Leaving Faizabad
Dear Everyone,
“Our revels are now ended.”
This is the last newsletter. In three days I will get on a plane and leave Faizabad and head for home. Forgive me if I do not tell you exactly when I am arriving. I need some time alone when I get to Canada, to settle my soul and decide what to do next. And then, one day in late July, I will simply appear, like Captain Kirk and Spock always used to do on Star Trek.
In my last weeks here, I have turned the office over to Mark, who came here from New York with plenty of toys – among them two guitars. So we’ve been singing a lot. He can attract a crowd of children on the street like the Pied Piper, and I had the privilege of sitting in a dorm room in the local medical college with about 27 enraptured afghan students while Mark sang the theme song from Gilligan’s Island. Wouldn’t have guessed up THAT scenario, would you? And for the curious among you, dorm life in Afghanistan is remarkably as it is in western colleges: lots of sitting around listening to music, smoking, and talking about girls (I just assume the last bit, but I bet I’m right).
Money arrived for Halim. In order for Halim to be assured of our help, one very concerned person put up the whole amount, with the hope that more of you would continue to give if you had more time. I certainly hope you do, especially after seeing Halim when I gave him the money. There is not joy like this in anything else. We were sitting cross-legged on my floor and I counted it out in front of him, then handed it over. He raised both arms to heaven, looked up, and said:
“Thank you, thank you, thank you your father, your mommy, your uncles, Mr. Brad and Mrs. Janice, all my brothers in Canada, thank you your church… thank you, thank you very much… you help for me. I and my family is happy… we pray for you because you much helping for me. Thank you one world for you…my problem is finished.”
He insisted on taking me out for kebabs afterward. I’m sure he would have taken the whole lot of you out if you were here, even if he spent all the money you just gave him. He’s like that.
When school is finished for his children in two months, he will move his family to their new house in Khash, a smaller village a little ways outside of Faizabad. Most of his extended family live there so his wife and children will be close to them while he is away at work. In Afghanistan, he tells me, nobody helps you but your family. He told me he has a rich neighbour in his present house. That man, he said, shook his head and said, too bad Halim, but never offered to help. “ But,” he said to me, “you write one letter your church, your father, your mother, your uncles – and they never see me, never see my house, and they send money. Canadian people very good people.” I tell him that most times the rich do not help the poor in Canada either. He says he knows, but that you are very good people, and you are his Canadian family because you “help for him.” I think that your gifts really do mean a world to him. You are not a rich NGO handing out money, but real people who have no reason to care, no reason to help, and you do anyway. Yours are the actions of people, who, in the words of the old book, are “longing for a better country – a heavenly one.” And let me tell you, from the light in Halim’s eyes, I would say we all got a little closer to it. Well done.
So what I came to do here is finished. The days roll by me, and I think about what I’ve learned. Mark comes into the office and says in a small, calm voice: “I have to tell someone. Catherine Hepburn died.” There is a short pause, and without any change in expression he says, “African Queen… I love that movie.” Another pause, and then I say I feel like I’m in an episode of Frasier and we fall about laughing. Later that day, we watch the masons across the yard on the next roof. There are five of them there everyday, and I swear that wall never gets higher. It will take them nine hundred years to finish. We laugh about that too. It’s just too typical of this country, and you must laugh. One thing that I’ve learned is that you must laugh.
But there are things you can’t laugh at. Last week, we heard that a teacher in a village up the river had raped a little boy, and the father had taken the teacher, stripped him naked and dragged him through the streets, while children watched, until finally the men of the village stopped him. We heard that the father had said he would kill his boy as well, to get rid of the shame. This week, we have found out that the relative of one of our staff has cancer all through her body, and that there is no hope for life. She is a young mother, and she will leave two small children behind. Our friend, the only doctor working in the Wakhan - amongst people with the highest maternal mortality rate in the world - radios and tells us that the choice he faces most often is whether to save the mother or the child. Saving both is rarely an option. And some other friends have been trying to get funding for a program that would help traditional birth assistants recognize the early signs of complications in pregnancy, potentially saving many of these women. They said last week that UNICEF had just turned them down.
There are things that you can’t laugh about, things to make you feel absolutely helpless. Or frustrated and enraged if you know that they are things that could be helped. There is a desperation to this work, and you know in your soul that it is too much for you, it is too much for all of us. So here, I’ve learned about faith. Not faith in people or social programs or theories about how education will change the world – these are often good, but they are never enough. Not faith in the resources and goodwill and wisdom of so-called developed nations. Out here, I’ve learned to follow another faith, a hope ”for a better country,” yet unseen except in the glimpses of heaven I am given even here. I believe in the formula of a half-crazed Old Testament prophet: Live justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God. Here you are sunk if you don’t believe in something. I believe this:
One thing God has spoken,
Two things have I heard:
That you oh God are strong,
And that you oh Lord are loving.
Smile at my simplicity if you like, but having been here I’m convinced that this world only makes sense in the light of heaven, and heaven here awakens at our touch if we walk in the way of God. So I have learned to trust here as well.
When I came here, I came because it seemed like a practical way to help people. It is the kind of thing I understand. I don’t latch on to admonitions to preach the gospel, but when Jesus says that whatever you DO for the least of these, you do for me – that I understand. But there are people out here doing just that, and at the end of each furious day, they wonder what they’ve really done. All that seems to happen is that people become dependent rather than self-sufficient, selfish rather than concerned with community. At the end of the day when you walk home and all the kids on the street shout at you and ask for pens, it’s hard not to wonder if that’s really all you’ve done. Sure, you’ve built roads and houses, you’ve given out food and medicine, but people are not pulling together to rebuild their lives and their communities. They are buying up cell phones and TVs and radios and computers, and growing poppy on the side so that they can get even richer. They hide their rugs and pull down their window frames when you survey so they can accumulate more while the real poor continue to die. No one helps his neighbour, the government helps itself, and everyone looks to the UN to save them. Can we really say we’ve helped people, improved their lives, if all we have to show for it is lists and lists of distributions to impress the donors, and the fact that there are now more TVs in Faizabad? It all begs the question: what is an improved life, anyway? There are obvious things, like UNICEF’s lists of basic rights: people should be given the right to life, to health, to education, to food, etc… I still believe that we should do all these, that we should fight tooth and nail for the poor to have them.
But.
You see, there are other people in places like this, people who are concerned not just with the bodies of the Afghans, not just with their minds, but also with their souls. I know what some of you will say. I went to university, too. And even if I didn’t I could read what my opinion of these people should be in the most recent Time magazine: How intrusive and clumsy, how naïve at best, how damaging and bigoted at worst; we know better than to talk about souls and salvation, because we have education, birth control, political awareness, and recipes for social change. Right. Well, we’ve got all that coming here in spades. Everyone and their dog is coming up with pretty plans for all of this, wonderful ideas with brilliant prospects. So why are people as greedy now as they’ve always been (or more), as selfish, as grasping? Heck, we’ve got all these things in the West, we’ve had them for years – are we better people? More virtuous and kind? More noble and just? Have they made our hearts any different? Look, I can get angry about missionaries with the best of them, I can accuse them of hidden agendas and disrespect for culture and other religions, and so forth and so on. But your hear about things. You hear stories of communities transformed and lives changed and hope and prosperity where there was simply no earthly chance of it. And these are not UN initiatives, not development schemes based on up-to-date theories, not the result of social activism. These are the stories of people who had the crack-brained notion that God brings freedom and blessing, people who started out not by surveying and writing proposals, but by kneeling in darkened rooms. I don’t know what to make of this, but I must admit that having been around a bit of the block here, the idea of it is thrilling. Not that we should simply stop handing out food and doing surveys, but there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our philosophy. And I don’t put much stock in philosophy when children are dying. In Afghanistan I’ve learned that where evil grows close beside beauty it is wise to exercise humility and a strong sense of heaven. In other words, I’ve learned that you’d best pray.
And finally, it’s not a matter of religion here. It’s a matter of love. True religion is the practice of love. I won’t debate you on who’s right or wrong between Islam and Christianity. This country has at least it’s fair share of people going around saying “God, God, God,” while their neighbours die in ditches. We are not noble, or truthful, or free based on which book we can quote. We are these things when we act in holy fear of God, and I mean fear in the best sense of that word. It is the fear of what is better than we are in every way, the kind of fear you’d have standing in front of a very good and very powerful king or queen, the kind of fear that makes you want to do your best. The kind of fear that would provoke you to LISTEN when such a ruler says that the practice of religion with no fear of God is an occasion for anger:
You cannot fast as you do today
And expect your voice to be heard on high.
Is this the kind of fast I have chosen,
Only a day for a man to humble himself?
Is that what you call a fast,
A day acceptable to the Lord?
Is this not the fast I have chosen:
To loose the chains of injustice
And untie the cords of the yoke,
To set the oppressed free
And break every yoke?
Is it not to share your food with the hungry
And to provide the poor wanderer with shelter –
When you see the naked, to clothe him,
And not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?
Whether you’ve memorized the Koran or John 3:16, those are words to examine yourself by. They are words about the practice of true religion, and that is the practice of love. Not education, or birth control, or clever, well-researched, aloof Time Magazine articles will save Afghanistan or anywhere else. It is not even surveys and food distributions, although that’s getting closer to it. What will save the world is not the feeding and clothing of it, but the changing of hearts that moves people to feed and clothe. And say what you want, quote your social theories and your PhD articles, laugh your most condescending laugh, but I stick by it: only love changes hearts. And not to over-do it with scriptural quotes, but the old book also says that God is love. So that’s the last thing I’ve learned here, without God, we have no love. And without love, we are just running in circles, quoting ourselves to each other to disguise our failure to make any difference.
So that’s what I’ve learned. Afghanistan, if it is to be saved at all, will be saved by these things, by laughter, by faith, by prayer, and by love. I guess if you want to pin me down, I’d say that Afghanistan will be saved by God. And if you really want to pin me down, I’d say that goes for the whole world. For me it’s just a question of how much I want to help.
You have been more than kind, more than generous, more than supportive of me and my journey here. I hope these letters have helped to bring you along with me, to see Afghanistan and it’s people, to be drawn by it’s enchantment, moved by it’s heartbreak, and staggered by it’s beauty. I hope I have given you reasons for laughter, for prayer, for faith, and for love, as I myself have been given. And the truth is that I could not have done any of this without you. So one last time: thank you.
In faith, hope, and love,
rjs
“Our revels are now ended.”
This is the last newsletter. In three days I will get on a plane and leave Faizabad and head for home. Forgive me if I do not tell you exactly when I am arriving. I need some time alone when I get to Canada, to settle my soul and decide what to do next. And then, one day in late July, I will simply appear, like Captain Kirk and Spock always used to do on Star Trek.
In my last weeks here, I have turned the office over to Mark, who came here from New York with plenty of toys – among them two guitars. So we’ve been singing a lot. He can attract a crowd of children on the street like the Pied Piper, and I had the privilege of sitting in a dorm room in the local medical college with about 27 enraptured afghan students while Mark sang the theme song from Gilligan’s Island. Wouldn’t have guessed up THAT scenario, would you? And for the curious among you, dorm life in Afghanistan is remarkably as it is in western colleges: lots of sitting around listening to music, smoking, and talking about girls (I just assume the last bit, but I bet I’m right).
Money arrived for Halim. In order for Halim to be assured of our help, one very concerned person put up the whole amount, with the hope that more of you would continue to give if you had more time. I certainly hope you do, especially after seeing Halim when I gave him the money. There is not joy like this in anything else. We were sitting cross-legged on my floor and I counted it out in front of him, then handed it over. He raised both arms to heaven, looked up, and said:
“Thank you, thank you, thank you your father, your mommy, your uncles, Mr. Brad and Mrs. Janice, all my brothers in Canada, thank you your church… thank you, thank you very much… you help for me. I and my family is happy… we pray for you because you much helping for me. Thank you one world for you…my problem is finished.”
He insisted on taking me out for kebabs afterward. I’m sure he would have taken the whole lot of you out if you were here, even if he spent all the money you just gave him. He’s like that.
When school is finished for his children in two months, he will move his family to their new house in Khash, a smaller village a little ways outside of Faizabad. Most of his extended family live there so his wife and children will be close to them while he is away at work. In Afghanistan, he tells me, nobody helps you but your family. He told me he has a rich neighbour in his present house. That man, he said, shook his head and said, too bad Halim, but never offered to help. “ But,” he said to me, “you write one letter your church, your father, your mother, your uncles – and they never see me, never see my house, and they send money. Canadian people very good people.” I tell him that most times the rich do not help the poor in Canada either. He says he knows, but that you are very good people, and you are his Canadian family because you “help for him.” I think that your gifts really do mean a world to him. You are not a rich NGO handing out money, but real people who have no reason to care, no reason to help, and you do anyway. Yours are the actions of people, who, in the words of the old book, are “longing for a better country – a heavenly one.” And let me tell you, from the light in Halim’s eyes, I would say we all got a little closer to it. Well done.
So what I came to do here is finished. The days roll by me, and I think about what I’ve learned. Mark comes into the office and says in a small, calm voice: “I have to tell someone. Catherine Hepburn died.” There is a short pause, and without any change in expression he says, “African Queen… I love that movie.” Another pause, and then I say I feel like I’m in an episode of Frasier and we fall about laughing. Later that day, we watch the masons across the yard on the next roof. There are five of them there everyday, and I swear that wall never gets higher. It will take them nine hundred years to finish. We laugh about that too. It’s just too typical of this country, and you must laugh. One thing that I’ve learned is that you must laugh.
But there are things you can’t laugh at. Last week, we heard that a teacher in a village up the river had raped a little boy, and the father had taken the teacher, stripped him naked and dragged him through the streets, while children watched, until finally the men of the village stopped him. We heard that the father had said he would kill his boy as well, to get rid of the shame. This week, we have found out that the relative of one of our staff has cancer all through her body, and that there is no hope for life. She is a young mother, and she will leave two small children behind. Our friend, the only doctor working in the Wakhan - amongst people with the highest maternal mortality rate in the world - radios and tells us that the choice he faces most often is whether to save the mother or the child. Saving both is rarely an option. And some other friends have been trying to get funding for a program that would help traditional birth assistants recognize the early signs of complications in pregnancy, potentially saving many of these women. They said last week that UNICEF had just turned them down.
There are things that you can’t laugh about, things to make you feel absolutely helpless. Or frustrated and enraged if you know that they are things that could be helped. There is a desperation to this work, and you know in your soul that it is too much for you, it is too much for all of us. So here, I’ve learned about faith. Not faith in people or social programs or theories about how education will change the world – these are often good, but they are never enough. Not faith in the resources and goodwill and wisdom of so-called developed nations. Out here, I’ve learned to follow another faith, a hope ”for a better country,” yet unseen except in the glimpses of heaven I am given even here. I believe in the formula of a half-crazed Old Testament prophet: Live justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God. Here you are sunk if you don’t believe in something. I believe this:
One thing God has spoken,
Two things have I heard:
That you oh God are strong,
And that you oh Lord are loving.
Smile at my simplicity if you like, but having been here I’m convinced that this world only makes sense in the light of heaven, and heaven here awakens at our touch if we walk in the way of God. So I have learned to trust here as well.
When I came here, I came because it seemed like a practical way to help people. It is the kind of thing I understand. I don’t latch on to admonitions to preach the gospel, but when Jesus says that whatever you DO for the least of these, you do for me – that I understand. But there are people out here doing just that, and at the end of each furious day, they wonder what they’ve really done. All that seems to happen is that people become dependent rather than self-sufficient, selfish rather than concerned with community. At the end of the day when you walk home and all the kids on the street shout at you and ask for pens, it’s hard not to wonder if that’s really all you’ve done. Sure, you’ve built roads and houses, you’ve given out food and medicine, but people are not pulling together to rebuild their lives and their communities. They are buying up cell phones and TVs and radios and computers, and growing poppy on the side so that they can get even richer. They hide their rugs and pull down their window frames when you survey so they can accumulate more while the real poor continue to die. No one helps his neighbour, the government helps itself, and everyone looks to the UN to save them. Can we really say we’ve helped people, improved their lives, if all we have to show for it is lists and lists of distributions to impress the donors, and the fact that there are now more TVs in Faizabad? It all begs the question: what is an improved life, anyway? There are obvious things, like UNICEF’s lists of basic rights: people should be given the right to life, to health, to education, to food, etc… I still believe that we should do all these, that we should fight tooth and nail for the poor to have them.
But.
You see, there are other people in places like this, people who are concerned not just with the bodies of the Afghans, not just with their minds, but also with their souls. I know what some of you will say. I went to university, too. And even if I didn’t I could read what my opinion of these people should be in the most recent Time magazine: How intrusive and clumsy, how naïve at best, how damaging and bigoted at worst; we know better than to talk about souls and salvation, because we have education, birth control, political awareness, and recipes for social change. Right. Well, we’ve got all that coming here in spades. Everyone and their dog is coming up with pretty plans for all of this, wonderful ideas with brilliant prospects. So why are people as greedy now as they’ve always been (or more), as selfish, as grasping? Heck, we’ve got all these things in the West, we’ve had them for years – are we better people? More virtuous and kind? More noble and just? Have they made our hearts any different? Look, I can get angry about missionaries with the best of them, I can accuse them of hidden agendas and disrespect for culture and other religions, and so forth and so on. But your hear about things. You hear stories of communities transformed and lives changed and hope and prosperity where there was simply no earthly chance of it. And these are not UN initiatives, not development schemes based on up-to-date theories, not the result of social activism. These are the stories of people who had the crack-brained notion that God brings freedom and blessing, people who started out not by surveying and writing proposals, but by kneeling in darkened rooms. I don’t know what to make of this, but I must admit that having been around a bit of the block here, the idea of it is thrilling. Not that we should simply stop handing out food and doing surveys, but there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our philosophy. And I don’t put much stock in philosophy when children are dying. In Afghanistan I’ve learned that where evil grows close beside beauty it is wise to exercise humility and a strong sense of heaven. In other words, I’ve learned that you’d best pray.
And finally, it’s not a matter of religion here. It’s a matter of love. True religion is the practice of love. I won’t debate you on who’s right or wrong between Islam and Christianity. This country has at least it’s fair share of people going around saying “God, God, God,” while their neighbours die in ditches. We are not noble, or truthful, or free based on which book we can quote. We are these things when we act in holy fear of God, and I mean fear in the best sense of that word. It is the fear of what is better than we are in every way, the kind of fear you’d have standing in front of a very good and very powerful king or queen, the kind of fear that makes you want to do your best. The kind of fear that would provoke you to LISTEN when such a ruler says that the practice of religion with no fear of God is an occasion for anger:
You cannot fast as you do today
And expect your voice to be heard on high.
Is this the kind of fast I have chosen,
Only a day for a man to humble himself?
Is that what you call a fast,
A day acceptable to the Lord?
Is this not the fast I have chosen:
To loose the chains of injustice
And untie the cords of the yoke,
To set the oppressed free
And break every yoke?
Is it not to share your food with the hungry
And to provide the poor wanderer with shelter –
When you see the naked, to clothe him,
And not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?
Whether you’ve memorized the Koran or John 3:16, those are words to examine yourself by. They are words about the practice of true religion, and that is the practice of love. Not education, or birth control, or clever, well-researched, aloof Time Magazine articles will save Afghanistan or anywhere else. It is not even surveys and food distributions, although that’s getting closer to it. What will save the world is not the feeding and clothing of it, but the changing of hearts that moves people to feed and clothe. And say what you want, quote your social theories and your PhD articles, laugh your most condescending laugh, but I stick by it: only love changes hearts. And not to over-do it with scriptural quotes, but the old book also says that God is love. So that’s the last thing I’ve learned here, without God, we have no love. And without love, we are just running in circles, quoting ourselves to each other to disguise our failure to make any difference.
So that’s what I’ve learned. Afghanistan, if it is to be saved at all, will be saved by these things, by laughter, by faith, by prayer, and by love. I guess if you want to pin me down, I’d say that Afghanistan will be saved by God. And if you really want to pin me down, I’d say that goes for the whole world. For me it’s just a question of how much I want to help.
You have been more than kind, more than generous, more than supportive of me and my journey here. I hope these letters have helped to bring you along with me, to see Afghanistan and it’s people, to be drawn by it’s enchantment, moved by it’s heartbreak, and staggered by it’s beauty. I hope I have given you reasons for laughter, for prayer, for faith, and for love, as I myself have been given. And the truth is that I could not have done any of this without you. So one last time: thank you.
In faith, hope, and love,
rjs
posted by rjs | 4:20 PM
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