In Kabul, a new ritual: Hungry women wait for bread outside bakeries

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2022/07/17/ [login to see] /in-kabul-a-new-ritual-hungry-women-wait-for-bread-outside-bakeries
In the late afternoons in Kabul, a familiar ritual takes place as Afghans head to bakeries to buy fresh flat loaves for dinner.

But since the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan last August, another ritual has emerged: Women in blue burqas settle in front of the city's upscale bakeries, silently waiting for charitable passersby to purchase bread for them.

They include Khadija, a mother of nine young daughters. Every day, she walks with swollen feet and blackened toenails to this bakery from the distant hilltop slum where she has lived all her life. Then she waits in her tattered burqa, endlessly stitched and mended.

"My daughters cry from hunger," says Khadija, who like other women interviewed, requests only her first name be used for the shame she feels begging. She guesses her age at about 30.

The sight of the women reflects how sharply the country's economy has unraveled, and how its people's resilience has been depleted by multiple crises. They have been battered by conflict, pandemic closures, three droughts and an earthquake over the past five years.