Out of the cracked, clay hard soil full of weeds and un-pruned haphazardly planted roses, a garden has sprung. The weeds have been crowded out by marigolds, violets, geraniums and sunflowers. The roses keep pumping out roses. I never would have predicted it. Summer is here. The nights are getting uncomfortably warm, but the wind kicks up once a day, as if there is an ocean about. I open my door and curtained windows and the air swirls in, and with it the sound of boys playing football mingles with the music box sound of peddlers pushing their ice cream and two penny wares down the street, and a woman scolding a child, and cars that beep in conversation with guards, and a residential gate that opens with the creak of metal against rusted metal, and the deep throated mush-mush of a herdsman ushering his goats down the street toward the heart of the city, and heavy thirty year old diesel trucks that rumble by, their decorative dangling strands like beaded skirts tinkling into the distance, and the clippity-clop of a horse pulling a hand-hewn cart that turns a corner, and the finches chirping from the grape vines in the neighbor’s courtyard, and once in a while a mourning dove that sits on the railing of my balcony, coo-cooing. It is the city breathing when the dust for once has settled; it is a sigh, an exhalation of normalcy into my sanctuary from which I cannot freely roam.
It is difficult for me to believe if I stray, alone, I will be plucked. What, I wonder, am I more of, a danger or an opportunity? To a Talib I am one thing, to a gang I am another, and to a minister in the government I am both. Each day I cover myself with a green scarf in the back of a car as I am transported from orphanage to orphanage. When I arrive I emerge from the car, remove my cloak and open my arms. “Sobakhai! Salaam!” Most often I am greeted by gleaming faces, children lining up to shake my hand, rushing to set up chairs, clean the white-board, bring a tray of green tea and lemon drop candies. I make certain to greet with hand over heart each of the staff, their older eyes that have seen things no sentient being should ever see, still able to muster kindness and a charity of spirit as they look into mine. How strange to be simultaneously wanted in this house and a pariah on the street.
And yet these questions and contradictions are Friday morning musings that tomorrow will be abstract and beside the point. My students are learning. Maybe not all hundred and seventy of them, but most have found a pattern to my efforts that my lack of Dari skills no longer inhibits. I realized this the other day while teaching the Sitara I kids. The class is huge, fluctuating between fifty and sixty, comprised of five to ten year olds. I usually go through a regular drill reviewing everything we’ve learned on the board. This time we pushed the chairs away and stood in a great circle. It was a kind of “Simon Says” that we played, wherein I pantomimed an action, emotion, pointed to some body part or item in the room, and they responded, shouting the matching appellation. There is a girl from Kabul, she stands twenty-nine inches tall, is quiet as a cucumber. Whenever I’ve called on her smiled ear to ear but refused to attempt an answer. Her name is Samia. Half way into my performance, in the midst of a rare collective silence while I contemplated something new to emote, she burst out in perfect English, “I know what you are, you’re a monkey!” The room erupted with laughter. Samia, realizing what she had said in her own culture is only one notch better than calling me a donkey and two notches better than a dog, inched toward me with reddening face and looked up at my eyes with her wet brown eyes. “I’m sorry, Ian jan. I’m sorry.” I couldn’t have been more pleased to be a monkey.
I no longer go into class with an agenda. I bring my toolbox, sit down, and start a conversation. One thing leads to another. Nida asked where I live in America. This compelled me to pull a globe down from a shelf, which led me to share photographs of Earth taken by the Apollo missions. “See,” I pointed with a marker, “India.” Then, as in a game of association, a list emerged: Ghandi, elephants, Taj Mahal, Hindu, funeral pyre, Ganges. On another day we discussed a news item about events in Afghanistan, drug use in Kabul, the hundreds of men holed up in the former Russian Cultural Center, now a bombed out rat trap; then we discussed opium, farming, fruit in Farah, goats in Bamyan, and finally dogh, how to brew it properly: first milk a goat, then kill it, gut it. Dry out its stomach and fill it with the milk. Shake violently for a few hours. Let it sit for a few weeks. Remove the fat from the milk, chill what’s left with ice water, mix it with cucumber and mint. Drink it on a hot summer day, and then curl up in the shade. Sleep.
More often than not we tell stories. A Pashtun boy from Jalalabad talks of becoming a journalist, but he really wants to be a soldier. He wants to kill all Taliban who killed his friend’s family. He is the best student in photography class. I told him yes, his country needs good soldiers, even more so good leaders. But I also told him not to underestimate the power of a photo; Ansel Adams who moved us to preserve nature, Dorothea Lange who moved us to help homeless Depression-era families, or the one shot of a Vietnamese child running naked through a street, a monk burning himself up with gasoline, how those two pictures moved the most powerful nation to re-examine its role in a war. The boy was thoughtful. “My father is a great man,” he said. “He lost his foot in battle against Taliban. Now he works in a factory. He can no longer farm. He wants me to be here, to learn. He knows it is good for me. He does not like the false foot they gave him, so he uses crutches. For him I will be journalist first, doctor second, then a soldier.”
One Uzbek boy never knew his father. He mimed a pregnant mother, indicating he was yet to be born when his father was killed. He would, if he could, bring me to see the blue mosque in Mazar-e Sharif. Then he would bring me to the river. “It is clean,” he said. He is unique among all the would-be doctors, journalists and engineers. He wants to be a psychologist. “So many people,” he said, “Daywana.” He pointed to his head.
“Crazy,” I said.
“Crazy,” he nodded.
The story of an eleven year old from Farah is engraved on her face. A rocket engulfed her in flames when she was an infant. She wears a mask of mottled skin; her eyes are like peepholes a child sees the world through. When I first met her I forced myself not to look away. I focused on those peepholes. She is completely comfortable in her own body. She jumps into picture-taking sessions, and the rest of the children seem blind to her deformity. “I want to be a nurse,” she said.
No matter what tack we take, we end each class with an ongoing project or ritual. The ten-year old girls of Mehan practice a choral arrangement of Blowin’ in the Wind. (They wouldn’t let go of that song. I had told them how fun it is to sing in the bathroom, and so at least twice a day the song echoes through their bathroom window in the most adorable Dari accent.) The Sitara II boys, gentlemen that they are, rehearse a group recital of Shakespeare’s famous sizing-up of a man’s life. Dariush begins with all the world’s a stage… and the seven ages are parceled out among the other boys. Dariush ends the speech with his humble, innocent voice, “Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”
One group of younger boys has steadfastly divided itself into teams, Strong and Power. I cannot end class before refereeing an ongoing game. One boy rolls a soccer ball across the floor toward an opponent, simultaneously asking a trivia question. “What are the colors of Afghanistan’s flag?” The opponent must answer correctly in English or lose a point. The cumulative score is 78 to 70 in favor of the Strong team.
Other classes end with an “actor’s cheer”. We squat down in a circle, arms extended toward the center and, humming, we slowly rise up, shaking our hands, the hum gradually increasing toward a shout, culminating in a unified jump toward the ceiling.
By the end of class something has happened. It has been a two-way conversation. The white-board has managed to fill with words, and the children file out one by one, each of the boys sticking a hand out to shake, the girls saying some combination of thank-you-I-love-you-good-bye. This is all wonderful and aren’t I great, but the truth is I am happy and relieved to get through a day without exposing just how incompetent I am. One thing is certain, I have put a bug in their little ears; if it at least approaches the same sized bug they in turn have loosed upon mine, I will be ecstatic.
Because, in the end, there is no room for self-satisfaction. Maybe an hour on a Friday morning, Jumma, when people pray and relax and clean house, or at 5 o’clock tea on the porch. Not when it comes to teaching these kids. You see, I went ahead and forgot my dream of Shangri-la. I handed out cameras like little portholes into freedom from the limitations of their own culture, and the boys sauntered back to Sitara II fully armed, snapping pictures along the way, harmless ones of Ulfat doing a hand-stand, Omid among the roses, but also some not so innocent, burned out buses stacked upon one another, a glass-cloaked wedding hall surrounded by refugees, a dog tied up to a stake in a pile of rubble. It was the buses Dariush tried to capture. I’d taught him to make the ordinary strange, the strange ordinary. He hadn’t forgotten his dream. It just didn’t occur to him the bomb-wielding box would be a camera, and the perpetrator of his undoing would be his teacher. A government security agent came up behind Dariush and pulled the camera from his hands. “What is this? Where did you get this? Who gave it to you? You’re going to jail. Come with me.” Dariush pleaded with the guard, and in the end escaped for the price of a roll of film. He ran back to Mehan; the dear child wanted to apologize to me. He was ashamed, bowed his head and opened his camera, exposing the empty chamber.
“It was his dream,” Farzana said in a hushed voice. She too is in photography class. “It came to be.”
And so had mine.
The wind has died down. It is hot. Across the street a family celebrates a wedding. Someone thumps away on a hand drum. I hear clapping, singing. I don’t have to look; I know the men are dancing in a circle. In the hallway, I hear, Frishta knocks on the bathroom door. Everyone loves Frishta. She is like the bumblebee that buzzes about the hammock in which I am trying to sate an afternoon drowsiness. I’d swat her away, but she keeps calling my attention to the blooming flowers. Besides, how could I begrudge such a big spirit with such little wings that somehow manages to fly? The bathroom door opens and shuts and the lock tumbler tumbles. I close my eyes and wait. I hear the water run, a bucket filling. And then, of course, she sings. “How manee rrroads mahst a meen wok down…” At times like this I’m compelled to randomly open the book of Rumi poems. A while ago I gave it to Farzana to hold onto, just in case. She keeps it in her room. I asked if I could borrow it and she happily retrieved it for me. She has covered it with wrapping paper. Purple and red roses on a yellow background. I open it now.
