Standing in a room full of ballot boxes, Afghan election officials are locked in debate over how many donkeys are needed to deliver voting papers to remote villages for today’s parliamentary poll.
“I think we need four donkeys for every polling center, right?” said Abdul Hameed, one of the field coordinators for the vote, who manages to win his three colleagues around after 10 minutes of careful calculation.
Donkeys play a central role in village life — beasts of burden in a country that in many ways has remained unchanged for centuries.
As Afghanistan moves along the path toward democracy, donkeys are playing no less an important part in ensuring every eligible man and woman gets to cast their vote.
About 10.5 million Afghans are eligible to vote for almost 2,500 candidates contesting 249 seats in the lower house of parliament, the Wolesi Jirga, in the war-torn country’s second parliamentary election in almost 40 years.
While helicopters will be dispatched to move materials to about 20 percent of polling centers nationwide, the Independent Election Commission (IEC) overseeing the poll said many are reachable only by donkey.
“More than 900 donkeys will take over from trucks along otherwise impassable tracks and roads,” the IEC said in a statement.
In this landlocked, impoverished country, many people live in remote and isolated valleys that can only be accessed on foot or by donkey and where distance is not measured in kilometers, but in hours and days.
Many of the people who eke out a living in these regions suffer from Afghanistan’s lack of good roads — which goes hand-in-hand with a lack of schools, healthcare and most trappings of modernity — and without the donkeys they would be unable to cast their ballot.
In peaceful northern Panjshir Province, election materials have begun their long and arduous journey along a newly-built US-funded sealed road that runs to Dara district center at the foot of a mountain abutting a narrow valley pass.
It was at this point, days ago, that thousands of ballot papers were loaded onto trucks, along with the white plastic boxes, desks and chairs that will furnish the polling centers set up in the lee of the craggy mountain passes.
From there, they traveled through the valley along a short dirt road heading toward a sprinkling of tiny Afghan villages.
At the end of the road — where the path ends, power lines disappear, mobile phone signals fail — the donkeys take over.
To make sure transport was adequate, election officials in Dara sent a man into nearby villages to rent the 16 donkeys they finally agreed would be needed to ensure that all the villages in the valley got everything they needed.
Most of the donkeys will have carried their burdens for more than 50km along goat tracks and hilly passes to reach polling centers yesterday, before today’s vote.
When polling closes the ballot boxes will be sealed and loaded back onto the donkeys for the return journey, ahead of preliminary results that officials have said will be released within weeks.
Final certified results are expected on Oct. 31.
Polling is planned at 5,816 centers across Afghanistan, though more than 1,000 polling stations will stay shut because security in war-wracked regions cannot be guaranteed, the IEC said.
The Taliban has threatened to attack polling stations, saying that election officials and security forces would be their primary targets and warning civilians to stay way, but while security may shutter some polling stations, donkeys and helicopters are being deployed to ensure that all Afghans get a chance to participate in their infant democracy.
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