In a post from last week , Quantity vs Quality, I discussed the fact that members of the Pirahã tribe have a short life expectancy of approximately 40 years. In this modern world, that figure seems really scant. However, when compared to Afghanistan's 43.8 years, it's not that much of a difference!
Imagine being in your late 30s and realizing that, on average, people in your country can expect to be dead by 44. I guess that would mean that the Afghani AARP cards would start being offered to individuals once they attained the mature old age of 25!
If we look at the various nations that border Afghanistan, life expectancy rates range from 63.2 years in Turkmenistan to 70.56 years in Iran. Why would crossing over an imaginary line reduce a person's expected life span by nearly 20 years or more?
Of course, the answer is obvious -- war, war and more war. While the Pirahãs experience a short life expectancy, reports from various sources indicate they lead contented lives. As the following story from TruthOut indicates, the same can not be said for most Afghanis.
Imagine being in your late 30s and realizing that, on average, people in your country can expect to be dead by 44. I guess that would mean that the Afghani AARP cards would start being offered to individuals once they attained the mature old age of 25!
If we look at the various nations that border Afghanistan, life expectancy rates range from 63.2 years in Turkmenistan to 70.56 years in Iran. Why would crossing over an imaginary line reduce a person's expected life span by nearly 20 years or more?
Of course, the answer is obvious -- war, war and more war. While the Pirahãs experience a short life expectancy, reports from various sources indicate they lead contented lives. As the following story from TruthOut indicates, the same can not be said for most Afghanis.
According to the CIA World Factbook, an Afghan's life expectancy is merely 44 years. That's 20 to 30 years fewer than neighboring Pakistan and all other surrounding countries. It is just one result of the ongoing devastation in that country.
The war in Afghanistan did not start in 2001 with the US invasion. It began 30 years ago in December 1979, when the former Soviet Union invaded the country. The human toll of the conflict is staggering: More than a million Afghans have been killed and 3 million maimed.
Five million (one third of the pre-war population) were forced to leave their country and became refugees. There are still 3.1 million Afghan refugees today, making up 27 percent of the global refugee population. Most of them live in Pakistan. Another two million Afghans were displaced within the country. In the 1980s, one out of two refugees in the world was an Afghan.
Most Afghans alive today have seen nothing but war.
Daily life in Afghanistan is miserable. Only six percent have electricity in a country which gets as cold as Chicago in winter. Even in Kabul, the country's capital, electricity comes for only a few hours a day. Traditional wood heating is difficult since not much wood is left in Afghanistan after 30 years of wars and forest devastation. Over 1,000 people died because of cold weather last year.
"About two million state school students do not have access to safe drinking water and about 75 percent of these schools in Afghanistan do not have safe sanitation facilities," according to the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF).
There is no law and order in most of Afghanistan. Government barely exists in Kabul. Former warlords are the leaders. That is demonstrated by the fact that "Afghanistan is the world's largest cultivator and supplier of opium (93 percent of the global opiates market), according to the [Afghanistan Opium Survey 2008] by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime." [A British daily paper] actually reported that "the four largest players in the heroin business are all senior members of the Afghan government."
The Taliban, which has lost its legitimacy due to its brutality, are sometimes remembered by Afghans as those who brought peace to Afghanistan...
Historically, for many reasons, Afghanistan has always been a tough place to live -- it is mountainous, with extremes in weather, and hard to travel through...without the additional danger of longstanding tribal disputes and banditry that thrive in this inhospitable region. People traveled through Afghanistan, because it is a geographic cross-roads between the East and the West. In Afghanistan, it is easy to set up your own little tribal fiefdom on a hill and hide out or battle with your neighbors. So traditionally Afghanistan has been rife with conflict and petty wars, the poeple are highly independent, and have a code of honor that requires instant retribution for any slight. The people of Afghanistan also are renown for their hospitality and generosity, once you are known to them. Afghanistan, for all of these reasons, has chewed up numerous invading armies, and will continue to do so -- awash in enough guns, bombs, and explosives to fight on for at least a hundred years, or more.
ReplyDeleteOn the issue of life expectancy, it is good to approach the statistics given with caution, generally speaking.
ReplyDeleteWe are often told here in America how modern science and medicine have vastly extended our lifespans. Our recent (17th-19th C.) ancestors died at ages around those given for the Piraha and Afghans! What a marvelous thing modern medicine is!
Except that they don't explain how the numbers were derived. Factor out women who died in childbirth, plus infants and children who died before the age of five. If you made it past your fifth birthday, and you were able (if female) to survive the birthing process, you lived about as long then as we do now. This is what I once read.
And based on extensive genealogy research I have done (several thousand people), I absolutely believe that to be true. Though I haven't crunched the numbers, I suspect people in the mid-1800's to very early 1900's lived a little longer than we do now, barring the aforementioned issues.
Where American longevity is concerned, the numbers given are based on marketing, and manipulation of statistics. The primary advances in medicine, where they relate to longevity, have been in traum care, childbirth issues, control of infection in the young (and adults), and care of infants/young children.
That said, life for Afghans, many Iraqis, and a host of other people around the world is brutal. I have a coworker who endured two years of war in the former Republic of Georgia, my late Lithuanian Godmother spent a couple years of her childhood in a Nazi workcamp, and I have spent almost a year-and-a-half in war-torn Iraq. These places and environments definitely take their toll.
Short lifespans are often given for primitive tribes/ethnicities. I would suspect that factoring out the childbirth/infant mortality rates and care of trauma/post-trauma infection would increase the average lifespan in these areas to a surprising degree. Maybe not to the high sixties/seventies, but likely out of the forties. And yes, they often experience much greater quality of life than many in the "civilized" world. The reasons for that are something that needs(!!!) to be examined closely...
The only good thing about all of that is they can still experience happiness dispite their situations. That doesn't make it any less saddening.
ReplyDeleteIt does make me not take clean water for granted, I think that's a big reason for our heath being better.