The kids have begun taking their exams. Every waking hour is spent studying. Even chores have turned second fiddle. The school they go to is by no means world-class. But the dedication of these orphans is certainly serious business. Consequently I’ve stopped my classes for now, and taken to an “open door” policy. One after another they bring their books in, angst ridden. “EN please.” We go through their textbooks and before long things smooth out. I sit on the front steps, sipping a cup of tea at 5:30 in the morning, showering the girls with my confidence in them as they leave for each session. Once in a while one comes home in tears. “Keemistry, Ooooh! Bad teacher! Bad subject!” But for the most part they arrive elated. They come rushing into my room shouting, we jump up and down together and slap five’s. Then comes the next exam, and the next.
Thus, for a few days I am not consumed with class preparation. I think about the world. The news cycles have twisted and turned since my arrival here on April 15th. A pandemic flu, Iran showing its cards, Obama showing his fly-swatting capability, a coup in Honduras, and the death of MJ. There are bills to pay, and an economy hanging from a limb. And there is Afghanistan, no longer the so-called forgotten war. Around four thousand Marines, along with Afghans and Brits are digging in down in Helmond Province. Thousands of refugees have ended up here in Kabul. In the meantime the enemy, increasingly complex, vanishes into the mountains, across the border, among the refugees, into the vast labyrinth of the markets. They are made up of insurgents from Pakistan, the Middle East, Iran, or they are of the old order belonging to Mul Omar, or they are new recruits from the thousands of disenchanted young men with no work and no money and no education who, after eight years have nothing but contempt for Karzai’s government, rife with corruption. Or sometimes they are our very own “allies”, working both sides. Whatever its makeup, as they have since befuddling the greatest armies in human history, Afghan warriors are like ghosts. The land is their co-conspirator as it absorbs their numbers for a time, and then, seemingly telepathically they re-emerge as a unified force somewhere else, perhaps even right behind their target. As dramatic as the Pakistan army’s push into Swat was, they succeeded in merely causing a national crisis of refugees, catching and killing relatively few Taliban and certainly none of their leadership. What, possibly, could we do differently from all the other empires that have failed here? Logic dictates there is no winning permanent influence with military might. Right now the new tactic is to use numbers, hold territory long enough for civilization to root. In the present situation this would require several hundred thousand troops and a coalition of countries that are presently getting cold feet. They call Karzai the “Mayor of Kabul”. This is not far from the truth. He is smart, playing for the old guard of warlords, buying them off one after another, planning for a rainy day. Everyone has a top ten list of silver bullets. Here is my preliminary and by no means remotely knowledgeable contribution. Call it intuition. Absent is any reference to military operations. They are doing what they are asked to do. Those men and women simply want one thing: to know their lives lost are for something right and good and worthwhile. This list is for them, so that the answer to those concerns is in the affirmative.
1) Empower women.
2) Plan for fifteen years down the line, when these orphans are 20-30 years old and all the beasts and wounded souls and tortured minds of the present adult population are dead. (Life expectancy here for men and women is 44.) Continue setting up and supporting really good residential schools. (Yes, residential. Imagine turning ten thousand orphans into an intelligent, professional work force.) Everyone but the insane tiny minority of men who grew up in a madras getting programmed value and will protect these schools. They already do. Millions of kids are going to school right now. The elders know education is vital. They want Afghan engineers, Afghan doctors, Afghan journalists.
3) Follow the money. Now that would be new, a monster wartime audit of a reconstruction plan. What has happened thus far would make George Marshall hang himself from the tallest tree. Where have the billions of dollars gone? Expose where the money is going, and expose where it is coming from. Those financing the enemy (it isn’t only opium), those pocketing, scraping off the top. Exposure may not change anything that’s been done, but is may guide the future. This includes not only the Taliban and the Afghan government, but foreign contractors, NGOs, and the United Nations.
4) Grab the 2,000 men sitting homeless down near the Presidential Palace in Kabul, every single one, and pay each ten dollars a day to slowly cover the city district by district, first to pick up the garbage, then to plant trees, grass, shrubs, then to level the roads with picks and shovels. They will gladly do it. (The earning around here for the average worker is 1 to 2 dollars a day.) That comes to 5 million for one year, plus the cost of trees and shovels and gravel. Compare what you get with that investment to what you’ve gotten with just one of the billions spent already. On one hand you get productive and relatively happy young men who don’t join the Taliban and who spend that money on local poor merchants. You visibly improve the city, thereby improving the attitude of 5 million Afghans living here and otherwise getting more and more restless daily. You also solve a health crisis due to alleviation of the dust and pollution. On the other hand you’ve created a bureaucratic feudal system full of unqualified friends of family in a wealthy minority at the top who push papers and stamp stamps and hand out pistachios and otherwise make nothing, do nothing but buy expensive clothes and cel phones and get married in expensive dining halls. (These people are making ridiculous amounts of money with little to no qualifications, some of them up to 12 thousand a week, part of the forty percent of the aide money actually making it to Afghans.) I’d get the shovels.
5) If you must negotiate with the old leadership of the Taliban, concede nothing more than exile to some small island off the coast of Africa. They are not the PLO or the IRA, they are not patriots nor countrymen. Giving concessions to them such as power share or autonomy would be like making deals with the KKK, ceding them Texas as long as they leave the rest of the country alone. Mul Omar, aside from presiding over the spiraling of Afghanistan into the stone age, among other atrocities ordered hundreds of innocent Hazara men beheaded. (Fathers of a few of the children in this very orphanage.) The non-Afghan insurgents will go back to their respective countries. The half to three quarters of their foot soldiers that are frustrated poor Afghan men who simply joined on for the money and sense of purpose can turn in their weapons and go home, where the government will hire them to build parks, schools, roads.
6) Collaborate with the real leaders of Afghanistan. The people actually making a difference here, and there ARE many, many people making a difference. The organizations and individuals opening technical schools for widows, promoting the manufacture of rugs, clothes, handbags for sale in specialty markets, or turning a farmer’s field into production of food, not poppies, the female surgeon in Kandahar, the legit police chiefs and fire marshals frustrated with being undermined, the popular folk singer following in the tradition of Ahmad Zair, the local gray-beard who requested a village in Farah Province protect a privately funded school (an Australian benefactor) from Taliban warriors, Malalai Joya. And so-on and so forth.
7) Get the East on board. Don’t forget, this country is the heart of Asia. The stereotype of fiercely independent, tribal Afghans goes only so far. The people here are enamored of what China, Indonesia and India have to offer. If we leave them isolated in the arms of the power brokers in Pakistan, Persia and the Arabian peninsula, they and our cause will perish. It is good Russia is getting a little friendly, letting the U.S. run missions through their territory. We need the other three giants, though, to jump on board in a very visible way.
When the money valve gets put on hold, the overstuffed warlords and their small armies of security forces and the government propping them up will beg to do right by their country, at which point the Afghans and the international community are going to have to decide to either drag them into the Hague to meet their comeuppance or to dig deep, turn the other cheek and let them drift off into obscurity with all their houses and cars, never to be bothered with again, but allowed to believe themselves heroes.
9) Stop pretending this is a fledgling democracy. It is not even embryonic. Children get fistfuls of id cards and for fun vote. The country’s version of Speaker of the House is an ancient and senile man who sleeps through debates, marches out like a disoriented child; a venerated elder says “GOD” told him Karzai should win (only after Karzai gave the man’s son governorship of Kabul). The election is watched the way reality TV is watched, a combination of Survivor and American Idol: “41 people marooned in a desert country battle for the million dollars, and you the viewer get to have the final vote! The fruit stand owner pitted against the blind eye doctor pitted against the “bird” man of Mazur.” It’s ok, though. First step is accepting reality for what it is. No need to panic because after thirty years of occupation, civil war, religious fanaticism there is not a quick jump to democracy. Remember, names have meaning here. This is a puppet (or more accurately self serving de-facto) regime. Calling it by any other name is just not going to increase the chances of winning hearts and minds. In fact it loses what respect there is.
10) Listen to Tom Friedman’s advice. Stop drinking oil. As the price of oil goes down, so does the influence of Russia, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia (remember that place most of the 9/11 “pilots” came from?), and Venezuela. When gas goes down to $2 a gallon, buy a hybrid to celebrate.
There you have it. My voice added to the news cycle talking-head white noise. I’ve succumbed. Just give me a cup of coffee and a table at Café Globalization. But these Afghan children I laugh with and work with and eat with every day hang in the balance, so I am compelled to take even such news junky chitter-chatter seriously. All I really know for sure is that knowing and believing are two different things; I believe which one leads the other around by the nose has great impact on the world. We know so very little. This is a scary thing, having to rely so heavily on belief, or worse having our beliefs controlled by such little knowledge. I cannot know if these children will grow up to fashion a new country. I cannot know if one or the other will live to twenty, will see another civil war, will not get married off by a rogue relative. I do know that Frishta thinks of me enough to run into my room with a handful of pine nuts, hand them to me with a smile on her face. I’d never seen a pine nut in its shell. I was at first suspicious and resistant, they look like deer scat. I didn’t know they were pine nuts. Frishta demonstrated, putting one in her mouth and fumbling with her teeth to shell it. I followed suit. Now I know pine nuts. I believe Frishta loves me a little more. I love her a little more.
I have prepared a Youtube presentation for you. It is a ten minute slide show of the best work to come out of the photography class at Mehan orphanage. Six boys and six girls ages 13 to 16. The first part is the outside world, refugees who fled Helmond Province ahead of the offensive down there, then the streets of Kabul. The second part is life in the orphanages. (Thank you One Bird, the organization out of New Orleans that provided the cameras and film.) All photos were taken by the children themselves without any guidance from me outside of the classroom. Two of my four finalists for first prize, Fawad and Farid Gul, are responsible for the refugee pictures. The two other finalists, Mahbooba and Zainab, got pulled into exams and will have to wait to do their stint in the camp. I’ll let you know the winner when all is done. I will place the link to watch the slide show at the bottom of this post.
I got my first bout of food poisoning on July 4th. Late in the day, elated at feeling better, I escaped to the roof for some air. It is always under such unexpected circumstances a song comes to me. I keep my pocket notebook handy, and a pencil. The sun went down, and three of the younger girls joined me. It was time for prayer. They prayed. I wrote, and then in the end- well, you’ll see.
Kabul 2009
Meena, Maqbola, me and Nabila
Fourth of July on the roof.
Sun’s gone and moon’s up full as the three faces
Of these ten year old orphans
As they pray what to God is the truth.
I’d gladly join them, get on my knees and
Bow toward the place I must go
Once in my life but, I don’t know how to;
There’s a war outside this city and
I’m too busy watchin’ that moon.
Day is hot, night is young, a wise man told them
Father’s too old and
Mother’s gone to beg in the street.
Rain and wind left early spring so take this bread and
Split it in two and
Marry your soul to your feet,
And don’t look for water in the sea.
Prayin’ time is over, “Peace be with you,”
One to the other they say.
Meena pulls her veil down around her shoulders
Her fading red T-shirt
From China through Disney to here.
Nabila teases me, she thinks I’m crazy,
Circles a finger ‘round her ear.
I do the same and we both start laughing.
Maqbola starts to hushing,
“Be still, or the neighbors will hear.”
Darkness descending,
Black mountains are blending into the sky
While ten thousand children decide
Where they will sleep
In the bed of the dead river,
Or maybe tonight’s the night they will fly,
Looking for that water in the sea.
The girls have to study, exams tomorrow:
Pashtu, English and Dari.
They don’t want to leave me alone with the moon.
They say you’ll never come down,
You’ll turn into a lantern or a tree.
“Goodnight,” I whisper. “Soon you’ll hear me follow
Just let me see one star to end my day.”
Alone I weaken, my legs begin to feel hollow
They bend to the lights of Kabul
The only stars I see before I pray.
Day is hot, night is young, a wise man told them
Father’s too old and
Mother’s gone to beg in the street.
Rain and wind left early spring so take this bread and
Split it in two and
Marry your soul to your feet,
And don’t look for water in the sea…