There is a malaise that comes over anyone who has ever returned from a deep immersion into another culture, like a return from a month in the woods or at sea, or from meditating ten hours a day for ten days without moving. It is a mild but not completely unrelated version of the letdown (or disorder) that overcomes so many of those returning from war. In my case such a malaise has been delayed by my continuing to tell the story of AFCECO orphanages to as many people around the country as I can meet for as long as possible. Today I pause.
There is another kind of malaise that comes from arriving somewhere thought to be unreachable, when a particularly focused struggle over time is magically relieved. An African American, for example, becoming president, or winning some award, a recognition after years of working alone and in the dark, perhaps even mocked by society with its penchant to resist change.
After watching the Mehan girls on NBC News Friday night, I felt a strange sensation in my gut, a terrible yearning to get back to Kabul. Not next summer or in a few months, but today. Overnight an orphanage struggling to make ends meet was now overwhelmed with giving. It is of course a dream come true, the children fully sponsored, thoughts for the first time turning toward the possibility of obtaining a building of their own. Even so, what comes to my mind is the next thing, and the next. How, I thought, might sudden fame affect them? How to keep the body surfing on the cusp of the wave without losing it, or worse getting pulled under?
On this All Saints Day eeriness has crept into my heart atop the drastically different life I now lead. The children are growing and I am not there to watch them grow, to guide them as I might through the changes washing over their little orphanage and their tailspun country. I myself no longer even care to live in my Vermont home, so intoxicating is this ever widening family of mine. The eeriness I speak of is another and completely different condition that lurks around most corners. The malaise of growing pains is a luxury, a trifle when compared to imprisonment, whereby a dreamer has only his dreams without the freedom or strength to act. It is downright frivolous when compared to the loss of hope. The day the world got a glimpse of Frishta exchanging her glasses with Brian Williams, her impish smile and her faun-like body, I received news that a member of my extended family I had just spoken to over the phone about the hope I felt and the giving I’ve seen in Afghanistan and here in America had shot himself in the head. It was a struggle he’d undergone for many years, this life. He was a doctor, husband, father. He had invited me to come visit, had many questions about my travels, and expressed an interest in hosting my presentation in his community.
Which gets me to thinking back to an e-mail I received from my ex-wife, a lieutenant serving in Iraq. She had been first on-scene when one of her Marines shot himself, also in the head. Which gets me to thinking about all the Afghan women and girls, thousands, self-immolating to avoid marriage to a monstrous old man, to escape endless poverty and abuse, because there is no other way.
In the grand scheme of things I should be happy. People look at me and say I have found my calling, I am free of hindrances; my voice is strong and steadfast. Right now I am only nervous, impatient, maybe even a little fearful. On Tuesday I will speak to my own community at Middlebury College. There will be people there who have known me for twenty years, the Halloween parties I used to throw, the potluck dinners. Others will be former colleagues, teachers and writers of such high caliber who for some time have perhaps been scratching their heads wondering what in hell has come over me these past few years, who may have an inkling I will never return. There will be students there, several of them Afghans, each in their own way feeling the weight of a world out of balance about to be placed in the palm of their hand. The title of my presentation is Start Again: rethinking Afghanistan inside a girl’s orphanage. In addition to the throngs of people I have met eager to know, there are many who merely look for confirmation of what they think they already know. What do I really know about rethinking Afghanistan? I don’t even know where I will be next week, or the next.
I remember the first time I stood in front of a roomful of people and delivered a speech. It was 8th grade, American History, and I had been tasked with memorizing the Gettysburg Address. I do not remember feeling the melancholy in Lincoln’s words, only a determination. Mostly I remember having to intuit the pace of the speech, where to pause, when to raise my voice, things that had nothing to do with its meaning. My grade, I’d assumed, would be based on execution. It was in that same class Mr. Mudry, my teacher, gave what he later revealed to be a complete hoax of a lecture, fabricating a history on which all his students took scrupulous notes, notes we would have if asked sworn to be the truth. These were perhaps two of the greatest lessons I learned at an impressionable age. They are the very lessons I have to trust my dear friends in the AFCECO family intuit themselves in the midst of accomplishment and great fortune; they are lessons I myself must adhere to fearlessly, because what separates my world from those whose only recourse is to escape it is a slim margin of error.