The frigid winter aggravates the suffering and misery of the poor and changes the life into hell for them. The high and sudden inflation on one hand and the empty-handedness in this chilly weather on the other hand, make them suffer more than ever before. The street vendors, mostly children, and the widowed beggars are trembling with cold until late evening in Kabul city. They fight tooth and nail to survive the cold and hunger. The melancholy looks of the vendors and the heart-wrenching groans of the destitute simply reveal their problems.
Kabul is home to hundreds of thousands of children who have no home. Many of them live in squalid refugee camps with families that have been displaced by violence and war. Bereft of any income in a city already burdened by high rates of unemployment, families struggle to survive without adequate shelter, clothing, food or fuel. Winter is especially hard for refugee families. Survival sometimes means sending their children to work on the streets, as vendors, where they often become vulnerable to well organized gangs that lure them into drug and other criminal rings.
Children in Afghanistan work in all manner of jobs. They work as street vendors, shop assistants, as blacksmiths, tailors, domestics, auto mechanics, carpet weavers, and in brick factories. Some of them are as young as 5 or 6 years old. In the cities, children collect paper and scrap metal, shine shoes, and beg. In rural areas, many children work in agriculture. Because of limited family incomes, parents encourage their children to beg or work. Years of conflict have left many families parentless and with child-headed households.
The children asking for money are running after the buyers in markets and streets as well as seeking financial help from motorists at traffic jams. The most pathetic side of the begging in Kabul is the teenage boys who are running after restaurant goers no sooner did they come out of the eating and meeting places. They are asking for financial help presenting them as orphans, homeless, hungry and so on. Those teenage boys are also running after locals, but their favorite targets are foreigners visiting shopping centers and hotels. They usually position themselves between the foreigners and the doors of their cars.
Much of the population continues to suffer from shortages of housing, clean water, electricity, medical care, and jobs. Criminality, insecurity, and the government’s inability to extend rule of law to all parts of the country pose challenges to future economic growth.
The vicious cycles of poverty mean that lifelong handicaps and troubles that are passed on from one generation to another. To name just a few of these hereditary plagues: no school or education, child labor to help the parents, lack of basic hygiene, and transmission of diseases. Unemployment and very low incomes create an environment where kids can’t simply go to school. As for those who can actually go to school, they simply don’t see how hard work can improve their life as they see their parents fail at the task every day.
Poverty often drastically affects children’s success in school. A child’s “home activities, preferences, mannerisms” must align with the world and in the cases that they do not. These students are at a disadvantage in the school and most importantly the classroom. Therefore, it is safe to state that children who live at or below the poverty level will have far less success educationally than children who live above the poverty line. Poor children have a great deal less healthcare and this ultimately results in many absences from the academic year. Additionally, poor children are much more likely to suffer from hunger, fatigue, irritability, headaches, ear infections, flu, and colds. These illnesses could potentially restrict a child or student’s focus and concentration.
Deterioration of living conditions can often compel children to abandon school to contribute to the family income, putting them at risk of being exploited – which is rife in our country.
In the end, poverty is a major cause of social tensions and threatens to divide a nation because of the issue of inequalities, in particular income inequality. This happens when wealth in a country is poorly distributed among its citizens.
One of the effects of poverty on children’s development is to lead them to build an antisocial behavior that acts as a psychological protection against their hostile environment. Discrimination and social exclusion often push them to more aggressiveness and less self-control and nuance in reaction to stressful events. Having often been taken advantage of in their early childhood, they rarely come to a constructive way to deal with conflicts.
As they grow up, these behaviors are more and more entrenched in their personalities and often considered unrecoverable. This highlights the importance of taking action as early as possible to improve children’s living conditions. Policymakers should understand that not just income but a child’s social environment at large play a big role in creating new effects of poverty.
It is sort of an unforeseen effect of poverty on people’s minds or mental resistance to change. Stabilizing and empowering political institutions is therefore a crucial aspect of fighting against the consequences of poverty.