Hope for Afghan Children

24 December

“How would you like to learn how to drive?”

I had told the three girls many things about their journey through America, but it had not occurred to me this would be their first lesson. Pashtana, sitting beside me in the passenger seat registered the full meaning of my suggestion first. Her eyes widened the way they do every time she smiles. “Yes,” she answered simply with understated modesty, matter of factly. Then she turned in her seat and clarified for Sahar and Manizha in the back that their teacher had in fact meant what he said.

“Here, Pashtana, take the wheel.”

This is how I myself learned to drive, my older sister letting go of the wheel and suggesting I take hold of it before the car drove off the road. Pashtana grabbed hold of the steering wheel and after a few wobbles left and right she steadied and piloted us around a bend and into a large school parking lot.

The three girls drive three different ways. Pashtana is careful, attentive to every direction, determined and unafraid. Manizha is one of those super smart girls who is impatient with details and wants to forge right ahead. She likes speed. Sahar is fifteen and bravely follows the example of her two older AFCECO sisters, but her legs are short and even with two pillows behind her and the seat jacked forward she can barely push the clutch all the way to the floor. Still, she did it, though steering without overcompensating took her quite some getting used to.

The girls are learning to drive a 1997 Saab 900 with a standard five-speed transmission. It is arguably the most difficult car to learn with, because the gears are touchy, the cockpit deep, and the dashboard high. You must practically push the clutch into the floor to make a clean shift into reverse. But the girls are driving it. We visit a deserted car dealership every day, and every day they learn something new. They start the car, move forward, shift to second, to third, drive around the building, park, go in reverse, turn the car around and start again. At the end of their first lesson, each of the girls having had two turns at the wheel, I told them they are my sitaras (stars). Pashtana’s eyes once again smiled. “I am very happy,” she said.

I tell the girls this: in today’s world driving is one of the great symbols of freedom, especially in America. But of course my students are teenagers, and there is little need to philosophize about something so omnipresent and visceral to just about every sixteen year old in the world. For them to drive is to go, to move, to be.

Everywhere we go people turn their heads. One man stopped us in a grocery store and asked where it was my friends had come from. He had seen us standing in front of the lobster tank, the girls giggling and aghast over the notion of eating one of those scorpion, spider-like things. The curious man could not place the girls, they didn’t fit any mold. He couldn’t even venture a guess. I deferred to the girls and they unanimously, simultaneously answered the man’s question, “We come from Afghanistan.”

As the world unfolds for the three emissaries from what may as well be a corner of the moon, it is impossible to predict what will impress them and to what degree. The ocean, the cinema, a supermarket, a highway.  One or the other of them ask me a question every now and then. The other night Pashtana asked me why Americans put lights everywhere, around their houses, their trees, their windows and railings and shrubs. I thought for a minute. It was winter solstice. I told Pashtana we wish to remember the light when it is most dark. We wish to share this light with one another, with strangers passing in the street, with the purple sky full of stars. Pashtana seemed satisfied with this answer.  “Cards?” she then asked. I nodded. That day I’d explained Spades, a card game for four that had succeeded in bringing out the girls’ competitiveness I know so well. Pashtana called up the stairs of my brother’s colonial New Hampshire home, “Manizha, Sahar! Bia!” Outside, flurrying snow glittered as it fell through the lights. Everywhere else was black under a heavy, settled sky. Inside, the house smelled of blue spruce. A fire of cedar logs we’d just collected from the forest now crackled in the hearth. Stockings hung above it and ornaments sat in the corner waiting to find their unique place from which to preside over yet another New England Christmas. Camels and bears and diamonds and kings, silver teardrops and crystal orchids, each a specific memory of a chapter in the life of a family. This year three new ornaments will take their place in this history, fragile yet eternal. I have asked the girls each to write their story down, something to share when their incubation here is finished, when I deliver them to their host families and they begin their journey separate from one another and apart from their overprotective teacher. We worked for some time just feeling free to indulge in this way. I explained that Americans want to hear these stories, that many people will be deeply affected by an orphan girl’s tale. Now they are practicing their speeches, and will test themselves first with my family on Christmas Day. I have an inkling this is what impresses them most, more than the Atlantic, the shopping mall, the 3D movie, the meals upon meals of rich and overdressed food, even I might say driving a car; the prospect of standing before two hundred people in the most powerful country in the world and calling these people to action in a different sort of way, the way of love and the way of nurturing and the way of trust, convincing them by virtue of their own existence that such a thing is universal and can work, is working even in a homeland so torn asunder as theirs.

This eve my brother and his daughter played a special song for their guests, he on guitar and she on flute, their rendition of J.S. Bach’s classical seasonal tune Jesus, Joy of Man’s Desiring. Though its title engenders religious overtones, in present company we feel a universality. It is a time we remember that to give is the anecdote for desire, like the time during Eid a widow cloaked in her blue burqa knocked upon the door of the orphanage, asked from the orphans a single piece of meat for her own children. The joy that comes with giving is like the notes in the music that seem to roll on without interruption, perpetual in their liveliness and unfolding. I watch Pashtana, Manizha and Sahar as they absorb this world of ours, and remarkably it is I who makes the discovery. We are one on this Earth.

Merry Christmas.

Pashtana driving for first time.

The girls making Mantu for my birthday dinner.

A walk in the woods.