Hope for Afghan Children

There is a song in my head this morning, one that has no name, no words, no tune. It is all songs, it is mathematical, it is inside my ear, it is what comes before nothing. It is that mid-autumn sort of thing, a day off from living, hazy, sun morning low in the sky, nothing to do. I behold because I cannot merely look or stare, the asters in the courtyard of my safety here in the center of the continuous perhaps never ending denouement of a five-part tragedy in a thirty-years war, vigorous yellow rich blooms I could eat, hundreds, and I perceive after all, life, the same life that is born and re-born when an orphan girl whose blood can trace a thin unimaginable line all the way to Ghengis Khan himself tells me she cannot play Zeus, there are too many lines, and does, when she says she cannot do the drama of Mother Courage, sacrifice one child to save another, and does, or when a second orphan scampers after a soccer ball, her impossibly long black braid trailing after her like a cord tied to the dusk of the fading sky, the ruins of Darulaman, and the full bleeding moon rising over the incisored dust-brown mountains of Kabul, or when a third orphan, tall and skinny, scribes a rendering of her name, her father’s name, the place of her birth, a village so remote as to honor the remoteness of its name, Hindu Kush, and finally her unknown make believe date of birth on a whiteboard in bright red erasable ink and tells me in her curtseyed voice it is her passport, when I ask her where in the world this conjured document will bring her, and she answers coyly, impishly, “I’m going to America…” when she does not know or even think she is one who will ever go, ever leave this trembling city, not in this story, not in this life. Now I know and cannot turn away, these are the moments that compose the song I speak of, they gradually fill my body, waiting for a day such as this to silence my fears.

The three girls who will accompany me to the United States for three months have been selected. An Uzbek from Kunduz, a Pashtun from Jalalabad, a Tajik from Takhar. The winter ahead of them they cannot possibly imagine and yet, oddly, I think it is the girls who will recognize a New England Christmas more than anyone, because they only know it from the over sentimentalized cards they’ve seen and that we Americans have grown not to believe, the ones depicting the season as a mythological candy land of red and green and white, home fires burning, safety singing and happiness inside the heart of a cold, cold world. Tucked within these Afghan orphans is the dream of a mystical land where human kindness becomes one with a season, the wind, the night, the stars. There will be footprints in snow, a sleigh weaving through evergreens laden with powder, there will be a small house huddled against a hill, and a many-paned window, yellow, aglow. And there will be such love.

Along with the joy I anticipate in watching the girls experience this new world is the joy I will feel in watching unsuspecting Americans experience what the girls bring with them. The gift they bring is that song I speak of; and along with this gift, at the very least, now at last you will know why I am here.

Sahar as Zeus in Prometheus Bound

Pashtana reciting Pashtun poem at Art Party

Manizha after asking Bashardost a question in leadership workshop.

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I remember my father reading to me in bed, books about the Civil War, about the history of invention and exploration. He read novels to me as well, often about families struggling to keep together in colonial times, pioneer times, adults and children having to learn from one another to survive. I remember my father’s heart, the simultaneous softness and itchiness of his sweater. Often he was still in his work clothes, a white shirt, a tie, a pullover v-neck vest, slacks and thin black socks. I remember what I think every child lucky enough to have had this experience remembers, the heartbeat and anticipation I felt radiating from my father, what we might call the joy of the reader. His fingers could not wait to turn the page, and almost always pulled the top right corner between his thumb and index finger well before finishing the last paragraph. He took pleasure in experiencing the story as much as I, even the simplest most childish of stories. It had something to do with the sharing.

I was reminded of this phenomenon while listening to a lecture given by a fiction writer, Kevin McIlvoy, about the role of immanence in writing. It is the immanence in a story, not merely the anticipation of what happens next that thrills us. By immanence I mean the mystical, unknowable now that contains the inevitable soon-to-be. This is why there is often a malaise that overcomes us when we work a job in which we can no longer perceive a shred of immanence. When this occurs we to varying degrees spend our working hours dreaming and free time dreading our return to work. Of course boredom is a trifling sacrifice when compared to the fact that bills need to be paid, but it is a nagging condition in a society where “exciting” lives full of immanence are dangled in front of us at every turn. This condition is also worth tracking in terms of what it informs us about its terrible unmentionable cousin, hopelessness. As Mr. McIlvoy explains, this is what we call writer’s block. We cannot go forward with our creation because we have lost a sense of immanence. I am holding onto you the reader this very moment only so far as you sense something more revealing might be coming from the unpredictable and almost unimaginable land of Afghanistan. I am sorry, but I have no story to tell except the ongoing reminder that what we are doing here is instilling a sense if immanence into the souls of children in a land so desperately in need of hope a good portion of the people will accept even the dreaded Taliban back if only it can promise something different.

My grandmother used to tell a story about one of her great grandchildren which I heard many times. My niece was three or four years old and it was an early summer morning. My grandmother had it in her mind to show her the magic of life by planting some tiny seeds in a row. A week or two later, after the seeds had sprouted, she watched from a window with a combination of dismay and wonderment as my niece wandered into her garden and went from sprig to sprig of green and pulled each from its fragile footing in the soil, expectant there would be attached to one of them an orange root known to all as a carrot. The thing that compelled that little girl to see what magic might be attached to those seedlings is immanence.

I think the world is losing its sense of immanence in Afghanistan and is readying to walk away. The news every week feeds this fading interest. So what if Karzai received bags of money from Iran? He gets bags of money from everyone, China, India, Pakistan, and of course the U.S.. This is about as rote a story as spacing items on an assembly line. And herein lies the creative block, the deterioration of immanence. I wager if I were in a bar, a Park Diner or a Starbucks in any part of America today and took a survey, with little variation this would be the prevailing sentiment: nothing will change in Afghanistan; the people are barbarians anyway. They don’t comprehend democracy and they certainly don’t need someone to teach them drama or photography. The women still walk around in blue sheets and grow old fast, the men wear stupid looking things, pajamas and such, wrap sheets around their heads, eat meat with their hands and cut off the noses of their women. The people are tribal (euphemism for barbaric), ruled by warlords (euphemism for medieval), bend and pray five times a day and mutter strange sounds like savages praying to King Kong. They don’t have a sense of humor; they don’t know how to have fun. They don’t even drink.

I have the feeling the only westerners with an acute sense of immanence about Afghanistan are soldiers, Marines and their families. Still, this has more to do with getting a job done (ill defined as that may be), and coming home in one piece. No matter how humanitarian the military brass wishes to portray its mission, establishing democracy, reducing civilian casualties and winning hearts and minds are peacetime pursuits. A war is still being conducted here. Airstrikes are spiking again, and roadside bombs are ever increasing. Civilians are still being killed and by all sides, and the only hearts and minds truly being won are the relative few who profit from wartime contracts.

If I spoke to a hundred people in the United States I predict for every one the first and for many the only question would be whether or not we should get out. Here is my non-answer answer:

In my years working as a counselor it bothered me to hear it asked by a parent or a staff member or a doctor or a teacher at what point do you kick a troubled adolescent out of the house, the school, the group home, even the wilderness camp. It bothered me even more that this was considered to be a solution to the problem. I don’t claim to be right or wrong, I only claim this is how it made me feel. At issue is hypocrisy; while asking the child to take responsibility for his or her actions we take little responsibility for our own. As individuals let alone as countries, only if outright caught with a hand half emerging from the cookie jar, only if found standing with a smoking hot gun are we impelled to take responsibility for just about anything we do. Otherwise we are all victims of something or someone else. The real tragedy, in America as much as in Afghanistan, is when true victims are made to feel responsible for their own victimization, and their persecutors are rewarded. To go to war with someone is in a perverted way choosing to fall in love with someone, to marry and have children with that someone. I do not accept that the attacks of 2001 left us little choice. We have inadvertently gotten ourselves into one hell of a shotgun wedding here, and this union has produced a whole lot of children. Whether we want a divorce or not seems, at least from my perspective, to have little bearing on the fact that the needs of the children, with or without loving parents, come first.

This week I showed the girls in leadership class photos of Kabul in 1965. I expected them to stare in amazement. I expected them to leap from their chairs. Nothing of the sort happened. They looked on with expectant smiles. No, not in their lives have they seen such things, not in their families, not in the streets, not even on television, but nevertheless they recognized them. Why? It is because these images are tucked safely within the immanence of their lives. This is the gift you have given them, and really, this is the only gift any mission should offer, be it militarily or humanitarian or otherwise. We give them immanence, and they will turn the pages. We must be like writers, remembering that to create something lasting in this world means to once again become not the father but the child sitting in the father’s lap. The father is what McIlvoy calls the “adult adult”. He is bored. He is not real. He is an entity, like God or the calendar. The moment we become the father is the moment we suck the immanence out of our endeavor. After all, what father hasn’t relished from time to time, or every single time becoming a child again when reading the words to the little boy or girl in his lap,

Once upon a time…

Photos of what was once Kabul, and may once will be.

Kabul circa 1970

University life

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There is on occasion a moment when the universe shows itself to be a meeting point between science and magic, and that is when I dial a number of someone I have not spoken to for some time, a whim, and I discover that very person is at that very moment dialing me. Such was the case this week when I pressed the button on my mobile’s directory for Ramazan Bashardost.

“Salaam Alekum, Mister Bashardost!”

“Salaam Alekum, khoobastee…”

“Je suis tre bien, comment allez-vous?” I was unabashedly and falsely showing off.

“Bien, merci.”

“Congratulations, Mister Bashardost, I see it is official that you have won your seat in Parliament again, with real votes!”

“Thank you very much.”

“Do you wish to visit the students of leadership class?”

“Why not?”

It is this why not he always says that puts a smile on my face, as if to answer “no” was unthinkable.

Yesterday October was in full bloom. The light was clear and angular, the shadows too, the sky a penetrating blue and the dust and smog had settled with the cold of the previous night. Manizha and Farida had arranged flowers from the garden on the conference table, red, pink and white roses and a cluster of yellow asters. All the girls sat expectantly around the table, pencils poised above notebooks. Half of their joy seemed to be wrapped in watching how happy I was that one of my heroes was there to teach my class. (My mood seems to be of great importance to them. So often one or another of them ask me if I am happy, if I am sad.) Tea and cake was served to all, and Bashardost launched right into a lecture. One by one the girls put their pencils down. They fell deeply into a spell, it seemed, eyes fixed, not wishing to interrupt listening with even a scratch of a pause to scribe thoughts into words on a page. As Bashardost spoke of the balance of power in Afghanistan, I could understand bits and pieces, and names: Fahim, Sayaf, Khalili, and Karzai. I watched his small hands gesturing, using the cakes to illustrate the manner in which power has been parceled out. My mind drifted. I scribbled on my pad of paper what I remembered of a graphic that I had seen that morning. It is something I’m certain Bashardost is aware of, yet I doubt many Americans are: In 2009 the United State officially spent over 663 billion dollars on its military. The next fifteen highest expenditures: China, France, U.K., Russia, Japan, Germany, Saudi Arabia, India, Italy, Brazil, South Korea, Canada, Australia, and Spain combined came to 500 billion. 43% of the entire world’s expenditure on military is American. If we pulled our allies from the statistic, how much more than all our perceived enemies together are we spending? The recent agreement to sell more weapons and planes to the Saudis highlights for me, given the above numbers, what Eisenhower warned us about. The military industrial complex has become big business, as vital to our economy as it is to our security. It constitutes 4.3% of America’s GDP. The problem here is the military doesn’t actually make anything, and even a layperson knows that like China, you have to make things to have a strong economy. So much of Wall Street’s collapse seemed to have to do with the lack of things we make and things we sell. Insurance on insurance policies is not real. If what we do make are weapons, how many end up being used against innocent people, or even against ourselves?

How much of our national security depends on how much of that money spent? More to the point, how has this money enabled us to improve our chances against Al Qaeda or even finding Bin Laden?

Compare this to what we give in foreign aide: 22.8 billion in 2006, one twenty-ninth of what we spend on military. Of that aid, almost a third goes to Israel and Egypt, two countries that I don’t see as somehow helplessly struggling. (We of course know why those two countries are paid off). When Americans rant and rave about big government, it seems to me what they should be ranting about is big military. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not a military slasher, but is it not reasonable to ask what we get for the $163,000,000,000 we spend over and above the next 15 world military budgets combined? (I am making an assumption the budgets for the CIA, Dept. of Homeland Security, and the FBI are separate and additional. It is also my understanding the CIA practically conducted and thereby financed the war in Afghanistan to begin with.)

As the national debate heats up for election day, I want to know what are America’s priorities, and what is our agenda?

My attention came back to the voice of Sahar asking Bashardost a question. She and he both used a serious tone in discussing the role of America’s military in Afghanistan. I kept quiet. I felt a deep satisfaction with being in that room. I ate a cake, I sipped my chi. The two-hours went by quickly. I could see Bashardost was getting weary. The girls had more questions but I intervened and asked the final question, a personal question. Why does he do it, why not live in France, teach at a university, write a book? It was a stupid question. I’m not good at asking the right questions of adults. Bashardost didn’t look at me; he looked around at the girls, smiling a wry smile as if everyone in the room but myself knew the answer.

“Well, I will ask you, isn’t America clean? Isn’t there a life there much better than your life here? I will ask you then, why it is you are here?”

Earlier this week a group of American peace activists contacted me. They are friends of an acquaintance. They were in Kabul for a few days and wanted to see an orphanage. I was at Mehan and invited them over. These people are very devoted to non-violent protest. One woman, a 57 year old from Chicago was once thrown in jail for planting corn over the top of missile silos. The children played host, as they always do. So personable and open they are. They voluntarily put on a gymnastics display, and then told me to get my cittern, they wanted to sing one of our songs. We had been working on El Condor Passa, so we gave our three guests a run through. Then the girls launched into Blowin’ in the Wind, to which I could not help but comply. At this point all sixty-five girls in Mehan know the song, even tiny Seema who arrived at the orphanage only three months ago. It has become a Mehan anthem. This particular attempt was the best I’d heard the girls do in terms of confidence, annunciation and tone. Our guests’ eyes pooled with tears as they sang along. I was pleased with how interested they were, each of them taking extensive notes and asking pertinent questions. Another little thread, just as threads had been extended through our other recent guests, U.S. soldiers from Kabul Compound.

Last night I played soccer with the girls and their coach. It is a great joy for me as it is for the girls, to be able to simply run free under the sky, the full moon rising, the sun setting behind the dusty mountains. I have lost a lot of muscle tone from my days of running. But I push on. Many of the girls have improved markedly in their game. Their competitive spirit is inspiring. I wondered, what if there was such a team in Jalalabad, in Herat, Mazar and even Kandahar? What wars might be won with such a simple gesture? It costs virtually nothing but a little wind, a little grass, a little love.

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The Minister of Economics (Department of Non-Government Organizations) pushed his half moon glassed down to the end of his nose, looked me for the first time in the eyes and told me like a disinterested teacher to his un-ambitious C student that my life is more important than the volunteer work I am doing here in Afghanistan.

Right away I realized I’d heard this before. A year ago I tried to enlist the head consul at the U.S. Embassy to assist me in my efforts to get the Afghan secret service off AFCECO’s back, a problem that went on to escalate from nasty interrogation of our representative to the outright terrorization of an innocent family. The Consul was kindly, but unequivocally told me that I was taking undo risks, especially given the neighborhood I lived in. He told me that there was nothing he could do unless I was actually dead, that your life is more important than the work you are doing. He told me to go home.

This is a reasonable point of view, but on both occasions I couldn’t quite shed the resonance of falsity somehow oozing from its self-assured wisdom. Yes, it is of course fair to say my life (let alone the life of innocent others) is more important than many actions I might choose almost on a daily basis. Driving, for instance. But given the frivolity of so many occasions we risk our lives to varying degrees, is my life so much more important than the needs of the children here? Besides, though CNN would have it different, I am not driving a hundred miles an hour through the streets of San Francisco. I’d say it is more like a slightly hair-raising gallop down the Saw Mill River Parkway into New York City bumper to bumper going 50.

In drama class this week we practiced improvising two scenes. In one there are two sisters and a father. One sister has been taking care of the father while the other has gone on to pursue her career in Europe. It is homecoming, as the father is close to death and the career sister wants to see him before he goes. We did this scene several ways, for example the one sister being resentful, the father loving the career girl more, or the one sister selfless and loving to all. Another scene involved two old friends, one who’s father was killed by Taliban and one, destitute, who has decided to go on the Taliban payroll and seeks asylum one night in his friend’s house. Sometimes in the middle of these sessions I step back and watch, sometimes I get right in there. They are always very much like life itself. You keep plugging away and once in a while it seems terribly meaningful. We finished class by learning a song divided into four parts, a fun way to practice working together with a script in English. It was a song I wrote about the strength of love to transcend boundaries and bridge distances. We did this in my old room at Mehan. Night is falling early now. Though it was five-thirty the windows were darkened and the room aglow. I remembered the night before leaving Mehan the first time, a year ago, all of the children crowding in to sing one last time together. The room is different now. It is not mine. There are desks and five computers, and there is a stack of brand new shoes in the corner. But this fact no longer elicits melancholy. The twenty-one children and one teacher of Raven Clan sensed something new happening. We drew closer, we became a unit. The walls of that room are like the wood of a guitar. They are beginning to resonate with all the tones of all the songs that have been sung there, all the lessons that have been administered by myself and others, and even all the wordless moments, hands clasped, tears shed, smiles provoked. Later, as I slipped on my sandals Parwana followed me to the steps that lead to the garden. “I am sad,” she said. Usually she says just about anything merely to practice her English, to get any lesson she can eke out of me, but this time I saw in her eyes she was serious. I paused and asked her why. “Because,” she said, “I don’t know… today was a good drama class.”

“Yes,” is all I could say, and goodbye.

“Ian-jan?” she called before I stepped into the car. “Exam tomorrow, on Taj Mahal?”

“What do you think?” I smiled.

She smiled too, waved a finger at me and headed back into the orphanage.

This week was one of those weeks I hold close. In leadership course we watched five movie clips: Joan d’Arc confronting the English cavalry and turning them away on the strength of her faith alone; General Patton slapping a soldier suffering from “shell shock” and sending him back to the front; General Custer leading his men right into the trap he had already been alerted to; William Wallace (Braveheart) giving his “freedom” speech to two thousand Scots; and Norma Rae refusing to be fired from her factory job and standing on a table with a sign saying Union, rallying her co-workers to do the same.

What governs our leading style? A higher power, authoritarianism, position, charisma, or example? I asked the class to identify what kind of leader is Bashardost, Malalai Joya, Obama, Karzai, Mul Omar, Dostum, their football coach? We discovered not all leadership styles work for all situations. What if Obama had been president after the attacks nine years ago and Bush was president now? What kind of leader is best when there is an emergency? What leader is best when there is an argument to settle between two people, between countries? As usual I was pushing the lesson faster than I should have. I wanted this discussion to move into an examination of teamwork and how a leader emerges from the group. I’d set up some typical challenges from my counseling days such as crossing a “toxic river” with only two boards and a rope. Before I could shift gears it was Hala who yelled out, “What about you, Ian? What kind of leader are you?” I shrugged and said I am not a leader. The room erupted, unanimously.

“By example, by example by example!”

Please understand it is with more humbleness than pride that I say to you now it will take more than scolding, prohibitive words from the Consul or Minister to turn me away from this place.

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Rain and thunder came rolling through yesterday. The sweater has come down from the shelf. Summer has been expelled.

I am teaching the boys the story of Ernest Shackleton, possibly the greatest success story to spring from failure. My three “keys” to good leadership seem to hold up here, but when you get down to it, leadership must be rooted in the ability to embrace failure, to wrap your arms around it and kiss it on the cheek. What I am talking about is not playing victim, not defeatist, I’m talking about what you do after looking failure in the eyes with open heart, after pressing enough to know that failure is resolved, she has made her decision, there are things in this world you cannot and maybe even should not understand. That is when you spend a few moments recalling for her the times you’ve had, when all was hope and learning, when she led you through your new home and explained to you the dos and don’ts, when she showed you she is no dummy, she knows chemistry, she knows how to fight. I remember when I sent her on a scavenger hunt. She was on the lesser team. This did not dissuade her from giving it her all. She actually thought her team could win.

Perhaps she was always going to be failure. Not sure if this matters enough to say, but there, I said it.

The storytelling best not go on too long. You only need verify she existed, you existed, breathed in that air together and when she cried, you cried, and when she laughed, you laughed. Then, failure resolved, you tell her you are right here, press your phone number into the palm of her hand. If she ever needs you, anything, to call. Even for no reason at all. She will waver here, because she will have expected ridicule, anger, even hatred. She will shudder and her eyes will well up and she will look smaller than she is. This is when you must be strongest, because this is the moment you will think perhaps there is a way of turning this all around, that all you need do is quickly change your tack and success will be salvaged.

Don’t.

If you try, she will only go away full of poison that will leave her defenseless against the world that despises her weakness and envies her strength.

You will pay, later, after the sun goes down. There will be a hole in your stomach that can’t be filled. You will wonder, “what if”. Don’t scratch, just let that wound heal. You have sent failure on her way ennobled, and you still have all your fingers and toes, and after all there are 27 crew members to lead to safety, through the darkest winter, through the worst kind of cold, through hurricane and ice chasm, and always a thirst even though all around you, everywhere, as far as the eye can see is water.

The boys were in awe of Shackleton’s story. His world couldn’t have been more alien, yet there was a sense of kinship in terms of devotion to the task at hand, the priorities, the moment all the men splashed a bit of milk from their cups into the cup of the one who spilled, and when the “Boss” gave his mittens to the photographer who had lost his at sea; history would require a pair of nimble hands. The boys did not see failure. She had become a part of the landscape, even a weight lifted, a lesson in love.

Failure’s name, in this case, was Endurance.

I asked a long-time sponsor recently the most difficult thing about her job. She said, unequivocally, “losing” one of her kids. It is cruel, time. This week one of her children abruptly left the orphanage. The girl was utterly destroyed, as were all her sisters. Even in this, maybe the gravest crossroads of her life, she was fiercely brave. She had to go, and that was that. Her relatives, the pressures of her world, the risk we take including the world in this journey, pulled her away. It is a risk we must take, or the children will never mean anything to their people, nor their people to them. We cannot own these precious gifts.

I have written of Maria so often it hurts. Home is never, at least for the orphan, where she has been, but where she is going to. This is not finished. There is a chance we will work this out, and she will return some day. She called last night to hear my voice, and for me not to forget hers. Oh, dear Maria, wherever your path leads you, know that if there is a failure here it is mine, and that you carry with you a thousand heartbeats. Remember Prometheus, the fire you possess from your years in the orphanage that can never be taken away, and also the fire you have given us, and we will remember how to feel alive.

April, 2009. Keeper of the key to the storeroom.

August, 2010. A forward, always.

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