Afghanistan remembers Japan’s Tetsu Nakamura, the slain doctor who brought water to thousands

Nakamura had worked in the country for more than three decades, helping secure clean water and irrigate arid land by building canals

His killing saw an outpouring of grief in Afghanistan, where an estimated 2 million people in 2018 lost secure access to food due to drought

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A mural dedicated to Tetsu Nakamura in Kabul following his killing last inDecember. 2019. Photo: Ezzatullah Mehrdad

Published: 2:00pm, 19 Jan 2020Updated: 2:00pm, 19 Jan 2020

Shafiq Did not know if he would never go home again, after escaping war in Afghanistan for a life in the refugee camps of Peshawar, Pakistan. The United States toppled the Taliban government in 2001, but even then his home country was in the grip of a terrible drought. By 2006, however, Shafiq had found hope enough to return – as a result of Dr Tetsu Nakamura’s efforts to bring water to Afghanistan’s previously dry lands.

For nearly 30 years, Nakamura worked and lived in Afghanistan, helping Afghans beat drought and disease. Thanks to his efforts, people like Shafiq can support themselves and their family; in once-desiccated Kuz Kunar, in the country’s Nangarhar province, the 40-year-old now grows radishes, onions and carrots.

Unlike many other Afghan men, who are reliant on their children’s labour to escape poverty, Shafiq’s children study in the local school and sometimes help him sell radishes on the side of a road.

But he was “shattered”, he said, on December 4 last year, when he heard the news: Nakamura had been shot in Jalalabad, the capital of Nangarhar.

“When we learned that Dr Nakamura was injured, the entire village was praying, asking God to bring him back even if he was dead,” said Abdul Wali Jabarghil, 48, a resident of Kuz Kunar. “It felt like we lost a brother, a father.”

Shafiq works on a radish field in Kuz Kunar, Afghanistan, an area that was dry before Tetsu Nakamura’s canal arrived. Photo: Ezzatullah Mehrdad

Afghanistan remembers Japan’s Tetsu Nakamura, the slain doctor who brought water to thousands

Nakamura had worked in the country for more than three decades, helping secure clean water and irrigate arid land by building canals His killing saw an outpouring of grief in Afghanistan, where an estimated 2 million people in 2018 lost secure access to food due to drought

Nakamura had worked in the country for more than three decades, helping secure clean water and irrigate arid land by building canals

His killing saw an outpouring of grief in Afghanistan, where an estimated 2 million people in 2018 lost secure access to food due to drought