“As Long as We Can Work, We Can Live”- Gul Bashra's return to her homeland

After spending 12 years in Gojar Khan, Pakistan, Gul Bashra, a 25-year-old mother of 4, was forced to return to her home in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. Gul Bashra was married off to her cousin at the young age of 19 and lived with him, his first wife, and their six children. Their life was not easy, but it was all she knew. Her husband, a daily wage laborer, earned just 9,000 Pakistani rupees a month—barely enough for food. Gul Bashra endured this life on the edge of poverty and bore four children. Sadly, one of them passed away in early childhood.

As political pressure mounted on refugees and undocumented Afghanistan's living in Pakistan, Gul Bashra's fragile life unraveled. One night, the police came and detained the entire family.

“They told us we didn’t belong there and took us all to jail,” she recalled. “We were locked up for four nights—our children were scared and crying.”

They were only released after paying 375,000 PKR—a  sum borrowed in desperation from relatives. Now heavily in debt, and suckling her youngest child, Gul Bashra and her family had to make the journey to their homeland, in irony, a journey into the unknown. 

Her husband had no home, and no welcoming family to take his wives and children to in Afghanistan. The stress of their predicament took a toll on his health, and he developed kidney problems.

Back in Jalalabad, the large family of nine rented a single room for 1,000 AFN. Her husband could no longer work. With no income and young children to feed- the opportunity to earn an income working on the CRLP site was a true lifeline. Gul Bashra, who had never had a job in her life, convinced her sister wife to care for their husband and children whilst she became a laborer under the project.

“On my first day I was really nervous,” she said. “But I knew I had no choice. We came back with nothing. But if there’s work, there’s a way forward for us.”

Gul Bashra is now using her wages to pay rent, buy food for the family and medicine for her husband. 

The Community Resilience and Livelihoods Project (CRLP) has supported more than 3,372 returnees to restart their lives. The interventions include short-term employment through small-scale community works, distribution of food packages or cash assistance, capacity-building training, and home-based solutions such as kitchen gardening. These efforts aim to restore dignity, create income, and build pathways to medium-term resilience for some of the country’s most vulnerable populations — people like Gul Bashra, who return not just with memories of foreign lands, but with a strong desire to rebuild their lives in the homeland .

*Name changed to protect the subject's privacy.