Afghans: Four Glimpses

Dear Everyone,

keep praying for us here in Faizabad. we have been working through some tough team dynamics.

as a gift for me, there are three guys at another NGO here, who are all my age, and believe similar things, and who have befriended me. Seth, Daniel, and DJ. they have become my haven if I need one.

for my birthday, which is this month, I would like to return to Taloqan for Easter. It will take some money, and I am rather tight right now since I must pay for some of my living costs here due to the limited funding for the Faizabad projects. But if I can wish for something, that is it. I need about 200 USD to fly there and back.

I want to thank all you for remembering me, and I have to apologize for not writing back to many of you who have written me. You are still a great source of strength, and I want to be sure you know that, even if I haven't thanked you personally. To get email in the morning can spark up my whole day.

This week I thought I would tell you about some of the people who have become my friends. In the end, after you have been in a place for a while, you realize that the essence of a place is not in the scenery, or in the little vignettes, but in the people who live there. So I will show you the people, and they will show you Afghanistan.



Haleem khan.

He is small and thin. He has a skin pigment deficiency, so his face has dark and white blotches. This, along with his impish features and bright eyes, gives him the appearance of a gremlin.

His English is the best of all the staff in Faizabad. He is always ready for a joke. He will gently make fun of Joyce’s accent, of Sue’s insistence on cleanliness in a country made of dust: "I tell her, we cannot wash dirt off walls, miss sue, the walls, they ARE dirt!" With the other guys, he tells them in Persian and has them all laughing. He works hard and doesn't lack confidence, despite his size.

Twice when we've been out walking, we have met children he knows, from his family. He picks up the small ones, gives them kisses, tucks money into the hands of their older sisters. Once we met his wife on the road. He gave her money. "For medicine," he told me, "my baby is sick." He is matter of fact; sickness here is a matter of fact. I have not asked him about his family, how many children he has, how many he has lost before they reached a year. I never saw his wife, and she walked away, burqa billowing. Men do not introduce their wives on the street, and strangers do not talk to them.

When we are at the office, haleem is busy, cleaning, fetching water, getting tea. But in the down times, in the pauses of the day, I have seen him squatting at the edge of the porch, still as a gargoyle, looking out to nowhere. I have seen him standing at the gate like a father waiting for the prodigal son to come home, watching the street. I sometimes ask him in Persian: "che feker mekoni?" what are you thinking? He tells me he is wondering if it will rain, or watching the people come home from work. But I wonder. He is 42 years old, which means he was a child in a peaceful Afghanistan and as a young man saw, it destroyed.

Did he see the Russian tanks lined up at every Buzkashi match, every celebration? Did he see the hills he stares at now erupt with the bombs? Has he seen the crops burn, the trees cut down, his children lose their legs to the Russian mines that fell like rain from the Russian planes? Has he seen his friends taken away, his sisters executed to justify soviet suspicion? And does he grieve now for his city? Does he see the children working in the poppy fields, the warlords and priests lining their own pockets while women die in childbirth at an astonishing rate, children starve, and men crumble with helplessness to prevent any of this? Is this what he sees, when he looks into nothing?

I don't know. He doesn't say. Aloud, he only wonders if it will rain.


Zuhoorullah.

Zuhoor is young, younger than I am. He is part of the new generation of Afghanistan, English-speaking, educated in Pakistan during the war, in love with money, and girls, and all things western. He understands Afghanistan, but not in the deep way that the older men do. Their hearts know the pulse of this land; he knows how to find things in the bazaar. He is a wise guy, a young blade, he smokes and wears western clothes and sings songs about girls. He doesn't care about politics, he cares about weekends.

And he is funny. He is quick with a joke. I convince him to make a numbered to-do list for each day. I motivate him by telling him that if he does it all on his own without me reminding him that I will give him the poster of a young Indian pop starlet. I show him a little of the poster each day, and by day two he has seen the top of her head and her hairline. He goes through a show of agony when I lock it up again in the drawer. Finally, he earns the poster, and takes the to-do list to heart. Now when I ask him to do something, he makes a big deal of looking at his to-do list and tells me seriously - before cracking up - that I am number seven. If it is a hard task, he tells me I am number thirty-one.

He does his job well. His job is to be in charge of the office and get things done. He takes pride in knowing how to do everything, how to find what we need in the bazaar, how to make a deal. He wears his coat draped over his shoulders like a mafia don. He keeps his beard to the minimum required, and would rather not have it at all. His head is full of plans to go to university in Europe or America. Advancement and dancing are on his mind.

And this is all I see of him until my last night in Taloqan, when he brings up the subject of girls. Is it ok, he asks me, to have a girlfriend in one place and meet another girl somewhere? We spend a bashful time clarifying what he means by "meet" and then I pause. He is asking me if what he sees in the movies, on television, what he sees as an American way of behaving is ok. Is it all right to cheat? I ask him how he would feel if his girlfriend "met" another boy while he was at work. He would be very angry, he says, he would want to kill that boy, he would want to kill her. This may be an expression, as it is in the west, to want to "kill" someone, but here I think it actually happens. I ask if his girlfriend knows that he has been "meeting" another girl. No, he says. How would she feel if she knew, I ask. He looks down, his brow furrows. I understand, he says, you are right.

But it is hard. He is desirable. He has money and English and computer skills. He is funny, he is a catch. And he has desires. Girls come to him, he tells me, and it is hard to say no. He doesn't say no. He will start to, he tells me, and then stops. But it is hard, he says.

In a way, he is like any college kid, struggling with desire and morality. Western ways entice him with the whole world. I am afraid for him. Will he be left with only cigarettes and smooth talk? Will that be the legacy of his advancement? America promises much and delivers little to young men like Zuhoor. The old men of Afghanistan are also afraid. Will there be anyone to take their place, to shoulder their concern for what is right in Afghanistan when they are gone?

Zuhoor will answer this question for us all one day. I hope he keeps joking, I hope he does his job well, I hope he remembers our conversation. I hope he looks down and furrows his brow before he answers.


Khalid aseer.

Khalid (pronounced HH-alid, with a throaty H) is my age. He is short, like most Afghans, and a little round. Sometimes he wears a waistcoat and a small toque pulled down over his ears, which gives him a hobbitish look, but most often he wears a tasteful leather jacket and leaves his head uncovered. He looks very serious at first, and sets his face in a neutral position. He gives nothing away. One time I was asking him if he had received the quilts from his supplier. Yes, he said. Did you pay him? I asked. Who? He asked. But he is serious about his work. He ruffles at any hint that he may not be doing his job correctly. And to be fair, I never saw him make a mistake.

He warmed slowly to me, but once he did, there was no cooling. When he knew I was leaving, he would look at me sometimes in the middle of some work we were doing and say, "you should not go to Faizabad; you should be here." He would always say that I was the boss, and insist that I go through doors ahead of him. But later, with a devilish gleam in his eye, he would offer me the open doorway and say, "ladies first." So serious Khalid knew a joke when he found one.

Khalid was the first afghan to hold my hand. Men do this with their friends here, and they REALLY do it. In the west there is a way to hold hands if you are friends and a way to hold hands if you are dating. Men here do it the dating way, which is a little surprising the first time it happens.

Twice when I was in bed, reading, he knocked on my door. He came over just to talk, he said. I asked what he usually did in his room before going to sleep (he lives away from his family). "I think," he said. "Last night I went to Kabul, and to see my mother and father, all by thinking." His mother and father are both sick. He took a week off once to take his mother to another town to see a doctor there. He provides for his whole family with his salary, and he hopes one day to save enough to go to Kabul University. What will you study, I ask. Law, he says, and politics. I hope he does, because he has integrity. He does not want more money, he told me, he does not want power like everyone else. He wants to do his job well.

I asked him about the war. Did he fight, I asked, thinking that the answer would be no; he looks like Bilbo Baggins, for heaven's sake. But I am surprised. He did fight, he fought the Taliban, everyone did. He, and every other able boy, carried a gun and sat in the trenches for one month. Every village had a draft. Was he scared? I asked. Of course, he said, I was very much afraid. He told me that sometimes there was no food, no water, no sleep, and the Taliban were always coming and shelling and shooting. But we killed them, he says, we killed hundreds of them. When he talks about the Taliban, his eyes have a fierce light. Was there no choice, was there no other way to get rid of them? I asked him once. He looked at me sharply. We had to fight, he said, there is no choice.

He has buried seventeen of his own family because of the war. His sisters are uneducated because the mujaheddin - the same who fought the Russians, fought the Taliban - would shoot girls for going to school. He does not like to watch war movies, he prefers romances. I have seen too much fighting, he says. He is a most unlikely warrior. You’d call him gentle. But still there is that ferocity that comes to his eye. He makes me wonder what I would do if I were pushed, if I had no choice.

Afghanistan follows the ancient way of dividing men, rather than the soul, into good and evil. Khalid is a good man. I hope he is still able to distinguish the evil men from the good, even when his eyes burn with what he has seen.


Engineer Kaiwan.

Engineer Kaiwan has lost all his teeth. We got the cook to serve him beans because he can't chew the meat. His knee is bad, and he limps. He wears glasses and the prescription sticker is still on one lens. He writes with a mechanical pencil and the leads are cheap and keep breaking. Every afternoon after work, he has two chocolate bars and a cup of tea.
He works, and lives, and sleeps away from his wife and family. When it rains the room he sleeps in leaks. And engineer Kaiwan will give his whole life to help Afghanistan, because it is his country, and these people are his people.

When I came to Taloqan, I had no idea how to do this work. I don't know how to build a road, or build a house. I don't know how to keep supplies flowing to works sites. I am 29 years old, and engineer Kaiwan is over 50, but two weeks after I came to Taloqan, I was his boss. The older engineers in this country have to put up with this, because we represent the NGOs and the NGOs represent the only money that will help them rebuild their country. So I did the only thing I knew how to do, which is ask a lot of questions. Where is the road? How long is it? How do you build it? What do you need? Sometimes I asked the same question three times. Then I would apologize for being so slow to catch on. He could have had many responses, impatience and disgust being two of the most obvious given the situation. But he would get this look of absolute delight, he would light up like an inner-city schoolteacher who has found a student who likes Shakespeare, and he would tell me: ask all the questions you have, ask a hundred questions.

So I did. I asked him everything.

He wants to see democracy in Afghanistan. He wants villages to have roads, and children to have schools. He wants to see intelligent people in government and not men with guns. He wants men and women to be free to live by their own beliefs and not in fear of the mullahs. He wants to see and end to the fighting that has destroyed his people for his whole lifetime. He is one of the older generation, educated before the Russians came, before the Taliban, before the warlords and extremists inherited power in the wake of war. He sees the young men enticed by power, by the quick ways of the world around them. He knows that democracy and development take time, years, and that they do not happen without the dedicated few who pour their lives into the foundation of these things. Everywhere he goes, he speaks to his people, to educate them, to persuade them to listen, to help them find their own freedom. When he is home, when he is eating with his wife, when they are going to bed, his mind turns these things over and over, and his wife chides him for being somewhere else and not with her. So I say to her I will stop, he tells me. But how can I stop? he says. He does not stop, he lies awake with it while she sleeps. He carries it with him everywhere.

Once we had a long debate in the lunchroom, and when we were done he looked at me and said with a boyish smile, "You see, everybody has ideas. Ideas are not like... (he looks around, looks at the uncleared table) ...they are not like glasses, you can not just line them up."

People are not like glasses either, engineer Kaiwan, and we cannot line them up. They must line up for themselves. But sometimes they will follow men like you, quiet determined men, full of laughter, whose hearts are too big for this ruined place. Sometimes they will line up beside men like you.

I will.

Peace to you, and to all of us.

rjs