In ‘Memory Boxes,’ Afghans Memorialize Lives Lost to Violence

Elementary school pupil Saima was returning home from school when she passed by a suicide bomber and a truck packed with a gas canister in 2015. The explosion shattered her 8-year-old body. Saima’s family found her hands, but her legs were missing.

Saima’s everyday items remained at home. Saima’s family collected her doll, pink mirror, photo, school book, notebook, red dress, and colored pens to be placed in a hand-made glass box, called a “Memory Box,” at the Afghanistan Center for Dialogue and Memory.

The center, located in a rented basement in Kabul, is the first repository for memories of those who fell victim to Afghanistan’s decades of war. It exhibits everyday belongings — from scarves to poems — that illustrate the lives lost to violence in the past 40 years of conflict in Afghanistan. The center houses the memories of a small portion of the victims, hardly 8,000.Explanations on the wall claim that as many as 2 million Afghans were killed between 1978 and 2001; 90,000 more were killed and wounded since 2009. The center aims to avoid a “double catastrophe” — the first being the death of civilians in violent conflict and the second the “erasing” of those deaths from Afghanistan’s “collective memory.”