I kept returning to the zoo -- no matter how heart-wrenching -- to try to understand what was happening to them. I thought they deserved our compassion, and I wanted to believe there was some semblance of hope for their tragic lives. Like almost all Kabul government employees, the small crew that runs the zoo has not been paid for months. Workers beg for money to support themselves and the animals.
The three caretakers who maintain the grounds and animals live in a tiny, dark room in a building riddled with artillery and bullet holes. They share their living quarters with colorful birds that fill the darkness with optimistic song.
But the Kabul Zoo is a place that stirs little optimism. During my first visit, Shiraga Omar, the zoo's director, had just returned from the butcher carrying a bucket of meat purchased at the local market with money donated by a British veterinarian.
Omar invited me along for the feeding.
Each carnivorous animal received an appropriately sized chunk of raw flesh. Today it was beef. Tomorrow, it may be lamb or chicken.
Omar walked from cage to cage, stuffing the pieces through large holes in the wire fence. A pair of wild cats that Omar couldn't quite identify but that resembled larger and fiercer versions of our own domestic cats, scrambled up their wire cage.
They hissed at each other and the large bird of prey in the next cage.
One of the cats limped around its urine-soaked cage with a mouthful of meat, fleeing the hungry advances of the other. Its right hind leg dangled.
Omar says it was injured in a metal trap when a poacher captured it for sale to the zoo.
The zoo is full of such scenes.
A bear with long black fur -- another species Omar was unable to identify -- furiously paced its cramped cage.
Blood and pus dripped from a nose wound some say was inflicted by the knife of a Taliban soldier. Others say the culprits were stick-wielding civilians.
Omar says he would like to get treatment for the bear, but it is a very dangerous animal and the zoo cannot afford a container to transport it, the equipment to subdue it or the personnel to handle it, much less the cost of treatment and medication.
A crowd of young men gathered around a small cage housing a male and female macaque. Boys poked sticks at the small gray primates as they tried to groom each other's dirt-caked coats and clean each other's wounds. Men dangled keys outside the cage, agitating the pair.
They threw rocks, trash and candy into the cage, all of which the macaques examined as though it might be something to eat.
A colleague asked Omar angrily why he allowed this to happen.
“What can we do?” he answered. “We can't even afford to pay the people who work here. We just don't have enough staff.”
Omar's response is understandable, but his inaction betrays a cultural difference between his attitudes toward the value and importance of the animals and our own.
He obviously cares for the animals and has made significant sacrifices to remain the zoo's director through hard times. But the teasing seems deeply ingrained and unlikely to change no matter how much money is donated to the zoo.
I talked about the situation at the zoo to colleagues who were covering the war and the reconstruction of Afghanistan. Their responses often seemed cold and cynical.
They believe too much attention is being paid to a story that seems unimportant in light of the hardships endured by a people who have known nothing but war, poverty and suffering for decades.
They explained that generations of children who have been born into violence and loss have had no say over their own fates, no choice in the lives they have been forced to live.
I agreed completely. But like the children, the animals also have had no choice in their fates.
These animals are captives in cold, bleak cages littered with excrement and urine. They are imprisoned by a culture that seems incapable of recognizing their value or purpose.
They have little to live for.
Recent events in Afghanistan have given me some hope for the Afghan people. There may be real prospects for peace and a gradual rise from the depths of poverty, violence and despair.
But when I think of Marjan, and the animals who survive him at the Kabul Zoo, I cannot feel that same sense of optimism.
