for lack of a better term, an old school person. I find that the configuration of his psyche is an earlier version compared to ours. I find his thoughts very fascinating. Mohamad is an old school Muslim too. He doesn't look like the stereotype of the Arab Muslim though. He has the typical Mongolo-Iranian features of all Farsi-speaking Afghans, dark brown hair, asiatic brown eyes, a very sparse beard, etc. He looks like he could be a descendent of Genghis Khan.