Armed with shovels, bags and flashlights, five students creep through a dark Kabul cemetery on a gruesome midnight hunt they hope will help them in their studies.
Lacking cash to buy medical skeletons, the medical students have been forced to extreme measures in order to continue the lessons they hope will turn them into Afghanistan's next generation of doctors.
With more than 80,000 people killed in the 1992-1996 civil war, many of the victims were hastily buried in this west Kabul cemetery and it is their bones the students search for to help them learn anatomy.
PHOTO: AFP
"It was a scary and risky thing to do," one of them said. "But we had no other choice, we were told we could not attend the next anatomy lesson if we didn't have skeletons.
"We knew we would have few facilities or permission to work on bodies for autopsy at our university, but at least by digging up graves we can find skeletons," he said.
Much has changed in Afghanistan since the fall of the hardline Islamic Taliban regime in late 2001, but for medical students, procuring a skeleton remains a major problem.
The Japanese government recently donated some much-needed anatomical models to Kabul University, including a male and a female skeleton and models of musculature and other organs.
But medical students still need to buy or otherwise obtain a skeleton for use during their course, an academic at the university's Medical Institute who requested anonymity said.
Lacking the funds to buy a set of bones, many students are forced to turn to desperate means to supply their need, second-year student Saleh Ahmad confirmed.
And outside the capital the situation is similar in medical schools in places like eastern Nangarhar.
"I still have my skeleton that me and my friends got from digging in Nangarhar province," first-year medical student Mohammed Rafi said. "Most students still have to provide skeletons for themselves."
Mohammed Shafi, who took part in a midnight skeleton grab four years ago, said then their institute did not have a single skeleton and they had little choice but to rob a grave and risk heavy punishment if caught by the Taliban.
Apart from the risk of being caught, their efforts were sometimes in vain.
"First we opened three graves and that was a useless effort -- they were too old and the bones had all worn out so we had to open several others," said Mohammed Homayoon. "Then we opened four graves and managed to get four sets of skeletons," he said.
Some of the bones bore the scars of the war-ravaged country's violent past.
One of the skulls they dug up was totally blackened, indicating the victim had been burned, he said.
"God knows how cruelly he was killed by fighters in the civil war," he said.
Once they had the bones in their possession, the students then had to clean, sterilize and varnish them. Without professional skills or equipment they undertook the grisly task in their homes.
"I was not aware that this boiling skeleton would make a terrible smell," Shafi said.
"My mother came out to the backyard and saw the skull and bones boiling in the pan with this terrible smell and when saw me and my friend standing there she immediately fainted."
Showcasing phallus-shaped portable shrines and pink penis candies, Japan’s annual fertility festival yesterday teemed with tourists, couples and families elated by its open display of sex. The spring Kanamara Matsuri near Tokyo features colorfully dressed worshipers carrying a trio of giant phallic-shaped objects as they parade through the street with glee. The festival, as legend has it, honors a local blacksmith in the Edo Period (1603-1868) who forged an iron dildo to break the teeth of a sharp-toothed demon inhabiting a woman’s vagina that had been castrating young men on their wedding nights. A 1m black steel phallus sits in the courtyard of
HIGH HOPES: The power source is expected to have a future, as it is not dependent on the weather or light, and could be useful for places with large desalination facilities A Japanese water plant is harnessing the natural process of osmosis to generate renewable energy that could one day become a common power source. The possibility of generating power from osmosis — when water molecules pass from a less salty solution to a more salty one — has long been known. However, actually generating energy from that has proved more complicated, in part due the difficulty of designing the membrane through which the molecules pass. Engineers in Fukuoka, Japan, and their private partners think they might have cracked it, and have opened what is only the world’s second osmotic power plant. It generates
JAN. 1 CLAUSE: As military service is voluntary, applications for permission to stay abroad for over three months for men up to age 45 must, in principle, be granted A little-noticed clause in sweeping changes to Germany’s military service policy has triggered an uproar after it emerged that the law requires men aged up to 45 to get permission from the armed forces before any significant stay abroad, even in peacetime. The legislation, which went into effect on Jan. 1 aims to bolster the military and demands all 18-year-old men fill out a questionnaire to gauge their suitability to serve in the armed forces, but stops short of conscription. If the “modernized” model fails to pull in enough recruits, parliament will be compelled to discuss the reintroduction of compulsory service, German
Hundreds of Filipinos and tourists flocked to a sun-bleached field north of Manila yesterday, on Good Friday, to witness one of the country’s most blood-soaked displays of religious fervor, undeterred by rising fuel prices. Scores of bare-chested flagellants with covered faces walked barefoot through the dusty streets of Pampanga Province’s San Fernando as they flogged their backs with bamboo whips in the scorching heat. Agence France-Presse (AFP) journalists said they saw devotees deliberately puncturing their skin with glass shards attached to a small wooden paddle to ensure their bleeding during the ritual, a way to atone for sins and seek miracles from
RSS