Unlike this old lady, some of the cases that come into our women’s ward are tragic beyond words. Let me give one story as told us by the poor sufferer herself, and she is only one of many who are suffering, unknown and uncared for, in Afghanistan at the present time. For, indeed—for the women especially—it is a country full of the habitations of cruelty. Her name was Dur Jamala, or “Beautiful Pearl.” She and her husband were both suffering from cataract, and lived near Kabul. They were trying to resign themselves to lives of blindness and beggary when someone visited their village who told them of a doctor in Bannu who cured all kinds of eye diseases. So, getting together all they could, which only came to about eighteen rupees, they started out on foot on their long and weary journey to Bannu—one hundred and fifty miles of rough road, with two mountain passes to cross on the way! They took with them their only child, a girl of about ten, and travelled slowly, stage by stage, towards Bannu. But before they had got far on their way, in a lonely part of the road, some cruel brigands robbed them of all their savings, beat her husband to death before her eyes, and tore away the weeping child, whom they would sell for a good price into some harim.
Women going for water at Shimvah
Poor Dur Jamala was left alone and helpless, crushed with grief. From that time it took her just ten months to get to Bannu, having been helped first by one and then by another on the way. She reached Bannu very worn and weary, and in rags, and was very grateful indeed to us for a comfortable bed and a good meal. The operation was successful, and resulted in her obtaining good sight in that eye. But meanwhile someone had frightened her, telling her that hell would be her punishment for listening to our teaching. She wept very much, and refused to allow us to operate on the other eye or listen to any more of our “wicked religion.” We saw no more of her for about four months, when she appeared one day in our out-patient department in great pain from suppuration of the second eye. She had been to some charlatan, who, in operating on it, had completely destroyed the vision of that eye, and she had suffered so much that she was only too glad to put herself again under our treatment. The second eye had to be removed, but she is able to work, as the sight of the first is good, and she often comes to us now and listens to the teaching, although she still says: “Your medicine is very good, but your religion is wicked.” Yet in listening to the Gospel story she finds some solace in the great sorrow which has so clouded the life of poor “Beautiful Pearl.”
Water-carrying at Shimvah
Women bring the water, frequently from a great distance, in skins slung on either side of donkeys.
If some of our medical ladies and nurses in England saw how their poor Afghan sisters suffered, often in silence and hopelessness, would not some of them come out to do the work of Christ and bear His name among them? “I was sick, and ye visited me.” Though till now we have only had a man doctor in Bannu, yet forty or fifty women attend the out-patients’ department nearly every day, and many of these have undertaken long and wearisome journeys to reach us.
There are the Hindu women from Bannu city collected together in one corner of the verandah, lest they should be polluted by contact with the Muhammadan women from the villages. For the women are much greater sticklers for the observance of all the niceties of Hindu ceremonial than their more Westernized husbands, and would have to undergo the trouble of a complete bath on returning home if they had been in contact with anything ceremonially impure. One can recognize the Hindu women at once by their clothes. They wear the same three garments winter and summer—a skirt reaching down to their ankles; a curious upper garment, like a waistcoat with no back to it; and a veil, which falls over and covers their otherwise bare back, and which they hurriedly pull over their faces when they see a man.
The Muhammadan women have indeed the veil, but the other garments are quite different. The upper garment is a full dress, coming down at least to the knees, and full of pleats and puckers, and ornamented by rows of silver and brass coins across the breast, while the nether garment is a pair of loose, baggy pyjamas of some dark-coloured material, usually blue or red, with very remarkable funnel-like extremities below the knees. At this point the baggy portion is succeeded by a tightly-fitting trouser, the piece about twice the length of the leg, and which is, therefore, crowded up above the ankle into a number of folds, which accumulate the dust and dirt, if nothing worse. The Povindah women—strong, robust, and rosy from the bracing highlands of Khorasan—are dressed almost entirely in black, the Marwat women in blue veils and red-and-blue pyjamas, the Bannuchi women in black veils and red pyjamas, and the women of other tribes each in their own characteristic dress.