Shepherds in Afghanistan

In the summer of 2001 photographer Robert Knoth and writer Antoinette de Jong traveled for weeks around the remote areas of northern Afghanistan where the population was suffering from a severe drought. In 2009, they revisited the same district of Shahr-e-Bozorg to try and find the families they had met eight years earlier. They found many of the people they interviewed and portrayed earlier and saw how rehabilitation programs had made a huge difference to their lives. But this spring, as northern Afghanistan was hit by extreme storms, rainfall and flooding for many weeks, much of the hard work that was done in recent years was falling apart yet again. Houses and schools collapsed, roads were disrupted or completely disappeared by landslides, and drinking water systems were polluted and destroyed. Climate change and overpopulation are causing erosion and a collapse of the fragile livelihoods for the majority of rural Afghans.