<div style="text-align: justify; "><span style="font-size: 1rem;"><b>Afghans are giving their hungry children medicines to sedate them - others have sold their daughters and organs to survive. In the second winter since the Taliban took over and foreign funds were frozen, millions are a step away from famine.</b></span><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"Our children keep crying, and they don't sleep. We have no food," Abdul Wahab said.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"So we go to the pharmacy, get tablets and give them to our children so that they feel drowsy."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">He lives just outside Herat, the country's third largest city, in a settlement of thousands of little mud houses that has grown over decades, filled with people displaced and battered by war and natural disasters.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Abdul is among a group of nearly a dozen men who gathered around us. We asked, how many were giving drugs to their children to sedate them?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"A lot of us, all of us," they replied.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Ghulam Hazrat felt in the pocket of his tunic and pulled out a strip of tablets. They were alprazolam - tranquilisers usually prescribed to treat anxiety disorders.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Ghulam has six children, the youngest a year old. "I even give it to him," he said.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Others showed us strips of escilatopram and sertraline tablets they said they were giving their children. They are usually prescribed to treat depression and anxiety.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Doctors say that when given to young children who do not get adequate nutrition, drugs such as these can cause liver damage, along with a host of other problems like chronic fatigue, sleep and behaviour disorders.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">At a local pharmacy, we found that you can buy five tablets of the drugs being used for 10 Afghanis (about 10 US cents), or the price of a piece of bread.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Most families we met were sharing a few pieces of bread between them each day. One woman told us they ate dry bread in the morning, and at night they dipped it in water to make it moist.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The UN has said a humanitarian "catastrophe" is now unfolding in Afghanistan.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">A majority of the men in the area outside Herat work as daily wage labourers. They have been leading difficult lives for years.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But when the Taliban took over last August, with no international recognition for the new de-facto government, foreign funds flowing into Afghanistan were frozen, triggering an economic collapse which left the men with no work on most days.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">On the rare day they do find work, they make roughly 100 Afghanis, or just over $1 (£0.83).</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Everywhere we went, we found people being forced to take extreme steps to save their families from hunger.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Ammar (not his real name) said he had surgery to remove his kidney three months ago and showed us a nine-inch scar - stitch marks still a bit pink - running across his abdomen from the front of his body to the back.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">He's in his twenties, in what should have been the prime of his life. We're hiding his identity to protect him.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"There was no way out. I had heard you could sell a kidney at a local hospital. I went there and told them I wanted to. Some weeks later I got a phone call asking me to come to the hospital," he said.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"They did some tests, then they injected me with something that made me unconscious. I was scared but I had no option."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Ammar was paid about 270,000 Afghanis ($3,100) for it, most of which went into repaying money he had borrowed to buy food for his family.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"If we eat one night, we don't the next. After selling my kidney, I feel like I'm half a person. I feel hopeless. If life continues like this, I feel I might die," he said.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Selling organs for money is not unheard of in Afghanistan. It used to happen even before the Taliban takeover. But now, even after making such a painful choice, people are finding that they still cannot find the means to survive.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In a bare, cold home we met a young mother who said she sold her kidney seven months ago. They also had to repay debt - money they had borrowed to buy a flock of sheep. The animals died in a flood a few years ago and they lost their means of earning a living.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The 240,000 Afghanis ($2,700) she got for the kidney are not enough.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"Now we are being forced to sell our two-year-old daughter. The people we have borrowed from harass us every day, saying give us your daughter if you can't repay us," she said.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"I feel so ashamed of our situation. Sometimes I feel it's better to die than to live like this," her husband said.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Over and over again, we heard of people selling their daughters.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"I sold my five-year-old daughter for 100,000 Afghanis," Nizamuddin said. That's less than half what a kidney goes for, according to what we found on the ground. He bit his lip, and his eyes welled up.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The dignity that people here led their lives with has been broken by hunger.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"We understand it's against Islamic laws, and that we're putting our children's lives in danger, but there's no other way," Abdul Ghafar, one of the heads of the community, said. BBC</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify; ">bnbd24/kh</div>