Yalda Hakeem's return to Afghanistan: unpaid employees and crisis-affected innocent children
The BBC's Yalda Hakeem was born in Afghanistan. His family fled the country during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in 1980. However, she has been reporting from Afghanistan ever since. Now, once again, she has returned to her homeland for the first time, almost 100 days after the Taliban took over Afghanistan.
I knew that returning to my homeland for the first time since the Taliban took over Afghanistan in August this year would raise many questions for me.
What has changed in the Afghan nation since the Taliban ousted the Western-backed government? Has the Afghan people finally got the peace they have been waiting for? And what will be the future of the women and girls here under the Afghan Taliban, who have already been pushed back into the realm of everyday life?
However, I never thought that I would have to ask myself a question, how much courage does it take to come to work in such a situation when you are not even getting paid?
But I got the answer to that question. From health officials in Kandahar to cleaners in Kabul's hospitals, none of Afghanistan's public health staff has been paid since the fall of the former Afghan government and the suspension of foreign aid.
For all these reasons, they still come to work on a daily basis to take care of the increasingly anxious population, even though they themselves are on the brink of despair.
Nasreen works as a janitor at the Indira Gandhi Children's Hospital in the capital, Kabul.
They told me, "If we don't come to work, these kids will die. How can we leave them alone?"
Children's wards need to be kept as clean as possible to ensure that patients admitted here who are weak and severely malnourished do not suffer from any major illness.
Nasreen says she can't afford the transport fare, so she walks to work. It is a very difficult journey that takes place on the slopes of the mountains. And then, after a 12-hour shift, she climbs the mountain again and goes home.
No matter how bad the health staff members are, the patients they care for are even worse off.
The United Nations says about 23 million Afghans are severely malnourished and 95% of the population is malnourished.
In the hospital wards that Nasreen cleans, you can see the most innocent and small victims of this crisis.
One of them is three-year-old Gulnara who is so weak that she can hardly open her eyes. His eyes are sunken in, his hair is disheveled. When she wakes up she cries in pain.
Severe malnutrition in Afghanistan is affecting children in this way.
Sohail Shaheen, a spokesman for the Taliban's political office, blamed the international community for all this and told me that the suffering of the Afghan people was due to the actions of Western countries.
"If they say the country (Afghanistan) is heading for disaster, hunger, a humanitarian crisis, then it is their responsibility to take action because the right steps can prevent all these crises."
He added that "the international community and other countries that are talking about human rights should consider taking steps to address the growing humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan."
You may or may not accept their analysis as to who is to blame, but most observers will agree that the solution lies in international funding.
When it comes to the country's economy, it becomes even clearer. When international aid is cut off, the country's economy collapses.
"I was working at a brick kiln," said one man waiting for a job on the side of the road. At that time my monthly salary was 25,000 Afghanis. But now I can't even earn two thousand a month. '
All four of their children at home are sick and have no money to buy medicine. "I don't see a future, poor families have no future," he told me