Missionaries

Dear Everyone,

I don't know what to write tonight. I will just let it come out, and you can have it between the eyes and respond or absorb or react as you see fit.

Tomorrow is my last day in Taloqan. On Friday, I go to Faizabad. I have found out this week that I will be teaching English. I will be designing my own curriculum, starting my own course when I am ready to do so. Faizabad is an unstructured environment, more like classic missionary work. I have just got comfortable with the hectic pace of the relief projects here in Taloqan. As the administrator, I could organize and order the little world of the office. It was overwhelming at first, but now I have it under control, and I am leaving. Now setting up my own English course seems overwhelming.

We have guests tonight, people from Faizabad. They talk about things like sharing testimonies, etc. I have just come from listening to our managing engineer pour his heart out to me about how much he loves his country, how hard it is to see it ruined and torn apart by people interested in power. He thinks about it all the time, thinks about solutions, what he can do. He says his wife catches him staring off into space at dinner, at bedtime, and she chides him to come back from where he has gone. Ok, he says, I will stop. But I can't stop, he tells me, who will help my people learn how to change? And last night my friend the office assistant talks to me about girls and struggles with temptation. He is a Muslim in an Islamic country, but he is also like 20 year olds everywhere, and life is a confusing place between desire and honour. I tell him he should treat his girlfriend as he would like to be treated... how would he like it if she were seeing another boy on the side? He considers what I say deeply, because I am his friend. They don't want me to leave. I don't want to leave. These are my friends. The guests, with all their missionary talk, feel like an invasion. They even have acronyms for potential converts. I feel like screaming at them, but instead I just get up and leave the room. Outside I feel like crying. How can I share beliefs with these people and feel so alien among them? Why would I put my whole life behind a man like Engineer Kaiwan, and not give a penny to these missionaries? I would rather be with my afghan friends, I feel closer to God with them. They pray five times a day, and not one of them has tried to make a Muslim of me. It’s not a question of religion, it's a matter of heart. My friends here simply have more of it. I want to go native.

I feel like a traitor with this email. Maybe it will do more damage to an already damaged body. I’m sorry. Perhaps I am here to learn to get along with missionaries. They seem so heartless to me. Their humour is stunted. These are people to make heaven seem dull. This is it: they seem more in love with their agenda than with the people themselves. Look at these Afghans! Listen to them! How can you not be in love with them?

I speak out of turn. I do not even know these missionaries. I judge quickly and harshly. But I cannot go easily from listening to a man so consumed with a desire to realize his dream of a free Afghanistan that he would give his whole life to do it, to a table where people are made into acronyms, and faith is passed around casually with the salt. May God judge me, but I cannot go easily with this.

Pray.

rjs