Elena Becatoros

SHEDAI CAMP, AFGHANISTAN (AP) – In a sprawling settlement of mud brick huts in western Afghanistan housing people displaced by drought and war, a woman is fighting to save her daughter.

Aziz Gul’s husband sold the 10-year-old girl into marriage without telling his wife, taking a down-payment so he could feed his family of five children. Without that money, he told her, they would all starve. He had to sacrifice one to save the rest.

Many of Afghanistan’s growing number of destitute people are making desperate decisions such as these as their nation spirals into a vortex of poverty.

The aid-dependent country’s economy was already teetering when the Taleban seized power in mid-August amid a chaotic withdrawal of United States (US) and NATO troops. The international community froze Afghanistan’s assets abroad and halted all funding, unwilling to work with a Taleban government given its reputation for brutality during its previous rule 20 years ago.

The consequences have been devastating for a country battered by four decades of war, a punishing drought and the coronavirus pandemic. Legions of state employees, including doctors, haven’t been paid in months. Malnutrition and poverty stalk the most vulnerable, and aid groups say more than half the population faces acute food shortages.

“Day by day, the situation is deteriorating in this country, and especially children are suffering,” said Asuntha Charles, national director of the World Vision aid organisation in Afghanistan, which runs a health clinic for displaced people just outside the western city of Herat.

“Today I have been heartbroken to see that the families are willing to sell their children to feed other family members,” Charles said. “So it’s the right time for the humanitarian community to stand up and stay with the people of Afghanistan.”

Arranging marriages for very young girls is a frequent practice throughout the region. The groom’s family – often distant relatives – pays money to seal the deal, and the child usually stays with her own parents until she is at least around 15 or 16. Yet with many unable to afford even basic food, some say they’d allow prospective grooms to take very young girls or are even trying to sell their sons.

But Gul, unusually in this deeply patriarchal, male-dominated society, is resisting. Married off herself at 15, she said she would kill herself if her daughter, Qandi Gul, is forcibly taken away.

Gul remembers well the moment she found out her husband had sold Qandi. For around two months, the family had been able to eat. Eventually, she asked her husband where the money came from, and he told her.

“My heart stopped beating. I wished I could have died at that time, but maybe God didn’t want me to die,” Gul said. Qandi sat close to her mother, her hazel eyes peering shyly from beneath her sky-blue headscarf. “Each time I remember that night … I die and come back to life. It was so difficult.”

She asked her husband why he did it.

“He said he wanted to sell one and save the others. ‘You all would have died this way’, (he said.) I told him, ‘Dying was much better than what you have done’.”

Gul rallied her community, telling her brother and village elders that her husband had sold her child behind her back. They supported her, and with their help she secured a “divorce” for her child, but only on condition she repays the AFN100,000 (about USD1,000) that her husband received.

It’s money she doesn’t have. Her husband fled, possibly fearing Gul might denounce him to the authorities. The Taleban government recently announced a ban on forcing women into marriage or using women and girls as exchange tokens to settle disputes.

The family of the prospective groom, a man of around 21 or 22, has already tried several times to claim the girl, she said. She is not sure how long she can fend them off.

“I am just so desperate. If I can’t provide money to pay these people and can’t keep my daughter by my side, I have said that I will kill myself,” Gul said. “But then I think about the other children. What will happen to them? Who will feed them?” Her eldest is 12, her youngest – her sixth – just two months.

Now alone, Gul leaves the children with her elderly mother while she goes to work in people’s homes. Her 12-year-old son works picking saffron after school. It’s barely enough to keep them fed, and the saffron season is short, only a few weeks in the fall.

“We don’t have anything,” Gul said.

In another part of the same camp, father-of-four Hamid Abdullah was also selling his young daughters into arranged marriages, desperate for money to treat his chronically ill wife, pregnant with their fifth child.

Abdullah borrowed money to pay for his wife’s treatments and can’t pay it back, he said. So three years ago, he received a down-payment for his eldest daughter Hoshran, now seven, in an arranged marriage to an 18-year-old in their native Badghis province. He’s now looking for someone to buy his second daughter, six-year-old Nazia.

“We don’t have food to eat,” Abdullah explained, adding he also had to buy medicine for his wife, who soon would need more treatment. “She needs another surgery, I don’t have one afghani to pay for the doctor.”

The family that bought Hoshran is waiting until she is older before the full amount is settled, he explained.

But he needs money now for food and treatments, so he is trying to arrange a marriage for Nazia for about AFN20,000-AFN30,000.

“What should we do? We have to do it, we have no other option,” said his wife, Bibi Jan. “When we made the decision, it was like someone had taken away a body part from me.”

In the neighbouring province of Badghis, another displaced family is considering selling their son, eight-year-old Salahuddin.

His mother, Guldasta, said that after days with nothing to eat, she told her husband to take the boy to the bazaar and sell him to bring food for the others.

“I don’t want to sell my son, but I have to,” the 35-year-old said. “No mother can do this to her child, but when you have no other choice, you have to make a decision against your will.”

Salahuddin blinked and looked on silently. Surrounded by some of his seven brothers and sisters, his lip quivered slightly.

His father, Shakir, who is blind in one eye and has kidney problems, said the children had been crying for days from hunger. Twice, he said, he decided to take the boy to the bazaar and twice he faltered, unable to go through with it. “But now I think I have no other choice than to sell him.”

Buying of boys is believed to be less common than girls, and when it does take place, it appears to be cases of infant boys bought by families who don’t have any sons. In her despair, Guldasta thought perhaps such a family would want an eight-year-old.

The desperation of millions is clear as more and more people face hunger. By the end of the year, some 3.2 million children under five years old are expected to suffer from acute malnutrition, according to the United Nations (UN).

Nazia is one of them. The four-year-old lay listlessly in her mother’s arms after visiting the World Vision health clinic.

Two years ago, Nazia was a plump toddler, her mother Fatima said. Now, her emaciated limbs are just skin covering bone. Her little heart beats visibly beneath her ribcage.

“The prices are high. Flour is expensive, cooking oil is expensive, everything is expensive,” Fatima said. “All day she is asking me to give her meat, yogurt and fruit. We don’t have anything, and we don’t have money to buy it for her.”

Charles, World Vision’s national director for Afghanistan, said humanitarian aid funds are desperately needed.

“I’m happy to see the pledges are made,” she said. But the pledges “shouldn’t stay as promises, they have to be seen as reality on the ground”.

Kelsey Ables

THE WASHINGTON POST – It’s used in the Impressionists’ sumptuous seas and skies, favoured by a depressed Picasso and a spendthrift Vermeer. Once more valuable than gold, ultramarine blue, now sold in its synthetic form, is so popular today it ranks just below whites and blacks in sales by top suppliers of paint for artists.

But if you’re a painter keen on “true blue”, you might want to rethink your next masterpiece. In our volatile, supply-chain-challenged world, sourcing ultramarine, along with a host of other blue pigments, has been difficult to impossible. The colour could be creating blue skies on canvases today, and – like cream cheese – be in short supply tomorrow.

Jumping straight into your “Rose Period” might not help, either.

A shortage of titanium dioxide, the pigment for titanium white and a fundamental ingredient in about a third of artist paints, also puts other colours at risk. And beyond paint, conservators are missing swabs and tissues to clean paintings. Artists have struggled with shipping delays on essential equipment like canvas and stretcher bars. But shortages of colour are more disconcerting – particularly when it comes to blue, the world’s calm and cool favourite colour, according to numerous surveys.

Earlier last year, paint companies feared they might run out of synthetic ultramarine when one of two main factories in France that supply the pigment for the colour stopped making it, and the other, unable to keep up with the resulting demand, restricted international exports.

And that’s not the only blue that has been scarce. AkzoNobel, a house-paint manufacturer based in the Netherlands, has reported difficulties sourcing the 50 to 60 ingredients needed to make a shade of blue used in its industrial coatings. Golden Artist Colours, a paint company in New York, noted the dearth of titanium white could limit the production of mixed blue paints, such as light phthalo blue and light ultramarine.

The idea that blue paint could vanish entirely may seem absurd, but even the suggestion – made in headlines last fall – is enough to foment existential doom. It was once easy to forget that the colours we experience in art and in our daily lives are materials – designed, selected and transported physical goods. Today, the supply-chain crisis has snagged the stitches of our reality and revealed the seams.

“Something that people don’t think about is that everything is colored,” said Narayan Khandekar, curator of the Forbes Pigment Collection at Harvard Art Museums, which has more than 2,700 pigments. “A white wall is not just a white wall, it’s either a warm or cool white.

Even car tires – each car tire has probably six pounds of carbon black in it to make it black instead of latex milky white. There are pigments used everywhere, even in ways that we take for granted.”

Asked what they’d do without titanium white, Pete Cole, president of the paint manufacturer Gamblin Artists Colours in Portland, Oregon, said, “Our Earth would cease to rotate.”

Looking back on the past year, United States (US) paint companies describe chaos. John Polillo, operations vice president at Blick Art Materials, said it’s like nothing he has seen in four decades in the industry. He hoped the situation will improve by the spring, after celebration of the Lunar New Year in China. The holiday should slow production there and help alleviate shipping bottlenecks elsewhere, he said.

The strain on materials began with base ingredients. During February’s record-breaking freeze in Texas, major petrochemical plants shut down, leading to a shortage of resin, a plastic additive used in paint. Then, paint companies faced a shortage of flaxseed oil, which some have blamed on pandemic-induced health fads.

Eventually, colours started coming and going, seemingly at random. Golden Artist Colours said its popular, earthy quinacridone golds and browns have been discontinued. During a COVID-19 surge in India, the company couldn’t obtain quinacridone magenta and hansa yellow because the government had to reroute to hospitals all industrial oxygen normally used to produce those colours.

Artist paints are unique in that they feature highly concentrated pigments, made of elements and other ingredients sourced directly from the earth.

“If I if I sell you a tube of ‘burnt sienna’, that is honest burnt sienna, dug up out of the ground, burned in an oven,” Cole said. And that means there are no substitutions. One gramme of natural Tyrian purple pigment, for instance, takes 120 pounds of sea snails to create, so paint companies make a mixed, artificial hue instead.

It is this combination of hyper-specific pigments and a global trade network that makes artist paints uniquely vulnerable to supply-chain issues. “You have a constant flow of colour moving around the world,” Cole said. “You have mined pigments from Italy. You have cadmiums being made in places that are all hard to get to, like India and Brazil. You have modern pigments being made in Germany.”

A glancing look at some key works in art history reveals how paints and pigments function like a technology of vision. Monet’s rich yellow sunsets and landscapes could only be painted after the invention of cadmium yellow in the early 19th Century. Hokusai’s The Great Wave, and the rest of his Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji series, wouldn’t have been possible without the then-recent arrival of Prussian blue ink in Japan. Losing access to a pigment is like losing a means of seeing.

Many famous artists have used blue in excess. A 20-something Picasso, beset by depression after a friend’s death, famously created more than 100 paintings during his Blue Period. The spiritually inclined abstract painter Yves Klein trademarked his own vivid International Klein Blue and used it almost exclusively, believing it was the best colour to use to paint “the void”.

Johannes Vermeer practically went broke for blue. Seeking a durable blue paint 300 years earlier, Vermeer would have been limited to natural ultramarine blue. (The cheaper, synthetic version wouldn’t be invented until 1826). Made from lapis lazuli – a semiprecious stone sourced from a remote river valley in Afghanistan – ultramarine was outrageously expensive, so most artists reserved the colour for special occasions, such as painting the ceiling of the Scrovegni and Sistine chapels.

But not Vermeer. The Dutch artist applied ultramarine to mundane scenes of ordinary people with the skill of a master and the self-restraint of a child. Ultramarine blue floods the shawl of Vermeer’s Girl With the Red Hat. It glistens above the soft face of the Girl With a Pearl Earring. In Woman Holding a Balance, the mountainous, ultramarine fabric on the table suggests a great expanse, as if the woman looks down into some mysterious elsewhere.

Coupled with his low productivity and poor business acumen, Vermeer’s love of ultramarine ultimately drove him and his family into debt.

After working on the 2016 exhibition “Infinite Blue”, Joan Cummins, curator of Asian art at the Brooklyn Museum, understands the role of international trade in creating works of art.

She noted that ultramarine blue appeared in Egyptian art thousands of years ago, despite having to be imported from Afghanistan. And she hypothesises that Titian, millennia later, might have been able to use so much ultramarine blue because his location in Venice put him in proximity to the first load that came off the ship.

Cole reasoned that ultramarine blue’s popularity today might have to do with its functionality.

“If you’re trying to paint the colours of the natural world, there are colours you struggle with and there are colours that practically do it for you – ultramarine blue is one of those colours,” he said. “It does its job so incredibly well.”

Another clue to blue’s popularity might be found in that long-sought-after “true blue”. Named for the long trip it took from Asia to reach the palettes of European painters, “ultramarine” derives from the Latin “beyond the sea”. At a time of pandemic-related physical restrictions, when good health is fickle and travel is fraught, we might find ourselves especially aching for blue.

“We associate (blue) with things that are big and limitless,” Cummins said. “I think a lot of people find it transporting.”