Haidar Ali is a carpet maker with a loom in his house in Kale Fatullah District, Kabul. He started making carpets as a child at home, 23 years ago. A carpet company near his home gave his family a loom, the wool and the patterns and the whole family worked on it, an ideal solution to the difficulties faced by working women who need to take care of children. In those days they used silk and wool imported from Belgium, but nowadays only Afghan wool from Ghazni is available. However in recent years the quality of Ghazni wool has improved considerably (accounting for the fact that Ghazni wool continued to be exported to the Pakistan carpet factories after the looms moved there during the war years) and the spinning process has also been upgraded. Before the civil wars of the 1990s the designs came from Bokhara and Iran but now they have their own pattern makers. Haidar Ali spent nine years in Pakistan with the same company. It was the only one that sold independently to the foreign market and the only one at that time to use natural dyes. Most of the Afghan factories in Pakistan don’t have a representative abroad and many of these carpet companies make very low quality carpets that are sold only in Central and South Asia.

When the Interim Government re-established the schools, Haidar Ali decided to return home with his family. Now although he insists that his children attend school they still help in their free time. His dream is to see them in a profession, but after so many years of turmoil he insists that they must also know how to make carpets. ‘There is always a job for carpet makers, and anyway it’s Afghan culture and no one knows whether or not the future will be peaceful’. A woollen carpet of 12 square metres takes five people 45 days to make and they receive $400 for it. A silk carpet of three square metres takes three people three months and they make $800. Since the company supplies the raw material and looms they have no investment.