Going Back

After three months at home in Canada, I’m back in Afghanistan. Arriving this time I felt something like a loss of innocence, as though I’d lost my child-eyes, which stared at everything with fresh wonder. I wrote in my journal two days ago, looking down on the hills of North-eastern Afghanistan from the window of the twin-engine airplane in which I was encased:

“this time I feel untouched by afghanistan, as though I’ve seen this brown land all my life and it has lost all its newness … shall I write home again and describe it all again, without fresh, eager eyes?”

Perhaps it is that I have told myself that I am just here to do a job; that this time I will organize the movements of thousands of bags of wheat and beans and salt, chart the movements of vehicles, and monitor the lines of communication, so that thousands of Afghans who I will never meet will have work, food, and in the end, clean drinking water.

I came here wrestling with my heart, which feels closer now to the individual outcasts of Vancouver than the poor of Afghanistan, especially as I will see them – as lists of people helped. But in the end the problem is the same, and this is what tugs at my soul wherever I go: whether they stand in a soup line everyday on Hastings Street, or at the site camp of an irrigation project every 12 days to receive their sacks of wheat grain, beans, and oil for the next 12, they are still the poor ones, and they come with the same empty stares, the same mumbled thanks, the same grumbled complaints, and all the tiny things put together to create an impression of utter loneliness. Maybe I should say “an oppression of loneliness” or if I use the word “impression” it should be understood as the type of impression a nail makes, say, driven through a wrist or an ankle, the kind of impression thorns make in a forehead, the impression that one makes as he is dying and asks why God has forsaken him.

And so my first impression of Afghanistan this time was not a wonderstruck delight in a new and foreign land, but an impression of emptiness and loneliness looking down from the airplane, flying in from the north, writing it all down…

“flying over what must be Afghanistan now, an eyeful of sharp brown mountain, just creases in a crust of dust and rocks. But I see the few houses trapped in the valleys and a sadness takes me. Oh, that you would call people from their loneliness, for how can we even touch this? Is this how you felt, dropping from heaven, and did you give up your life in the end because you’d do anything, anything to get back there and bring a few of these lost ones with you? Is it this despairing heartbreak that finally moves us to love? Looking down, I know I love my world of things, of leaves in the fall and warm coffee shops and beautiful clothes and people to greet me. Coming down, I can almost not bear it, this isolate, desolate place with garbage and rot and war and flies, and the smell and people who stare and all of the otherness. So then, is this how you felt, too, coming down from heaven to a stable, a dumpster in a backwater town?”

I’ve landed now. I’ve walked across the splitting tarmac into Kabul Airport, where the customs forms are still photocopied on scrap paper and there are still bullet holes in the walls. But the lights work this time, and the luggage conveyor runs, and they have professional pylons and dividers to show that there is a line for this and for that, rather than a crowd for everything. And I’ve driven through the streets of the capital, clogged by even more cars now and smoggy with the fumes. People talk on cell phones and there is more than one wireless provider in town. Women still wear the burka, but not all of them. Some of the buildings have a fresh coat of paint, and some of them have open holes in the walls from the bombs, but through the holes you can see laundry hanging and men scratching themselves and yawning, like you have X-ray vision into their living rooms, and bedrooms, and kitchens, since these are all the same room. Children still come to you in traffic jams, dodging the cars in order to sell a foreigner a paper or a phrase book or a map, standing like islands in the stream when the honking mass of yellow and white cars begins to flow again. Everyone still stares at foreigners.

I’ve left Kabul behind, and flown with NGO privilege to Taloqan, where my old friends are, where Engineer Kaiwan still has tea and cookies in his office after work, where Zuhoor still festoons his desk with plastic flowers and other junk and dreams of being governor, where Khalid, stoic as ever, hands me an invitation to his engagement party, and plays dumb when we ask for details about the girl he is marrying. Engineer Kaiwan invited me in for tea and gave me a handkerchief his daughters had embroidered exquisitely for me, and somehow we go to talking about the Inuit and I was describing igloos and I got to see the child-like delight in his eyes again. And I went to Khalid’s engagement party with Zuhoor and ate a pile of mutton in grease and onions at 9 in the morning and drank a tea that is a blend of unskimmed cream, black tea, and salt, and we whispered jokes all through the speeches like wriggling kids at church. Khalid, according to custom, was not at his own engagement party, but Zuhoor could not explain the reasons to me.

So I’m back, and these will be the writings of someone who has seen all this already, straining to see it again with new eyes, to write it for you whose eyes are always new to this place, and to write it for my own heart, in the hope that after we have seen it all and the dust of the earth has wearied us and weighed us down, it will be our hearts that recognize our loneliness and lead us to each other, and then to heaven.