A Visit To The Taloqan Orphanage

The staff of the Taloqan orphanage is lined up to greet me as I enter the muddy yard. With the usual Afghan hospitality and melodious greetings from everyone I am ushered into the office through the wool blanket that serves as the door. Inside there is a desk, some wooden benches, and a cupboard with a box of pens and some books. We all sit down and the men smile at me, their weathered faces crinkling. They bring me tea. We might have sat there drinking tea and smiling at each other all day, but I am a typical Westerner, so I get to the point. Mission East has given food to the children of this orphanage, I am here to write the report, and I only have an hour. It’s an impossible task. How do you get across something like this?

So many times these reports are a rush of lists and numbers, how many children, how many bags of rice. The lives of people are assumed, they slip between the numbers. It is easy to forget that each of these children is an entire world, a small history of despair and hope, thoughts and dreams, tears and laughter. You need to take these children into your heart and let their stories seep into you, you need to look in their eyes and not flinch from what you see. I have a camera, a notebook, and a single hour to do them the small justice of making their world known.

The office manager is a man named Abdul Rahman. Under his turban his eyes are especially bright and crinkly. He tells me that the orphanage was started two years ago. There are dorms and classrooms and the children are instructed in Math, Dari, Koran, and English by a small teaching staff. I ask him where these children come from, and he says most of them come from villages, brought by their relatives. None of them have fathers, and most of them have lost their mothers as well. I ask what would happen to them if they did not come here. “They would stay in the village,” he says in a typical Afghan understatement. I press him further.

“What would they do there?”

“They would be working, watching sheep,” he says, “the girls would clean and take care for the small children.”

“They would do this for their relatives?” I ask.

“No,” he says. “They would be …” he searches for the right word. “They would do for some man in the village, they would work and sleep there.” He finds the word. “Like slaves. For all life.”

A teacher named Nuruddin speaks up. He has a big beard and a soft voice. He tells me there are many children in this situation, but the orphanage has not been able to take more than 80, even though it has room for 150. “There are not enough clothes,” he says simply, “And not enough food.” He gives me a little what-can-we-do? smile. Or maybe it’s a what-can-you-do? smile. Abdul Rahman tells me that the government has given enough food, blankets, and clothing for only 20 children. The rest have come from other organizations like Mission East, but it’s still not enough and they have to turn children away.

I know that teachers get paid a pittance here and I start to wonder why they continue with so little support, when a little girl comes into the office to ask for a pen, and in a way, she answers my question.

Her name is Rowaida. She is twelve years old. She tells me that her father was killed three years ago, which probably means he was killed fighting the Taliban. She has 3 sisters at home and one brother who is 13 and not in school. He works at a mechanic’s shop. I ask her where she would be if she were not here.

“I would be at home. I would not be learning how to write. Like my brother, I would not know how.”

I ask her if she is happy to be at the orphanage. She looks at me like I’m a bit slow. She tells me that learning is important, and here she is learning. I ask her what she wants to do when she grows up.

“I want to be a teacher,” she says right away, “I want to be a teacher here.”

I tell Rowaida that I am writing what she says in my notebook so that people in Europe can read it. I ask her if there’s anything she wants to tell them. Her answer is quick; she doesn’t even stop to think. “Tell them to bring us blankets and food,” she says. “And bring dresses for girls.”

After Rowaida leaves, they take me on a little tour of the rooms so that I can get my pictures. When I enter the classrooms, the students stand up in rows like pawns on a chessboard. They whisper while I fiddle with my camera. Each class has two or three books, and a pen to share. They sit on the floor. Their dorm rooms are stacked two deep with beds, and there is one blanket for every two bodies. I step over a pile of little plastic boots and sandals at the door as I leave.

There is so little for warmth, comfort, or brightness here, but the rooms are filled with small, hopeful lives. “Bring dresses for girls,” Rowaida says, and I understand. I know why the staff is here. I know why Mission East donated food. I know why I’m writing this. There is a chance for some beauty, some spark of life here, and these children have set their hearts on it. For now, all they need are dresses and food and they’ll do the rest. Surely they are worth at least that.

Hope and Irrelevance

Beyond the final No there is a Yes, and upon that Yes rests the entire future world.

-Wallace Stevens

My last freehanded attempt on the life of the church in Kabul needs a sequel, I think. For while such places may be home to the innocent banter that has long been the refuge of humans in our bewilderment and need for company, they also have the secrets of blood and belief in their foundations and they are filled with things that even angels long to see. I would be remiss not to honour that.

I approach the church with a sharp eye to what Paul the Apostle called “the foolishness of God.” Standing earthside to the secrets of heaven, one cannot help but wonder about the wisdom of staking the redemption of a lost world on such as us, with our hymnbooks and our prayers, our innocent blinking, clinking communion glasses, and squeaky pews. If I say that this church in Kabul seems irrelevant, it is only because coming to it through the dust and ash and heartbreak of the landscape it seems that you have only entered an insulated space, a hard one to reconcile with the world outside. The dissonance makes for a difficult approach.

While I was in Europe for my vacation after Christmas, I had two significant moments between glum, lonely train rides and airport waiting rooms. In Paris I happened on the Cathedral of Notre Dame in time for Sunday Mass. I was enchanted by the place. I see how you could believe that God lived there. The architecture makes your mind soar up, and in the archways there are lights and angels. All through the Mass there was the constant shuffle of tourists around the perimeter, and the priest’s face was lit by flashbulbs. A man stepped into the aisle by my elbow, camera held up like an offering, and stood there snapping pictures while the Host became the Body and Blood of Christ. I remember thinking that the sacred has become pedestrian. We no longer remove our shoes for holy ground, but set up tripods and lenses on it to capture some facsimile of a holiness we’ve forgotten and add it to our memories: at one time people believed in something. In Hell, maybe we will keep our memories like a book of photographs, only to each will be added the glimpse of heaven, the vision of God, the only thing we really longed for but missed, because all we wanted was a picture. Feet shuffle, shutters click, but the Mass goes on, a Body is broken for us, Blood is spilt, and our sins are once again forgiven. Here, as in Kabul, there is strange company between the cynical earth and the hope of heaven, between faith and incomprehension.

Notre Dame has stood for ages, the Kabul church for years. What keeps them there, like rocks in the stream of a mostly disinterested world? Is it not faith, that slippery thing, that undying hope that what can be grasped with the hand or seen with the eye is not the end of the matter? Is it not belief in the foolishness of God, which began with the very creation of this world while foreseeing its fall, continued with the stubborn insistence that we could choose love in the end despite hearts that lean toward greed and selfishness; Foolishness that chose a most unlikely Hero, a carpenter from the laughingstock of towns and the most wayward and tragic of nations, and climaxed with the impossibility of life sprouting from the gaping wound of death? Is it not some secret smile inside those who believe, some gambler’s sixth sense, that these places, these churches and temples may stand alone against the tide of the rushing world, but in the end they will stand for something, an ending so unbelievably good that people will fall to their knees as their longing is met where tears and laughter flow together?

The world may not believe it. They may use words like those I have written and laugh at the believers, they may shake their heads and make shrill protest as I have done in moments when the dissonance overtakes me. But they will still go in droves to the cinema, that modern place of worship and belief, to see and feel the hope that yet infects them, despite their best efforts. It is this way for me, and my second significant moment in Europe came at the movies. Professor Tolkien bristled at any hint of allegory, but he knew well the power of the fairytale. In a theatre surrounded by Parisians I realized, as I have realized again and again when I confront myself with the dissonance of church and world, that it was hobbits - those masters of innocuous conversation, those perfecters of innocent blinking, those champions of pew jumping and clinking glasses – it was hobbits in the end who saved the world.

So now I come to it, with no small apology, for I know I have not been fair to those who, better than me, have given their time, their strength, even their lives over to restoring health, dignity, and life to the people of Afghanistan, a task that must be buoyed up by a tremendous belief in things unseen, more tremendous than my own. I still hold that such people are irrelevant to the world’s eye, but theirs is an irrelevance that I wish for my own life, the irrelevance of hobbits, the irrelevance of those who change the world. For in the end, it is not relevance that saves us in our ruins, but hope.

Isolated Moments From a Vacation in Europe

Isolated Moments from a Vacation in Europe

I bought a ticket for London on the last day of the year.
You kept reaching for my arm in Paris, the comfort of being known,
Touch not impeded by invisible signs and missteps,
But romance is not a stolen thing.

Remember this, in your hotel room alone,
A stranger in the city and a pouch of tobacco your only friend;
Remember the silence of a dinner alone,
The revolving of your thoughts,
The listing of your heart.

On the train to the airport there is sometimes a man and his son.
He plays the violin, the boy collects the coins.
They move through the cars like characters in a story,
Like an old tree beside a highway,
Like a tilting barn in the fields blurring by on your way somewhere else,
Like regret.
While you are in the airport waiting room, the violinist puts his son to bed
In a red brick house.

Suddenly the beautiful unlikely, a woman with raven hair
Delicate as silk, wrapped up to her neck in black wool, holding a book up
Reading while she walks,
Not even looking up to leave the train, to walk down the platform oblivious.
She is the moon, rising over the hill in autumn;
She brushes your face as she passes.

On the roof outside the window of a tiny room,
A sunny spot in a prison courtyard of graffiti and ducts
Robot fingers reaching up to the only freedom,
A forgotten old world alien skyline,
Laundry flapping from the power lines.

Back on the train a woman does not have the right ticket and receives a fine.
She is poor. She keeps saying Pardon! Demande Pardon!
I think about how to say I’ll pay in French
But the moment passes, shaking its head.

All this life and none of the secrets, but letters and prayers
To dribble out like breadcrumbs for moonlight to discover
A white road to heaven,
A way home in the dark.