For the first time I dreamed I was back in Mehan orphanage in Kabul. The presence of new children along with the girls I know indicated to me I’d gone into the future. I felt nervous and at once relieved. I’d come to the end of this zigzagging road. I looked forward to staying in one place. The new orphans introduced themselves one by one. Theirs were unfamiliar names, and I was sorry I hadn’t brought my little brown pocket-sized notebook to write them down. Nothing dream-like about this dream, it was real and natural. The only oddity is the children seem to me in retrospect amalgamations of the Afghan faces I know so well and the faces of American kids imprinted upon my mind’s eye after so many visits to so many schools. Even the names were a strange blending of the two, a Fatima with Denise that becomes Fanise. More than Farzana and Ali and Fahima I see the shocked faces of my present students as I tell them about the horrors witnessed by those three. I see these students giggle while watching the video of Omid screaming on the pirate ship ride, or Sitiza slipping and falling in a water fight with Nafisa, and when I tell them about teaching the girls how to spit a watermelon seed, their capitulating eyes as they finish the story for me, knowing full well the inevitability of an all-out spitting war. This pendulum swing from utter estrangement to the most basic elements of familiarity is the plot I unabashedly manipulate into play. My dream indicates to me this life hop-frogging around the country, eliciting in audiences wonder and hope for a country’s people where we currently enter our ninth year of war has penetrated my psyche.
There is a tension in that juxtaposition; no matter what the war, the enemy must be vilified, simplified, less than human for us to kill. I ask the students what an average Afghan looks like. Not until I wrap my scarf around my head, scream and shoot an imaginary rifle like a banshee on opium do they nervously laugh with familiarity. But what if that enemy is by generous estimation about 12,000 members of the opposition called Taliban? There are 28 million people living in Afghanistan. Even if we subscribe to the further characterization of Afghans as being tribal (euphemism for feudal, even stone-age), to see a house full of same-said tribal children behaving in just about every way more civilized, disciplined, playful, appreciative and happy than the children in the very classrooms I now visit casts a spell I have rarely witnessed in adolescents. They are humbled, intrigued, so quiet that during the silent sections of the video not a whisper, not even a shifting in a chair can be heard. And then come the questions, invariably more than time allows. It is the kind of questions, the way they are asked that confirms my suspicion. They want to know, and then afterwards they want to thank. What is happening here? I believe it is something as simple and universal as, once tasted, the desire for freedom. If the Mehan girls can do it, so can we.
I cannot say truthfully why I do what I do. Oftentimes I think I go on a simple hunch, and the storyline gets imprinted upon the outcome of my actions. I wanted to go to Afghanistan. I want to raise money for the orphanages. I want to improve people’s understanding of the complexities and realities for the average Afghan. These goals are no more fantastical than saying when we are young we want to get married and have children. We know nothing about marriage and we certainly don’t know a thing about what it means to have children. On one level, if we really look at it, these goals are random by nature. We think these are goals but if for example what we actually want is love then any book in the self-help section of Barns and Noble will tell you there is little to no evidence love is remotely guaranteed. The truth is, and I didn’t know this until a fellow Omprakash volunteer pointed it out, I am trying to keep the orphans alive in my heart. I am trying to be with them even while trapped in my own country on the opposite side of the world. And here we go, the actual story as so kindly hinted by my dream; my countrymen and women are adopting me even as I cling to my orphan-ness. Slowly, I acquiesce.
It is a dalliance with ego to speak as I do about my inner workings through all of these entries as much as I speak of the world and its people. I trust you will forgive any indulgences. Hermann Hesse wrote that as a body everyone is single, as a soul never. And yet he also wrote that one man is more than just himself, that he also represents the “significant and remarkable point at which the world’s phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again”. Whatever the case, universal or unique, East or West, what this continuing journey reflects is a naïve and preposterous urge to build a bridge between the two.
Thus far people and host organizations have contributed $3,200 to this “tour” of mine. My hope is to have ten thousand by the end of February. I have decided that all money will go into an education fund for the orphans. Though scholarships will undoubtedly be available to cover tuitions, there will be numerous other costs such as airfare to Bangladesh where a Farzana Nori may well one day attend the Asian University for Women. There will be books and supplies to purchase, and most direly there is a need for tutors and fulltime teachers to augment the vastly inadequate public school in Kabul. To be sure, this is just a beginning, but we have two years to get the fund up to speed, before the oldest children turn eighteen. They each in their own way must experience a fall from the nest. To make great sky circles of their freedom I wager these children would somehow lift themselves no matter how depraved their world. Still, I cannot imagine standing by without doing whatever I can to improve the span of their wings.