Family members work together to move the threshing board from the wheat they are threshing. Living in one of the most remote places on Earth the people of the Wakhan rely on family and community to survive year to year.

Tajik soldiers patrol the Panj River that cuts through the middle of the Wakhan and separates Tajikistan and Afghanistan. Though this stretch of Tajikistan is not part of the Pamir highway, which is nicknamed the Heroin Highway, it is continually patrolled, because of the drug trafficking from Afghanistan through Tajikistan. When asking about Afghanistan, locals would point across the river and give a thumbs down.

Donkeys are used to thresh wheat in a mountainside village near Zong. Extended family and village members all participate in the harvest together. The donkeys are driven in teams, their hooves crushing the grain and removing the seed heads from the stalks. It can take weeks for a family to completely thresh their wheat harvest. The Panj River and the Hindu Kush of Afghanistan are in the background.

Three generations: Two men take their turn to rest during the threshing and winnowing of harvest time, while a child plays and a lone donkey is given a brief reprieve. Man and beast work, sweat and rest in rotation. Boys wrestle on their breaks, and during lunches fathers share stories over nan, tomatoes and tea.

The sun sets on an Afghan village in the Wakhan. Sheaves of wheat sit in harvested fields waiting to be threshed.

Men use pitchforks to winnow the chaff and wheat seed from the stalk, while the donkeys rest. They take turns winnowing while younger boys take turns driving the donkeys. After the donkeys thoroughly thresh the wheat the stalks are removed and the remaining chaff and seed are gathered together and winnowed. The pitchforks are then used to toss the wheat into the air, allowing the mountain breeze to carry the chaff away as the wheat grain falls back to earth.

A Wakhi man proudly shows off his pitchfork fashioned from two wooden branches and a few pieces of wire.

Two friends relax while their fathers and older brothers load wheat sheaves onto a trailer.

A Wakhi girl sits on a small, rented threshing machine. The wagon next to her was loaded with the left over wheat chaff, which will be used to feed her family’s livestock through the winter. Cows graze in the harvested fields between piles of dried wheat sheaves waiting to be threshed.

A man in Vrang village throws a sheaf of wheat into the feeding hole of a small harvesting machine. The machine will allow him to thresh all of his wheat in one or two days. The chaff is blown out a discharging port while the heavier seeds fall through a sieve and out a lower discharge channel. The chaff blown out the top discharge port forms a pile on the ground in front of the harvester and is easily collected into bags. While this is the most efficient method of threshing in the Wakhan, it also appeared to be the loneliest. We often saw men working harvesters alone. The machines are rented for 10% of the family’s harvest.

Donkeys in the remote Wakhan remain an important beast of burden, still used for transportation, caravanning, and threshing wheat. Surrounded by desolate barren mountains, the Wakhan Valley is surprisingly fertile and comes to life during the fall harvest. With the donkeys tethered together at the neck, family members take turns driving them in circles as their small hooves crush and thresh the wheat.

An old Soviet van is used to transport this portable threshing machine. While machinery has greatly improved the efficiency of harvest threshing in the Wakhan, its other influences are also seen: broken down and abandoned tractors and trucks that lack the hardware or knowledge to be fixed.

Fuel for machines is scarce in the region. This fuel station is located at the merging points of the Panj and Pamir River, and is the only one we came across in the remote Wakhan. It is a small concrete bunker with a fifty-five gallon drum of petrol, which a man pumps fuel out of and into a bucket to be poured through a funnel and into a vehicle.

While girls could be seen wandering around the harvest fields, women were largely absent. Here, on a rare occasion, a woman accompanies her husband; standing at the rear of an old Soviet van she watches him feed wheat stalks into a threshing machine.

A man in Yamchun village pauses from his pitchfork work to wave a greeting. His tool is fastened from two sticks.

Brothers, cousins, and friends break bread together. Fall harvest in the Wakhan Valley is a time of fellowship. Community meal times are abundant in villages that used donkeys or tractors for threshing. Not being as noisy as the threshing machines, the villages have a more playful and welcoming atmosphere. Since men and boys work in shifts they relax, talk and play games together when it is their time to rest.

A man shows off the first fruits of his hard labor.

Grain rattles out of a threshing machine and into a container, while a child digs out a few pieces of wheat grain for a small snack. The noise of the machine made it difficult to talk when standing near it, so men often worked at the machines alone.

A boy struggles to move one of his family’s donkeys, reluctant to get back to the threshing work that awaits it. When stubborn donkeys refuse to cooperate, the young boys use whips to drive the teams onward over the piles of wheat being threshed.

The last sun rays of the afternoon paint the outer wall of a house in Darshai village. The villages sit in the stark contrast of dry barren mountains, and the fertile valley fed by the Panj and Pamir Rivers.

The young boy in the village of Langar speaks Russia, English, Wakhi, and Tajik. He was eager to be our translator, tour guide, and host. He even convinced us to buy his hat, which he was quite proud of. He’s an example of the future that awaits him and his peers, a future that wasn’t available to their fathers. Increased tourism in the area has already seen the establishment of local guesthouses set up through foreign aid.

After a long day in the fields, the principal of the village school in Langar snuggles with his daughter in the evening air as she plays with her doll.

Hot, salty milk tea. Hospitality is the marrow of culture in the Wakhan, and tea is at its center. A son serves tea to his guests in his father’s house. The Cultural Revolution changed the culture of the world forever, and continues to change the world as global development and geo-politics reach into the farthest reaches of the globe. The question of modernization is not a question of if, but when and how. The change will come, and the changes most notable will be on the surface. A threshing machine instead of a donkey, time will tell the real impact such changes will have on culture, and how community value and participation are affected.