Hope for Afghan Children

I understand it has been a rainy spring in my native New England, a very rainy spring in Italy, and here in Kabul there have been floods to the north and even the usually trickling Kabul River has been replenished.  Every three days a thunderstorm has rolled through the city, laying down for a while the incessant dust.  This is in great contrast to a year ago when I first arrived and never saw rain at all.  A year ago, now, is a lifetime ago.

Preparing the 15 children for their performance tomorrow has sent flashes through my mind of Julie Andrews teaching the Von Trapps how to sing.  The orphans are particularly amused with learning the scale, “do-re-me, re-me-fa, me-fa-so…”  It is the only way I know of to train their ears and widen their range, and of course warm up their voices.  There are two added elements to my task that the erstwhile teacher did not contend with: training the children to sing in a very foreign language and, I’d say most challenging, a completely different understanding of tone, melody, and rhythm, in short how to approach the task of singing a western song.

When I listen to them practice the two Afghan songs they plan to sing, one in Dari and one in Pashto, I am exhilarated by the movement of their voices.  Pashto in particular dazzles with its musicality, a blend of percussiveness and lyrical flow.  But teaching the subtleties of a western song is like trying to keep a class from shouting out an answer that I am trying to elicit from the one student I have called upon.  Start with the difference between singing Blowin’ in the Wind and If I had a Hammer.  Explaining the building tension or irony in the words reflected in the music is like teaching two languages at once.  Teaching orphaned victims of war how a hammer can be justice and the wind can have answers to countless deaths is from their literal vantage point ludicrous.  Regardless, the children work tirelessly to understand my direction.

Some are songbirds, like Nabila.  She has a natural ear and hits the notes right on.  Yesterday she plucked a pink rose and put it in my hair before rehearsal.  Eventually I transferred it back to her.  Nabila has a stunning face, an amalgamation of everything Asia, and with the rose tucked behind her right ear and her black onyx hair pushed behind it, she proceeded with a confidence of spirit I had not seen in her before.  A year ago she would have shrunk from the solo I’ve assigned.  Now, the older girls ask her to participate where they wouldn’t have before.  There are others, too, who emerge from their shells.  Sitiza, in 11^th grade and finally standing at her full height (she is 5’ 8”) rather than hunching apologetically, she also has a solo in the performance.  She shows ambition where there was none, and worked extra hard to get into my special English class for advanced students.  Some of the girls cannot sing, or are terribly shy, but they have a fierce desire to break out of the social chains that were slapped on their wrists upon birth.  Fatima, for example, from Farah province, whose mother abused her and her sister Sadaf and whose father went into an insane asylum, who a year ago was the most skittish, mouse-like emotionally fragile child I’ve ever known has come to every rehearsal and made her way into the group of already confident girls.  It is like watching a flower grow out of hard earth.  Meena, dewana (crazy) as the others frequently say, though she is only eleven has a low gravely voice like a sixty-year old blues singer who has smoked all her life.  When she hits the notes she blows all the others away.  Problem is, when?  It is completely unpredictable when she will decide to hear and intone the note or when she will not care in the least.

There is Lida, whose father died when she was a baby and whose mother married again, which generally means casting all previous children out from the family.  There is Maria and Sahar and Neda, veterans of the orphanage who balance their desire to shine on their own with their responsibility to bring the others along.  There is Farida, who comes from such a conservative origin that just to remove her scarf in front of this ragtag man from America is a minor revolution.  Who could have ever predicted she would one day pump her right fist into the air along with the others and shout Justice! and Freedom! It is certainly a mixed bag of voices this singing group, but on display will be more than performance.  The marquee, if it existed, would do well to supersede its headliner with “Unadulterated Courage”.

We are performing the songs for the students and faculty at American University of Kabul.  The event is being sponsored by their student council, which is raising money for AFCECO.  The drama group will wait to share their Greek tragedy later, perhaps in three weeks when we are ready for an audience.  Everyone at the University seems delighted with this budding relationship with the orphanages.  Unfortunately, just when a sense of normalcy begins to enchant us, the reality of war takes a swipe at our hopes.  All use of the football field has been suspended due to a very credible code orange threat of attack on the University.  Nobody has any idea how long this will last, if ever the restriction will be lifted.  We must wait, and inquire, and wait.

I have dreams, now, for the children.  Before, I dared not.  I see them someday performing a full theatrical production, sets, lights, costumes and sound.  But then I think back to my early days of theatre and the company I kept.  We were a bunch of gorilla dramatists at Evergreen State, running around in town and through the woods, drawing up the archetypal and even primal forces of Jerzy Grotowski and the Polish “Teatr Laboratorium”.  I think of the players in Shakespeare who band together in Midsummer Night’s Dream and Hamlet, of the troupes that roamed the countryside in the Middle Ages.  I’m inclined to go where the children themselves take our fledgling merry band, to have a repertoire of fifteen-minute plays, passion plays for war, for a population that has only known war, plays that bear witness and call for awareness, that can be performed at a moment’s notice in a living room, a park, a school, a hotel lobby.  Augmenting these plays will be songs, songs in three languages, of east and west, and who will care if there is no dry ice or cross-fade or trap door?  Who will notice the absence of bangles and hats and fake beards and swords?  All of these need only be suggested; they exist already in the imagination.  Perhaps my inclination is correct, perhaps we need only a jersey, of sorts, a team color.  Three years ago I had T-shirts made for American students in Middlebury, Vermont, back when I directed a theatre club.  The shirts are black, of course.  I had them printed with a white outlined sketch and lettering of the group’s totem: Raven Clan Players, along with the duplicitous masks of tragedy and comedy.  On the back is a motto, Talent is your capacity to experience.  I had 21 extra shirts that never sold.  On a whim I lugged them with me to Kabul.  When I sat down to write the adaptation of Aeschylus’ play a few weeks ago, I didn’t know how many of the orphans would want to participate.  The chorus could be five, it could be twelve.  I’d accommodate whoever wanted to join.  Total number of kids that auditioned: twenty-one.

I muse about seeing this through, of watching the children move into their lives beyond the orphanages.  I dream of seeing the orange blossoms of Jalalabad and, at the other end of the country the watermelon fields of Farah, the grapes, the apricots, the plums and elderberries, pistachios and pomegranates.  I dream of beautiful red poppies, the way I’d always known them, delicate, vibrant, scattered, harmless.  I see a day just one of these children shows me her or his village.  Every one of them I have asked at one time or another what would be the first thing to see in Mazur, in Lugar or Herat?  A clean mountain stream, a blue mosque, an apple tree that once was so large as to be a world unto itself, but is now diminished as is the endless forest I knew as a boy, the stone outcropping that was a fortress, the pond that was an ocean.  In my classes I have incorporated storytelling as a means to deepen the appreciation of language.  Girls as well as the boys bring to this a natural modesty.  As with everything it seems, I must model what it is I mean.  I told the story of being afraid of the dark, how I would flip the light switch in my bedroom and leap across the floor to my bed.  I told the story of climbing a pyramid in Egypt when I was 19, of falling in love with the girl who climbed with me, and how the following day our friend tried to do the same climb but fell to her death.  I told of a wounded mother brown bear growling in the night, and of flying alongside a red tailed hawk, the hawk’s look of perplexity and amazement and, in the end, kinship.  I purchased a globe the size of a bowling ball and it goes where I go.  I want to give the children the world with all its disasters and all its joy.  In turn their stories have begun to spill into the room.  Their world within the world comes to life vibrant light and heat and snow.  The risk is obvious.  The word atrocity is loaded and yet ill defined, just as the word terrorist.  There is the honor killing of a woman or girl who dares to learn, to wear high heels, to speak to another man.  There are cluster bombs raining from the sky onto the village, life, wherein the earth is rendered flat and silent but for the screams of loss.  Then comes the dance of death, wherein a man is decapitated and before the body bleeds out, hot oil is poured to cauterize the wounds so the life in both body and head continue to reach, to twist, to dance.  Finally there is a corpse, frozen into the ground so it could not be removed, telling the story of what it means to be skinned alive.  I listen and I do not flinch, I do not look away.  I sometimes nod my head, not in understanding but to remind the child I am here, I am listening, and I will not forget.  And the miracle is these stories are neither buried nor inflated.  They are facts, the way a well was dug and water found is a fact.  And mitigating these nightmares are stories that are redemptive, and almost always they are stories of place, olive trees, herds of fat-bottom goats, white mountains climbing higher and higher and the vast, open rolling hills of tall grass bending, as if the land were really a sea.  When the children speak of home, home is everywhere and it is here.  It is the orphanage, it is the village, but it is not so much a building, nor is it even so much a people.  It is the land, as if all else is encompassed by it.  To call the earth itself home is foreign to me as Dylan’s song of answers blowing in the wind is foreign to the children.  But not to these denizens of Afghanistan.  I put an old map of their country on the wall in my classroom.  It is labeled in Persian.  I stare at this as I would stare at a Rorschach test, for it does look as if someone spilled a half-cup of Indian ink on the page.  There is nothing political or natural about its boundaries.  There is a small section in the north that follows a river, but otherwise the country seems to be the fated remains of what has never claimed.  In the geographical game of tag it would be the place designated as safe.  I stare and wonder and then close my eyes.  I see Khalida smile a bashful smile, I see her blue eyes and her face light up when I ask her to please tell me of Nuristan.  I see Ahmad Shah square his shoulders and his head tilt to the side and back as he describes the sunshine in Farah.  I see Parwana look to the sky, and I hear the softness in her voice as she describes the nature of green that is Jalalabad.  So much love, so ready to the helm as I have never experienced.

I have been to some places, and others I will see.  Maybe this is life; maybe it would be thus wherever I happened to land.  But I feel, finally after forty-nine years and forty-nine different attempts to gain admittance to even the smallest singular secret of the universe, my application for apprenticeship has been accepted, and the training has begun.