every day, I type out the names of families, their household size, the province they are from, how many of their family members were killed/injured, and how much in cash aid we were able to provide. every day I think of the wars, raids, airstrikes, earthquakes, and floods that they have lived through. a man taps on my aid worker’s shoulder and says “you didn’t ask me about my cattle. you didn’t ask me how many of them died. how many I lost.”
i’ve added a new tab onto this excel file. I put down the number of cows, sheep, horses, cats, dogs, birds, and chickens that have died in each household from the earthquakes. I think of how no one else is asking them these questions. there are no journalists with mics in hand asking the people in Afghanistan about their grievances. no one is taking note of it. so I tell my aid workers to ask anyway.
we no longer know what the death toll is in Kunar Province. someone somewhere stopped counting, someone somewhere stopped taking note. I don’t know which makes me angrier, that they stopped counting, or that we no longer know. I add another job responsibility in my aid workers job descriptions, to count. ask each family about who they lost, ask about their names and their ages. then send it to me, and I’ll store it in a document 7500 miles away, I’ll write about it. I’ll write about what they lost.
every day, in some coffee shop in Chicago, I sit alone behind a table and I count. one day I’ll go back and visit the graves that were dug. because I will remember them, even when the rest of the world won’t.