From the very beginning of my experience in the orphanage I have tried from time to time to advise prospective volunteers as to the less than glamorous experience they will face.  In this respect it is a good idea to heed Mister Swift and downplay Mister DeFoe (creator of Robinson Crusoe).  With a preponderance of Byronic Heroes throwing themselves into the savage world and going native (Dances with Wolves, The Last Samurai, Avatar) we can only take so much of this liberal romanticism.  But must the pendulum of opinion always swing?  Is there not a way to amalgamate the two? Or, as history suggests, is real cultural exchange doomed to only occur by force of war, occupation and colonization? I am thankful for the two young volunteers and their gifts, because this seems to me to be a crucial argument, now more than ever before.  If it is not periodically engaged, we will all end up with a nihilistic view of the world wherein everything boils down to a mix between fate and survival of the fittest (such as the movie Apocalypse Now).

It is I think important to give a nod here toward the effect culturally of mass communication and information technology.  As it plays itself out, indications are this is creating some sort of hybrid world culture, or at least virtual culture. Cellular phones alone have transformed Asian society where, unlike the West the vast majority of people still live in the isolated countryside.  But this does not really have significant enough bearing on what to me is the core issue my younger adversaries have aroused in my heart: how to reconcile the American disgusted by poor, unworldly and corrupt societies with the peasant oppressed by consumptive societies?  How does 28 million Afghans tossing every single piece of refuse and sewage to the side of the road and into rivers compare to a well pumping oil into the Gulf of Mexico for three months?  Even more provocatively, how does the human and financial cost of the events of 9/11/2001 weigh in against the human and financial cost of invading and occupying Iraq and Afghanistan?

In light of all this it occurs to me that people who volunteer mostly fall into two categories, runners and imposters.  There are exceptions, to be sure.  I sometimes fancy myself one.  Having been a runner and imposter for so many years I sense both as they become manifest, and then I marvel how they burn from my skin layer by layer not out of some great enlightenment, but out of weariness from the effort it takes to sustain them.  Either that or I’ve perfected the art of (self?) deception.  Whatever the case, I leave you with this meditation and will speak of it no more:

In the end Gulliver maintains that nothing disturbs him about humanity; he is neither repelled by the scoundrels nor admiring of the saints.  Only one kind of person does he detest, and that is the deformed soul full of pride.  This is the highest evolution of the imposter (not too far removed from the emperor).  At the end of their disillusioning volunteer experience, the subjects interviewed for the aforementioned college thesis decided to keep their disillusionment close to the chest, choosing humbly to side with the status quo that praises such experience as life changing and character building.  This is the highest evolution of the runner (not too far removed from the victim).

There must be a third way to be.

My second road trip in Afghanistan brought me to Mazar and neighboring Balkh.  I walked upon the ruins of what was once an empire that Genghis Khan reduced to ashes simply because he was insulted by the very king he had initially reached out to in peace.  I visited the tomb of Rabia Balkhi who scribed her final poem in her own blood on the wall after her brother the king murdered her slave-lover.  Then I looked out across the central Asian plains that Rumi was born to before his exile.  Whenever I try to imagine a third way, he is one of the poets I turn to.  It may be that any page I turn to, like a fortune cookie or the i-ching would somehow be meaningful, but here is the poem I just randomly opened to:

A JUST FINISHED CANDLE

A candle is made to become entirely flame.

In that annihilating moment

it has no shadow.

It is nothing but a tongue of light

describing a refuge.

Look at this

just-finishing candle stub

as someone who is finally safe

from virtue and vice,

the pride and the shame

we claim from those.

(Translation by Coleman Barks)

As we crept upward and the Kabul river sank lower and farther away I began to understand how a tough landscape for centuries kept Buddhism out of central Asia so long after it had been planted in China, Nepal and India.  Sheer, towering mountains, desert dry and brown, loose footing and stones, everywhere stones of all sizes, as big as a house leaning on an angle, teetering against gravity.  Every once in a while we passed a Kuchi nomad.  Oddly, where women everywhere else in Afghan society are not often seen (and if at all cloaked in the ghostly burqa), with the Kuchi it is the opposite.  Never do I see the men, only the women, gypsy-like with nose rings and brightly colored skirts and vests, so gay a color as to contradict the harsh life they seem to lead, oranges and violets and pinks and purples and yellows all thrown together.  Their tents could be seen along the river or on a small plateau, and they would be ushering a few donkeys or goats along the road, or sometimes carrying huge bundles of sticks or grass on their backs.  They are, I think, the original gypsies who migrated to India, then west clear to Spain and north into the heart of Europe, all the way to Ireland.  They are the pariahs of Afghanistan, and yet they live freely.  Other then the Kuchi we passed only periodic checkpoints and water stands.  It wasn’t until we got to the top of the pass that signs of war dotted the landscape.  We stopped to inspect the first burned out Soviet tank, but after a while it was as common to see such armored, twisted remnants as it was to encounter a switchback on the road.  Over the top we went and then down, down through a chasm along a new river, this one rushing in class 5 rapids, bright green against the drab brown of its environs.  Jamshid noted it was at this singular entry and exit point that in the early 90’s as the civil war commenced a notorious warlord named Zardan terrorized all who tried to pass through.  How surreal time can be, all these images drifting, lingering in my mind’s eye as we descended into the floodplain of the river opening up toward the rice fields and orange groves of Jalalabad listening to Jamshid’s tape, a collage of top-forty sentimental hits from my childhood, including Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head, Those Were the Days (My Friend), Me and You and a Dog Named Boo, John Denver singing Country Roads, Frank Sinatra singing Strangers in the Night, Neil Sedaka singing Laughter in the Rain and Karen Carpenter singing Yesterday Once More.  Most compelling was Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazelwood singing Summer Wine, wherein the man, imbibing himself on her “summer wine” loses his silver spurs.  I laughed; and then I cried.

Jalalabad is not Kabul; though the streets are equally devastated, busy, dirty, overflowing with humanity trying to pinch a dollar out of its day, I saw not one westerner.  No business suits.  Every man was dressed in a shalwar kameez outfit, the pajama-like pants and long overshirt, white or blue, and every single woman over the age of 14 (except for Kuchi) wore a blue burqa.  It is difficult to understand, difficult to look at these blue ghosts.  There is no way of knowing how many wear the burqa out of fear, how many out of convenience and habit; women who grew up with it, activists under cover or others avoiding hassles or simply wanting the anonymity, or how many wear it because they have been beaten into it.  One thing for certain, it is not natural.  It is not Afghan.  It is not any more cultural than the yellow star was for Jews.  Nine and a half years after their “liberation”, the Afghan woman’s life that so incensed the west and even played a part in the fever for all-out invasion and occupation (Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush, a covey of celebrities all added fire to the flame) has not changed significantly.  (It is legal to rape your wife, and a woman who flees an abusive husband is thrown in jail, where she is often raped.)

These harsh realities, though, do not give the whole picture.  There is another Afghanistan, beneath the surface, one that is secular, free-loving, and striving to make real change from the ground up.  Mostly made up of 18 to 35 year old educated Afghans, this movement I have seen with my own eyes is supported by a vast majority of older people who, though they may be conservative, illiterate, they were among those fighting the Soviets you don’t hear about, the democratic mujahidin.  (What we know as “mujahidin” is the extreme fundamentalist muj who received the bulk of support such as Stinger Missiles from Pakistan, and by proxy America back in the 80’s.)  This other Afghanistan is the one I know through my association with AFCECO.  Though it had filtered through the orphanages from time to time, I was about to venture into its many facetted heartbeat outside the anomaly that is Kabul.

We drove straightaway to Spogmay Orphanage, the new program housing around 30 boys and 40 girls, ages 6 to 12.  “Spogmay” is Pashto for “moon”.  The place put a spell on me equal to its appellation.  A spectacular house, three-stories tall with columns to great you, ornately dolloped with glittering tile and glass of many colors, and on top a crow’s nest to look out over the city.  The owner is a diplomat who leases the building for $1,600 a month, at least a thousand less than he could otherwise garner.  There are those who might question the investment in such an abode over a simple concrete institutional-like structure, but environment is the first and most vital step in affecting the lives of these children, creating the space in which to infuse them with a philosophy of equality, education, tolerance, reaching for individual aspirations while working for the greater whole.  Watch the children stand in chorus formation to greet you as you enter the orphanage, and survey the confidence, the calm and serenity on their faces as they sing a song in Pashto about the days when Afghanistan was peaceful in the 60’s.  Watch every one of them come forward, stick out her or his hand to shake and say “Salam”.  Especially watch the 7 year old Nuristani girl about 3 feet tall, how utterly confident she is, self directed and determined.  Watch the children skip in and out of the house with donated toys.  Walk downstairs and see them in class with their tutor, finding common ground and unifying their various languages.  Step outside and see the boys together with girls, standing in a circle in the grassy courtyard.  See the instructor who is a woman and an expert soccer player lead the children in a series of physical exercises as the once blazing sun settles down behind the outer wall of the compound.  Witness these things and you will connect them to the environment they live in.  Clean, spacious, organized, beautiful, safe.

Of course, it is still an orphanage.  The rooms are packed with bunk-beds, the children eat simple meals of nan, rice, beans and fresh fruit, some tomato and cucumber and pepper.  They all must do chores constantly.  They all must be disciplined, and they have to share the attention of the adults and be satisfied with what amount of loving they get.  But these elements are not such a bad thing absent of the depravities we think of when we hear the word “orphanage”.  That is why we must come up with a new way to describe Spogmay and Mehan and Sitara.  In Persian the word is parwarishga, literally “foster haven”.  This works for me.

The children of Spogmay do not speak Dari.  They are Pashai, Nuristani or Arab Afghans, all ancient minorities of this region.  It was strange for me to try out my hard-won Dari and be received with absent stares.  Once again I had to resort to my eyes, my hands, my tone of voice to communicate.  I had almost forgotten how.  I mostly observed their behavior, interactions, mannerisms.  I wanted to detect if this experiment was working.  After all, many of the children in our Kabul homes had already been raised in the Pakistan programs.  These Spogmay children were all fresh from the world of remote villages, sharing little language, having had no indoctrination into the AFCECO way of doing things.  It was only a matter of a few hours before I walked up to Jamshid, smiling from ear to ear.  “Jamshid, I know what I came here to see: it’s working!  What we do in Kabul is replicable, even here in the bedrock of Pashtun conservatism and Taliban stronghold.”

What I need to stress here, and words won’t do it because you must see for yourself, is that this goes far beyond humanitarian aspirations.  Helping poor children get educated, giving them love is all well and good, but it is completely unremarkable.  What we are talking about here is a silent, powerful revolution on a scale of the historic non-violence movements in India and the U.S.  You will think I am overstating.  I will tell you about the rest of my road-trip, and perhaps then you will agree.

We left Spogmay to visit the second, smaller orphanage in Jalalabad.  Naseema is named for Naseema Shaheed High School, which was the Afghan-run school in Khewa refugee camp in Pakistan, the camp where Andeisha grew up and the very school she attended.  The school was named for a young woman who was killed helping the democratic mujahidin resistance during Soviet times.  When the camp and school were shut down by the Pakistani government, Andeisha had it in her mind to keep her beloved school alive in spirit and name.  Right now the orphanage is undergoing a major face-lift.  Cabinetry, plumbing, painting primarily.  The work will be finished in time for the school year that unlike Kabul begins in September.  While visiting Naseema, we met a variety of men, the kooky, limping white haired landlord with an infectious smile, the head carpenter and his workers, and various staff and older children.  The carpenter insisted we come to visit his village up in the mountains, where many of AFCECO’s children come from.  This decision, going or not going, would not be made quickly.  Especially with a pink faced American in tote.

We had other things to do in the meantime.  After delivering a new (old) car that is much needed by the Jalalabad staff, we drove to a clinic at the edge of the city that is in desperate need of support.  The people of AFCECO are involved in networking other Afghan grassroots organizations that help people in various ways.  This particular clinic has for twenty years served over 40,000 refugees who otherwise have nowhere to go for care.  We aimed to introduce a large NGO called Morningstar, (that we have come to know through their interest in helping provide volunteers), to the clinicians running the operation.  What we found was heartening and heartbreaking.  The doctor and her staff are heroic in their dedication and passion, but the facility has collapsed into near ruin.  Literally, roofs have caved in, there is little sanitation, the operating room is open air and dusty.  The faces of the medical team were just this side of tears, forlorn as they were, yet their strength and courage bore them up.  The doctor spoke frankly, honestly, open eyed to the Morningstar investigator.  They had plenty of human resources, and thousands of patients.  They charge only fifty Afghanis per visitation, that’s a dollar.  They administer inoculations, treat malaria, provide a midwife, prenatal and postpartum care, and otherwise attend to the business of healing.  They have been deserted by corporate NGOs and the Afghan government primarily because refugees are a population that seems everywhere in and around Afghanistan to be left to its own devices.  We have treaded carefully with Morningstar; they too are big, and anything big can be a great disturbance or even destruction as much as it can be a godsend.  They have thus far proven to be most sensitive, responsive, and committed.  Their representative asked a slew of appropriate and professional questions, taking detailed notes.  It was terribly hot.  The trees and even the grass were blistering.  Everyone at the end of the hour still maintained a demeanor of hope and a rolled up sleeves, get work done approach to the situation.  Meanwhile, I watched several burqa-clad women arrive with children, meet with a nurse and leave.  They were receiving their last series of shots for hepatitis B.  I wandered into the courtyard that had once been a lush garden.  Random flowers mixed with weeds.  I closed my eyes and imagined medicinal herbs, some fruit trees, sunflowers.

The visit over, we drove to a spot on the Khost river where it comes tumbling through a hydro plant.  Not long ago this water was glacier.  Afghanistan is a perfect candidate for hydro power (and solar and wind and even geothermal), as there is a continuous supply of snow-melt on rivers and streams for production both large and micro.   We ate a kabob feast for a late lunch, and settled into a mug full of dokh (nowadays a yogurt drink but as I’ve described in the past, true dokh is completely different).  As we leaned into our pillows on a rooftop carpet in the trees, I tried to think of a time I hung out with such a large group of men.  Out in the real world of Afghanistan I felt new and naïve.  I have been around women and girls primarily most of my time in this country, but normally this would be my life, among men.  I’d have to go back to an all male sweat lodge I did in Vermont ten years ago to recall anything similar, or way back to my years playing high school football.  The men here are different.  They do not waste a lot of energy competing with one another for one thing, verbally or physically.  There is a certain amount of femininity, gentleness, even hand holding.  No battle to be alpha.  This in direct contrast to what I know of their history, men who walked through mountains in snow with a jammed AK-47 to battle an empire, who keep their families alive under the worst of circumstances, and who would give their lives in one flash to honor the life of their friend or relative.  As I relaxed on my elbow I looked around at all the posters of candidates running for parliament.  How did these men compare with the men whose company I now kept?

We drove to another house situated by the river where we all jumped in to shed the heat.  It was one of those days where the wind felt like a hairdryer.  Afghans are not avid swimmers, and the current was strong.  I took the lead and crossed over to a large sand bar, not thinking that this was showing off or inviting a challenge.  It is what any New England boy would do.  The other men hesitated, but one by one they made their way, albeit with a certain amount of effort akin to half drowning, half paddling.

The sun (finally!) descended and it was time to return to Spogmay and the children.  Yet another feast awaited us, and with stomachs achingly full we pulled beds out under early evening sky to be cooler and to watch the first quarter moon drop from sight.  Jamshid brought a portable radio out and tuned into the Voice of America, a network aired specifically for an Afghan audience.  We’d gotten word our fearless director Andeisha was to be interviewed, along with the deputy minister of work and cultural affairs.  As I lay there on my orphan’s cot, staring at the purple night and listening to the conversation in Dari while children flitted about speaking Pashto, Nuristani, Pashai or Arabic, I felt isolated in a dream wherein I was supremely alone while at the same time connected to something much larger than I’d imagined before.  I drifted off to sleep this way, exhausted and content.  Still, the night was not over; Jamshid’s voice summoned me back.  A treat had been planned, and I know now it was on my behalf.  Three classical musicians sat in a corner of the orphanage.  One on rubab, one on tabla and one, the singer, on harmonium.  I sat with the children and staff on pillows that had been scattered across the floor.  I have often played classical Afghan music while I worked in the orphanage and now at the office.  I turn it up loud and fill the house, only because it seems to please the natives.  These musicians where mesmerizing, the singer penetrating.  They performed one love song that lasted almost an hour.  The rhythm danced from lilting to pounding and back again, like a feverish heart.  Often I turned and watched the faces of the boys and girls, to see if they were also transfixed.  A few were certainly being polite, but most were agape.  They, like I, had just discovered their cultural roots that for their lives and twenty years previous had been outlawed, even erased.  I fell asleep well before the performance ended, and I believe in this way the music was fused with my own fiber.

I was awakened an hour before the sun was to emerge.  As I have learned, it is better not to be so concerned with agendas here, nor with balanced books, debts and favors, who is going to do what where and when, all those things that seem so paramount in western culture.  What must be addressed is, in its time, addressed.  I had no idea where we were off to, but wherever it was required a very prompt and early start.

We drove north.  Jamshid pushed a tape in.  Save All Your Kisses for Me, by Brothershood of Man.  My brain went into a spasm.  I asked him to kindly put something else in, a collection of songs he’d shared once before by the most famous singer in modern Persian history, Googoosh.

Slowly we curled our way into the Hindu Kush Mountains.  After about two runs through the cassette our driver Han Agha pulled off toward a mud-walled village nestled beneath a grove of poplar trees and pines.  Here I got my first glimpse of village life.   Except for the architecture, clay walled labyrinth of huts, my mind immediately went back to the years living with hippies up in the mountains of Washington State.  Children were everywhere, barefoot and doing chores, subsistence crops growing in a variety of plots, everyone a part of one big family.  Homes are utilitarian, not spacious.  Life is very, very simple.  The primary difference is zero to limited access to education or health care.  After walking through the village we sat for chi and nan.  One indicator of opportunity for developing places like Afghanistan is the presence of solar panels and battery storage.  Even the chi was warmed up in a solar collector.  With energy for the masses so prohibitive in cost and delivery, it makes sense these villages jump over the 20^th Century energy world, skip straight to the next.  As we drank and ate one local man who seemed to be my age told a story about fighting against the Russians.  He showed the scar where a bullet went through his arm just below the elbow.  I imagine these stories abound.  Everyone suddenly stood up.  Time to go.  I still didn’t know where we were going, for how long or why.  The reason is simple; I hadn’t asked.

Soon enough I figured it out.  We were going to the very remote village high in the mountains where the carpenter had invited us to visit the day before.  Janshegal is at the end of a two-hour hike at the end of a twenty-kilometer road that begins after an hour and a half drive north from Jalalabad.  Janshegal is Pashai country.  They fought the Soviets tooth and nail.  I later read of a siege on their village that failed.  30 Russian soldiers killed, 28 of the villagers.  These people are now in their second generation of warrior blood, against Taliban and Northern Alliance both.  They are conservative, but not fundamentalist.  Over twenty of their children are now living in AFCECO orphanages.

At the end of the road we staggered out of our car and were immediately joined by ten or so men and one boy who had descended only to accompany us back up into the mountains.  I have never seen so many Kalashnikovs in one place.  Even the young boy carried one.  I wore flipflops, but the path was smooth.  I made my way up front with the henna red bearded man who seemed to be the captain of this platoon.  The landscape grew more dramatic with every hundred meters.  Gigantic stones, bleached white dotted small landings that had been transformed into an agricultural patchwork of verdure.  Old crops had just been pulled.  Then, higher up, corn only knee high but thick and dark green healthy.  The air grew thin and I started to huff and puff.  We stopped every so often under low lying trees that I could not identify, a kind of aspen leaf but a harder wood gnarly barked trunk like that of a hickory.  Nobody knew what it is called in English.  Every turn in the path I marveled at the stonework.  Everywhere, bordering the plots of corn, buffering the stream, miles of stone walls built with such care.  The boy saw me put my hand against one wall as if worshiping.  “My grandfather built that,” he said, and walked on.

Stories woven into the land.  This was my kind of place.  Of course, most of the stories are related to war.  Here is the outcropping where they hid from the helicopters; there is the stone they battled over for two years.  As we walked we seemed to accumulate more men.  This was a major event, and I felt terribly self-conscious that it was not all for Jamshid’s benefit, that the American had come with a tag, and this tag could mean many things.

What I saw up in those mountains that day is what people refer to disparagingly about Afghanistan, things that would place it firmly in the Middle Ages.  True, I have seen a man using odd shaped, seemingly random stones to weigh out a price for two watermelons on a scale that Monty Python couldn’t have depicted any more backwardly.  Janshegal conjures a time without internal combustion engines.  Surrounded by stepped plots of corn all trimmed in stone, attached to the steep uplift of earth rising higher and higher beyond like they were always there, like the stones themselves are the houses.  Not mud here, all stone.  Women and children were scattered everywhere doing chores.  A line of girls arrived from somewhere farther into the mountains with gigantic loads of feed for their cattle and goats they had picked that morning in some meadow far away.  The mosque was itself rustic, like a natural amphitheater you see in American national parks.  Animals wandered at will.  Where would they go?  We were led to an outlook situated in a grove of trees looking back at the village.  Rifles were piled in a corner and more children arrived.  A carpet was rolled out, chi was served, lunch was already being prepared over a fire.  Fresh meat kabab, onions and tomatoes direct from the garden, freshly baked nan… Afghans know how to have a picnic.  They make our hot dog, burger with sand in it and rickety benches with ketchup smeared on the seats look more like the Middle Ages.  The only thing the two have in common is a penchant to serve soda pop.

An oriental magpie robin (I know it because one sits outside my window in Kabul) sang in a pine tree overhead, as if it had been commandeered for the job.  A boy sat down beside me, and soon two more.  It is always the children who come first, while the adults remain politely apart.  One boy looked familiar, and to my surprise he began to speak English.  “You know Fawad?”

“Fawad?  Yes, he is my student.  And a good football player.”

“He is my brother.  I am good at football too.  I am forward.”

In a short while I discovered just how connected this village is with AFCECO.  It is through his brother my new friend has been determined to learn and practice English.  I looked around at all these warriors sitting on rocks stroking their beards and I realized that they every one of them were not proud, not angry, not jealous or hardened.  They were hopeful.  They have a direct link with opportunity, the education of their children, and they would die for it if necessary.  And it is not just the boys, but many girls too have come from this place.  One father has an 18-year old daughter he wants to save from being pressured to marry.  She is ambitious and smart, he said, and asked Jamshid if he could have her join the orphanage.  The link here is that everyone is part of the same community.  In much of the world children leave a village and never return.  This will be the case with some of ours, but many if not most are still proud of their people, their lifestyle, and they feel a responsibility to use their gifts to improve the village, rather than exchange it for a material life alone in a city.

After a feast we walked upstream to wash in a small waterfall.  Goats and dogs and shepherds were on their way down the path.  One man led a dog that stunned me with its looks.  It had all the markings of a cheetah, orange with black spots.  It didn’t look real.  The shepherd offered to sell it to me for two thousand dollars.  I thought about breeding it and selling the one-of-a-kind animal in the west, quadrupling my money and using it for computers in the orphanages.  Jamshid and I often joke about such opportunities that come and go.  We rattled off expenses and profits and possible risks as we walked.

It was 4:30 in the afternoon and shadows were getting long.  One more cup of tea and then we’d make the long walk back to the car.  Something had been brewing in my chest and I had been waiting for the right opportunity to let it loose.  With all the men sitting together sipping chi, I asked Jamshid if he would translate my English into Dari, and one of the other men translate his Dari into Pashto.  The elder of the group patted a pillow next to him and asked me to sit.  His face had the lines of Father Time traveling up and down his cheeks and across his brow.  His beard was long, straight and cotton white.  Another elder refilled my cup with steaming green chi, and everyone waited patiently for me to speak.

“I am not a soldier,” I said.  “And I’m not a farmer.”  This was translated and the men nodded and chuckled.  “I am only a teacher…”

I went on to tell them what I am here for, why I believe in it.  I told them for many centuries others had come to Afghanistan only to take, that I would try and give, that I was honored by their trusting me with their children, and that I would do everything in my power to give them back teachers, midwives, engineers.  With this speech I opened a door, and the men began to tell of their woes, the road that washes out and the school they need and the clinic.  Their hopes attached to this one scraggly American were visceral.  I bowed my head in almost shame that they would value me so.  Each of the elders came up to me and touched my heart with his right hand, put his cheek to my cheek, and then thanked me three times, as if a prayer.  These are men who fought the Soviets, the extremists, the warlords, and they will continue to fight as long as they must, not for ideology, not for money, not for power or vengeance.  They fight to protect the lives of their children.

Satisfied, almost jovial, we all said our good-byes.  We walked down the winding path but this time through the village.  One house after another was identified as home to children I teach in the orphanage.  A few of the boys accompanied us as we descended into the valley.  Every now and then I looked back.  I had often hinted to Jamshid my desire to see a village.  I know not to pester him.  Sooner or later, he would oblige me.  History has always been a part of my cosmology.  Without it there are no stories, nor is there connection to some sort of meaning.  When I begin my lessons again, I will look one student in the eyes and I will describe a stone where that child once hid from her brother, or the birdsong that once drifted through the window of his house.  I will tell a story they know, and with that one singular story a stone will be put into place, and a foundation can be built.

The last thing the elders told me is to please not forget them.  It is the smallest thing they could have asked of me.  It is the most vital thing that I do.

Gold

Meetra, Murcel, Sadaf, Nasrin, Nahida, Malalai, Malalai Butterfly, Sana

1)    Natural landscapes of the world: Sahara desert, Mt. Everest, Olympic rainforest, Siberia, Amazon River, Tahiti

2)    Animals of the world: condor, mountain goat, praying mantis, hippo, octopus, sperm whale

Turquoise

Farzana Nori, Khalida, Zainab, Leema, Parwana (Parwana moved up)

1)    History of Afghanistan through its characters: Alexander the Great and Roxanna, Genghis Khan, Rabeha Balkhi, Malalai, Meena

2)    Afghan Provinces: Badakhshan, Kandahar, Ghor, Heart, Balkh

3)    The minorities of Afghanistan: Balochi, Aimak, Kuchi, Kohistani, Pashai

Green

Mursal (older), Shakeba, Hala, Sediqa, Farida, Neda

1)    Read The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

2)    Spain, Morocco and the Sahara all the way to Egypt

White

Shagofa, Lida, Sahar, Manizha

1)    Read The Pearl by John Steinbeck

2)    Mexico

3)    Typing

Black

Ali, Omid, Sorab, Dariush

1)    Places in the world: India- food, England- Stonehenge, Kenya- proverbs, China- folktales, Panama- canal, Antarctica- Shackleton, Cuba- tobacco, Greece- drama, Brazil- Amazon, Thailand- golden triangle

2)    Typing

Purple (This class meets 4 hours a week)

Pashtana, Sitiza, Maria, Yasamin, Sosan (Sosan moved up)

1)    Places in the world (same as Black)

2)    Read The Miracle Worker by William Gibson

3)    Read The Giver by Lois Lowry

4)    Typing

All the above advanced classes include full length and ten-minute films, work on the Internet, and most importantly (and most difficult) writing exercises.

I have 55 other students, boys and girls who are advanced beginners. Their classes will be topical as above, but very simplified, including many games such as word Bingo, mixed words, mixed sentences, etc. I have volunteers teaching all the younger children for the rest of the year, so I can focus on my 87 students.

I want to address another aspect to AFCECO that is essential to what makes this organization unique, and that is its staff.  Here is a rough list of employees:

House Parents                               20

Cooks                                                11

Bread makers                                   2

Guards                                             22

Security specialists                         2

Drivers                                               4

House Managers                          10

Accountants                                     2

Bookkeeper                                       1

Liaison with sponsors                   1

Liaison with government              1

Total employees:                            76

These are all Afghan nationals.  They too reflect the country, just like the children.  Hazara, Pashtun, Tajik, Uzbek, Nuristani.  Some were refugees.  Some are in university.  Many are widows with children, who otherwise would be at the mercy of a violent household or be begging in the street along with the ten thousand other widows in Kabul.  There are among our Afghan volunteers many students who otherwise would have nowhere to stay, nor afford their tuition. (By tuition, I mean $500.) This is a big family.  There is not a hierarchy, only a common purpose.  It is, in essence, the closest I’ve seen to a synthesis of all things East and West.  Through the various empires that have at one time or another taken a seat in this rocky heart of Asia, just in the last hundred years Afghanistan has been privy to colonialism, communism, socialism, monarchy, fundamentalism, feudalism, democracy and anarchy.  (It is honestly difficult for me to say which is the present power structure!)  I cannot tell you how AFCECO operates under these condidtions.  People here take care of one another, and they don’t stab each other in the back, and they don’t gossip.  It isn’t neat and tidy, but we like it that way.

I will be off to Jalalabad tomorrow morning at 5am.  It is 102 degrees f there.  We will inspect the new orphanages, and I’m going to give some lessons. Then Mazar to scope out the possibility of the next orphanage opening there when we get the funding.  Then Herat, to check in on the children at their orphanage.  My first real journey into the “other” Afghanistan.

I leave you with a link to a song I wrote last week about a wayfaring stranger and a freckle-faced Hazara girl.  Given the story I told, it was a somber kind of mood.  It is followed by another song I wrote many years ago that has somehow grown in meaning.

If you’d like to listen, go to:

The girl was stunned.  She didn’t know what to say.  The men dressed like Taliban, their guns were Taliban, but they looked different.  She glanced again at their faces.  They were not Pashtun.  They were from somewhere else; they spoke Dari, but poorly, and their noses were strange, and their beards, and beneath the dirt their skin was white.  “I don’t know,” the girl finally answered.  “He went out with grandfather.”

Again the man asked.  “Tell us where is your father?”

The girl told him, she didn’t know.  Without thinking she ran from the room.  She moved faster than her feet.  She fell and bumped her head.  When she reached her mother she told her that two men had arrived looking for father.  Her mother reached out and touched her on the brow.  When she brought her hand back there was blood on her finger.  “What happened?”

“I don’t know,” said the little girl.  “I ran and fell and bumped my head.”

“Are these men friends of your father?”

“No,” the girl shook her head, but she didn’t know what to call them.

Her mother headed back to see who these men were.  The girl followed close behind.

“Where is your husband?” the same man asked as soon as mother and daughter entered the room.

“He is gone with his father.”

“We will kill you if you are hiding him.”

The mother opened her arms.  “Kill me, but he is not here.”

Instead, the men walked around the room and rummaged through boxes and clothes and smashed a framed picture of the girl’s father.  They took anything of value they could carry, and left the house.

Hiding in the mountains surrounding Yakawlang was a veteran of the mujahidin resistance against the Soviets, a Hazara warlord who now fought against Mul Omar’s Taliban but who for several months had been losing ground.  Up north Mazar i sharif had fallen, and the Northern Alliance had begun to splinter again.  The general had riled up the Taliban with hit and run assaults on their positions in Bamiyan Province.  He and his men had fled Yakawlang just the day before, knowing the enraged Taliban forces would descend upon the village and its despised Shi’a Moslems.  He was not known for being a coward.  He and his men had been privy to deeds that have rarely been imagined.  The practice of forcing people to purchase the lice from his soldiers’ heads was indicative of the extent to which he’d go in order to amalgamate simple plundering and killing with extreme forms of humiliation.  The “dance of death” had been a favorite, wherein a man’s head is removed but before his body and heart stop functioning the neck is cauterized with boiling oil.  The body is left to writhe and “dance” for some time, an entertainment meant to traumatize the living as much as the dead.

Now the general uncharacteristically waited.  One of his top advisers had suggested they surprise the Taliban during the night.  He and his men had the advantage of knowing the terrain well.  But the general dismissed the thought.  Though Mul Omar controlled most of the country, the Taliban’s days were numbered.  All that the general need do was outlast him.  If he played his cards well he could have a place in the next government.  He would ask to be a minister, an MP perhaps.  Who knows, he thought, maybe even vice-president.  “Let the Taliban come and kill everyone,” he said, “So in the future my people react and fight when I tell them to fight.”

The ground was frozen.  There would be no grave digging.  The Taliban would hang around for three days, kicking those women away who were intent on trying to bury the dead.  This would be added insult, because Moslems are compelled to assure the martyred souls travel quickly to the hereafter.  Some women would go out at night to retrieve their loved ones, but the bodies would be immovable.  Their blood will have frozen them to the ground.  The best these women would do is suffer the cold in order to keep the dogs from taking their part in this nightmare.

The little freckle-faced Hazara girl had listened to gunfire before.  At times like these her father spread a large, hand-stitched quilt over her from head to foot.  When the firing stopped he’d pull the quilt down and kiss her, saying it had only been a dream.  He was not there to comfort her now.  Minutes after the two Taliban soldiers left, the girl ran out of the house into the cold morning to find him.  Everywhere she looked there were only women and children.  Nobody would answer her questions.

This girl, like most all the girls hadn’t seen much of anything beyond her village.  She hadn’t even seen the places in her province that had been etched into history, not the healing mineral waters of Lake Band-e Amir, not even the 1,500 year old giant Buddha statues carved into the sandstone cliffs twenty kilometers away.  She knew only of their names.  She knew the taller Buddha, Salsal was a boy, that his name meant “light that shines in the darkness”.  She knew its companion Shamama was a girl Buddha, that her name meant “queen mother”.  Many nights awake in bed she imagined the Buddhas were real people, that she one day would visit them.  She made up stories, what they would eat, the arguments they would have.  Once she imagined they were going to have a baby.  But these statues would never be more than names and stories to her.  In two month’s time they would be destroyed.

The first day went by and none of the women told her what had happened, why they cried so or where her father had gone.  On the second day she found her uncle sitting behind the house.  He seemed not to have his wits about him.  She pulled on his sleeve until he spoke.  He told her the truth, that her father his brother was no longer with them.  She did not believe him.  She ran inside but could not find her mother.  Frantic, she headed again for the back door.   At first the Taliban had been careful to march their victims away from the village, but now they did not care who witnessed what.  The girl emerged from the house just in time to see a Taliban shoot her uncle once in the heart, then once in the face.

At least 300 men and boys were killed.  One who survived was a man everyone called “uncle” but who was only a good friend of the girl’s family.  He would tell the story of how the Taliban tied his and twelve other men’s hands with their own turbans.  If there was no turban they used rope.  If no rope, electrical cord.  They were forced to walk for an hour, through the freezing waters of the Yakawlong River.  The men’s feet became blocks of ice.  Finally they were lined up against the wall of an Oxfam building (a former NGO clinic).  While the fighters argued over who had the honors to shoot, which of them would become Ghazi, the uncle who had once been a teacher pleaded with a Tajik boy who had been a student of his.  This student, like most all students appreciated his teacher very much.  He went to the Taliban officer and lied, explaining that a mistake had been made, that his teacher was not Hazara.  The commander for whatever reason acceded, and let the man go.  This did not, however, absolve him of loading the bodies and half dead bodies of his friends and relatives into the truck after the shooting was over.

It was in her ruined home late on the third day that the Hazara girl heard this story for the first time.  None of the women, including her mother, were concerned any more about what the child should hear or not hear.  The girl had earned the truth.  No matter the years, she’d remember those rifles, and the broken picture of her father, and the red of her mother’s fingertips after touching her brow.  She’d remember the cries of women and old men, and Taliban dragging daughters into rooms, and then silence.  She’d remember money appearing that she had not thought existed, money her mother had hidden, her neighbors too.  Carpets, jewelry, even radios piled into pickup trucks, and when it was over and the trucks and rifles and men had gone, blood that could not be cut from the frozen earth.

Though these fragments she knew to be real, they would remain invisible to the world to which she would soon be introduced, the world beyond the towering and ill-fated Buddhas, beyond the borders of her useless, drought-ridden province.  As one world rushed out of her life, the other rushed in. 10,780 kilometers away, another pair of iconic statues stood poised to fall that year, ones made not of sandstone but of glass and steel.  The girl would have to negotiate the world’s collective sadness over their destruction and the deaths therein, while she carried the massacre of Yakawlong alone in her heart.  She would have to negotiate so many new things, the world’s sudden interest in the graveyard that is Afghanistan, those who would deny the massacre ever happened, and even the complicit Hazara warlord who would soon become Second Vice President.

Mostly, though, she would have to negotiate her mother’s decision to marry again.  It was, her mother would try to explain, a way for her to survive, the only way, even if it meant orphaning her girl.

This is a quote attached anonymously to a video commemorating the life of Carl Sagan.  The video was brought to my attention this morning by a man who sponsors a child at Sitara I.  Sometimes I just like Nasruddin Hodha the foolish Mullah of Persian folklore, arrive on Friday with a blank mind. Seeing where that quote takes my thoughts, I trust somehow this page will be filled.

From what I can gather this is actually a quote by Thomas Campbell, not Sagan.  I doubt Sagan would ever have concerned himself seriously with the immortality of an individual soul.  He was interested in the future of the planet. But the quote and the man nevertheless are now entwined, as thousands of people who have watched the video no doubt think these are Sagan’s words.

Carl Sagan is a man I admire and who holds special meaning for me in light of the fact he died the same morning as my mother died, in late December of 1996.  The feeling that rushed through me that day was the strangest blend of sadness and fear and resolve and even excitement about the unknown.  When the mother goes, so goes love.  Love, of course, in the sense that only mothers know, no matter their deficiencies.  Throughout my life and my work B.A. (Before Afghanistan) I had known two kinds of orphans; the orphan parented by an adoptive family since birth and the one abandoned between the ages of 7 and 14.  Abandonment has enough categories on which I could devote a book, but the net result is the same as for true orphans, which is the loss of love.  To further complicate matters, somewhere along the line these children must also deal with mystification, anger, resentment and an array of other emotions that come with abandonment.  Even true orphans have expressed to me they to some degree have felt these feelings, even more confusing because there is no logic to them.

Now, keeping all that in mind, take a look at this list of the five most populous nations in the world:

China                    1,338,410,000

India                      1,182,867,000

United States           309,636,000

Indonesia                  234,181,400

Orphans                    210,000,000

Now consider that 70% of “orphans” worldwide have one or both parents still living.

Having nobody to live in your heart is utter despair.  Such people are apt to spiral into a variety of destructive behaviors, or they might discover a doctrine or person to which life can be devoted and thereby redeemed because it promises something “after”.  In either case life itself is expendable (and by proxy I might add, Earth as a whole). This is not to suggest that orphans invariably give up on life.  What I do suggest is that to be an orphan is to be especially susceptible, and more importantly to keenly understand loss of love, what the rest of us negotiating our own levels of despair stand to learn from.

That is why I believe it is important to change the way we think of orphans, as well as the way in which we rush to help them.  We must no longer think of them as mere victims we need to clothe, shelter and feed.  They are quite resourceful, as the world saw in the film Slumdog Millionaire and as we can see in streets from Kabul to Rio. Besides, notoriously our attempts to “help” these children have oftentimes added to their misery, and even more often set them up for a second abandonment; that of society dropping them from its radar.  These orphans end up in the next institution; prison.  Nor should we think of orphaned children as souls to save or a means to absolve our own guilt.  My grandmother adopted a baby boy after the death of one of her children.  This set up a life-long struggle, at the center of which was my mother who at the time of the adoption was ten years old.

First it may help to admit there will always be orphans.  Then it might be easier to think of them as a natural human resource, rather than a scourge. Extremists everywhere, political and religious have been tapping orphans for generations, but not to learn from, only to mold them or to put a gun in their hands.  Before they dissolve into the slums, get brainwashed, become killers, get thrown into jail or otherwise succumb to despair, rather than “fix” them first, why not join ranks with the orphans, learn from them as they learn from us.

Who should understand more than Americans?  For what is America but a nation of orphans?  Even Native Americans are orphaned, in some ways more so.  All of this talk of spreading peace and democracy, but how to prove we mean it without going to war, without appearing to the rest of the world we care only about ourselves, not just our notions of freedom but more brazenly our lifestyle of excess, our hunger for oil and a plethora of deodorants from which to choose?  America and Americans give more than any other nation or people, yet today we are primarily considered to be takers.  How might we turn this around?  There is one struggling nation out there that can do more to spread the noble notions of our founding fathers than any invasion ever will.  It is in fact the fifth largest nation in the world, and if we applied to it a fraction of a fraction of the resources we apply toward building roads and weapons, its people would sweep across the globe and effect change as well as our reputation in the time we have already spent at war in Afghanistan.

These days, idealism is scorned.  It was even indirectly scorned by President Obama in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize, insinuating that the likes of his heroes Gandhi and King are brave, noble but naïve.  What I speak of is no more idealistic or less passionate an idea than the words of Tom Paine that incited an American revolution with “common sense”.   This idea is equally as simple and real and in the palm of our hand.  Last December Zainab went home to her village in Nuristan.  She had to ride a donkey to get there.  The entire region lives under the shadow of Taliban. Little 4 foot 8 inch, 14 year-old Zainab was received in her village like some sort of celebrity.  The people set her up in a hut and asked her if she would begin offering lessons to the other children, boys and girls.  Everyone began to call her “teacher”.  How did this happen?  Is it because Zainab has been given something so much more valuable than shelter, food and clothing?  Education, yes, but a Ph.D. alone would not have created this scenario.  It would be just as naïve to say all that was required is a home in which an orphan’s heart can be filled.  After all it is not known if any heart, given the loss of love, can ever be truly filled.  We may as well ask if America’s appetite for expansion will ever be assuaged.  No, I think it is a matter not of what was done for Zainab.  If she has been given anything useful it is the space to realize her own capabilities, her own dreams, her own will, and above all, to live with the loss of love, and to ask of herself only to somehow be worthy, through her actions and her words, of living in the hearts she leaves behind.

This Independence Day I am thinking not only of my country, but also of Carl Sagan’s “pale blue dot”.

It took four days, but I managed to download a Disney film onto my computer.  It is a film that is new, yet harkens back to my own childhood dreams.  Narrated by James Earl Jones, a celebration of beautiful, all powerful Earth.  As we head into exam time at the government schools, I discuss our blue orb with every one of my students (now around 120).  I first showed them a shuttle launch I pulled from Youtube, and then photos from space, from the moon, the Hubble telescope.  The experience was unforgettable.  How do you explain such a thing to grown, developed children who have never actually seen such photos nor contemplated such a concept as being alone in space?  I worked my way back from deep space, to planets, to the moon, and finally Earth.  This culminates tomorrow when I show the film at Mehan, a celebration of what is ultimately worth fighting for, that which sustains us, our consciousness, our love and our joy.

My first “semester” of this year has concluded.  To all my 14 and older students (there are 30 of them) I gave a mid-term exam, 100 questions, about two hours to complete.  Only two failed.  Twenty-three of them ranged from 78 – 88%.  Five got scores in the nineties: Hala, Sadiqa, Maria, Ali and Sosan.  I am pleased that I seemed to have composed an exam not too difficult, not too easy.  I am moving Sosan to the twice a week, two-hour tutorial (Purple group).  When I announced this to Purple group, two in that class sank in their seats, Yasamin and Pashtana, because their scores (86 and 83) were according to them a failure.  They assumed one of them was getting booted to make room for Sosan.  A half-hour into class I put my marker down.  “Why the long faces?  What is wrong?”  They wouldn’t say until at the end of class Sosan, equally dejected, spoke up.

“Ian-jan, who is going?”

I completely missed her meaning.  She had to ask three times before it dawned on me.

“Oooh,” I said, almost collapsing, admonishing myself for not being clear, “I only said Sosan is joining Purple group, did I say anyone is leaving?”

The relief was so intense Pashtana began to cry.

I want to address a quality in most of these children, particularly the girls, and that is toughness.  Pashtana’s tears were silent, yet she didn’t try to hide them either.  There is nothing remotely self pitying about any of the girls when their pain rises to the surface, or in this case the tears of relief that indicate just how important a single hour of instruction is to Pashtana.  The pressure they feel to seize opportunity and succeed is not associated with parental pressure or peer pressure or even pressure from within.  I believe it has to do with the pressure of the alternative lurking, waiting, fawning: life as a slave, or worse.

I have managed to pester the university enough, and our eternal ally on the inside Mike Smith has managed to circumvent the urge to suspend use of the football field.  Last night I got to be the “head coach” so-to-speak in the girls’ return to the field after a month delay following the suicide bombing.  (Jamshid is in Dubai, meeting Farzana and Mahbooba who are returning from Italy.)  A gale and cloudburst roared through south-west Kabul.  The girls did not huddle in the vans.  They rushed onto the field and ran through the torrent, kicking the soccer ball up and down the field.  I could see the storm would soon blow over, sunshine was on its way, so I let them play.  As we started a match a double rainbow arched across from one mountain to another in the east.  Swallows by the dozens flitted across the field.  It was a glorious break from the heat and dust of summer that had hit this past week.  The match was intensely competitive and physical.  Leema got smacked by an elbow full force on the face.  Sahar got a line-drive in the stomach, Malalai butterfly got another ball square on her nose.  There were six incidents where a girl was hurt.  No babying here.  Within a half-minute the ball was back in play and the injured girl, only a moment before in pain on the ground, was up and after it.  I was on red team, and a staff member Ghani was on white.  Ghani is young and very swift on his feet.  I on the other hand…  My one shining moment was a perfect pass angled in front of the net for Khalida to punch in.  Score was white 4 and red 2.  Hands on knees, panting, I shook my head.  I am an old man, I muttered.  Parwana raced over.  “Ian-jan, you are old, but here you are young.”  Her right hand was over her heart.  “Come, we have five minutes!”  Together we ran downfield for a final push.

What I am doing is not remotely brave.  I am merely doing what I’ve unconsciously been training myself to do all my life.  Nor is it so difficult to be brave if it is your job, if you are a parent or a soldier or a firefighter.  Bashardost goes without a bodyguard, but he I wager does not feel or consider himself brave.  Is it bravery to choose death to save a life, or is bravery subtler than those hallmarks?  I wonder if it has something to do with choosing life when all around you is death.  So many times I have negotiated with the idea of giving up.  It is very tempting, and thus I could never besmirch those who have.  History never seems to change.  In the end, as those photos of a distant star now verify, our sun will swallow Earth whole.  Why all the fuss?  When I in my daily activities get to experience such real bravery as exhibited by the children of AFCECO, it is not difficult to explain why all the fuss.

They had never experienced questioning a leader of their country.  They had never experienced a two-hour exam.  They had never experienced running through a storm just for fun, a football in the face, competing to the final minute, and they had never seen their world, our world, as one blue and white island spinning in seeming endless nothingness.  As I watched, in every instance they recovered something of what it is I used to believe is good in the human spirit.

It is clear now, what I will say to God if she exists, on the day I will die.

“Throw me in the room with the orphans, will you?”

As you read these words, you may happen to be listening to your own memory song.  Stop reading then, pour a cup of tea or a glass of wine.  Remember a time when everything was right, maybe only one hour of a day when death could come and the final note would be joy that, although it is slipping away, would not otherwise be joy.

Last night I felt such a joy as a little Hazara man in rough, plain white pants and shirt adorned only at the collar with the colors of his country, reached out to me, and as we walked up the steps to Mehan orphanage hand in hand, the realization spreading across his face as he looked up into mine that this American was strange, and as I watched him take the time to shake the hand and address every single child, every adult, to see every room and stand there, appreciative, inquisitive, in no hurry to get his photo opportunity and move on as any politician would.  Mister Bashardost had come without hesitation, without grilling me with questions, without even knowing a single person other than this curly haired, freckle faced man who had chased him down in the chaotic traffic of Kabul.  He had arrived only with his young driver in a car that has the dimensions of a sheet of plywood.  (His excuse for not attending the peace jirga, populated as it was with war criminals, drug lords and thieves, was that he did not want to waste the gas in his car.)  When he saw the children, when he saw the orphanage, his face lit up so bright, his eyes twinkled so softly I could tell it had happened to him as it had happened to so many others.  Though he’d arrived late for his appointment on a Thursday evening he would not so quickly leave.  He turned to me.  ”They are so happy, so clean!”

I was anxious for him to sit with my students and answer questions.  I tried to hurry him along, but he would have none of that.  He practically visited every closet of the orphanage, all the while talking to the younger children and khala Nasifa, our house mother who Ramazan had chosen to be his guide.  I stepped into the library where thirty of my oldest students waited with such great anticipation the energy in the room tumbled into laughter just to let loose an excess of giddiness their bodies could no longer contain.  They also knew how excited I was.  This was Ian’s event, and they could tell he so wanted it to be a success.  I had chosen the Doffie Library as a venue.  I had chosen the very end of the week, the night before Juma when all were tired but relieved.  I had chosen to have the boys and girls sit together, something they had not done since my photography class a year ago.  I’d coached them all on the importance of bringing intelligent questions, that this too was a classroom experience and may never come again.  But as much as I had set the stage I could not control time.  The children had been waiting an hour.  Their patience was melting.  Sometimes a clown is all you can hope for.  A large stuffed pink octopus dangled from the ceiling of the library.  I stood beneath it so its tentacles just reached the top of my head, and raising one foot off the ground I pretended to be balancing the toy in defiance of gravity.  The kids uproariously cheered.  And that is when Bashardost chose to finally enter the library.  I stumbled out of my contorted stance.  My face turned pink.  The Member of Parliament and former Presidential candidate cocked his head sideways.  “You are American, but your spirit is here” he said, his right hand over his heart.  I do not know what he meant by here, Afghanistan or his heart.  He sat on a small couch that had been brought for him.  Then he patted the cushion next to him.  “Please,” he said.

I do not know if Mister Bashardost is a Great Man, as we think of people like Gandhi and M. L. King.  But then, a part of me imagines that those two legendary peacemakers were only men, and that they too merely shifted themselves one small step askew of normal, to simply live as they believed and as they professed the world should behave, regardless of religion or race.  I played referee and selected who would ask each question.  Neda was first.  She sat in the front like a reporter at an Obama press conference with notebook full of notes in her lap, pencil poised.  She asked her question.  Ramazan’s eybrows raised, and then he launched into a ten minute response.  Then came a question from Ekram, then Farzana, Pashtana, Dariush, Farid Gul, and so on.  Each sparked a ten to fifteen minute response from their guest.  I did not understand but every fifth word that was spoken.  Once in a while Bashardost patted my knee and said my name, or “America”.  I watched his face, sipped my tea, and watched the faces of the children.  They were so rapt, inquisitive, challenging, mature.  At one point the entire room erupted in applause for something Bashardost had said.  I would later learn the children had asked astute and challenging questions, that they were not simple groupies like me, but had pushed issues such as comments Bashardost had made in public, the status of women, laws that have been ratified, the Taliban, NATO, and racism.  Two hours is a long time to be squashed into that hot library with seventy people on their night off, past the dinner hour.  Not one child squirmed to leave early.  Every now and then I looked for the eyes of a student and she or he looked for mine, and we smiled. I wanted every minute to last.  Inevitably the spell began to ebb, the last question was asked and given its lengthy answer.  I turned to Bashardost and inquired what he thought of the children, of their questions.  He turned to me and took my hand once again.  “In this room could be a future president of Afghanistan.”

Before he left he had business he wanted to attend to.  First, a man in Germany had given him a thousand euros that belonged to the man’s daughter who had died and bequeathed the money.  That money would now go to the orphanage.  Then, Bashardost asked if I thought it would be okay for him to give some pocket money to each of the children.  “Saes…” I squeeked.  Okay. He then stood at the door to the library and for each child leaving the room he peeled 500 afghanis from a small stack of mint bills, about $11.  Times seventy children.

I lingered in the hallway as the staff of Mehan accompanied Bashardost down the dark stairway of the orphanage.  I checked in with Farid Gul, with Sosan.  With the smaller ones who Bashardost had insisted be allowed to sit in on the library conference.  The kids hung onto me, and I onto them.  Joy, once again, slipping away.

I will see you Shambay, Manila.

“Exam?”

No, this time no exam.

I caught up with the others just outside the front door.  I said good-bye to the little Hazara man as Afghans do, cheek to cheek while shaking hands.  The crescent moon just barely peaked above the courtyard wall.  The shadows of sunflowers and roses mottled the garden in a kind of half remembered dream.  Bashardost got into his tiny black and red and green car and waved.  Here is a man who is loved by all, but who at any moment could be killed by those in power and those seeking it.  He gives almost all his money away.  He lives in a tent.  No bodyguards.  No tinted windows.  Just before letting go my hand he had whispered into my ear.  “Today I am happy.”

I close my eyes and listen to Time and the River once again.  I see Leema, Fawad, little Frishta, and Sahar.  I see all their faces like little moons themselves, and something new that is written in their smiles, their brows.  A little pride, perhaps.

I am so very proud of them.

I am back with my students.  I look at the sign Omid made for me on Teacher’s Day, and though it is overstated it nevertheless fills me with purpose and a tablespoon of pride: “The children future to Ian-jan hand”.  The fact he neglected to insert the possessive forms for the noun and proper noun lends a dollop of shame to the accolade; I have lapsed in my great responsibility.

On Saturday (following the Jirga), Mehan was abuzz upon my arrival.  Normalcy and human contact come as a great relief to all.  The girls do not much care for days with too much time on their hands.  They do not remain idle.  I found my classroom had been immaculately cleaned and organized.  Each of my groups meets for an hour, three in the morning and three after lunch.  Then songs, then drama rehearsal.  My first class, all beginners, raced into the room and sat waiting for me to stop shaking hands and get to work.  “Exam today, Ian?”  This was Manila.  She learns quickly.  As number one in class she relishes exams, but not to show off.  She relishes the experience of knowing.

“I’m not sure, Manila.  Shall I give you an exam today?”

“Yeeessss,” she answered coyly, while the other girls protested.  With the beginners I write a simple narrative that contains elements they are familiar with, the building they live in, the garden, the staff, Kabul city.  Ian walked to the orphanage on Saturday.  Along the way he saw many things, he saw an old man pushing a cart, he saw a donkey pulling a cart, he saw the blue dome of a mosque… We read this over and over.  Finally I give the narrative minus key words, which they are to choose from a scrambled list in order to fill in the blanks properly.

Ten minutes early the next class is at the door.  One of the students bangs with her little fist.  Frishta.  She calls my name.  “Ian, class is over!”  A long time ago the children dropped calling me Kawka, the term used to address all adult males.  The girls call me Ian, the boys (except for Omid) call me Teacher.  “EEEEAAAAN!” Frishta would not relent.

Two advanced classes at Mehan are at various stages of learning about Egypt.  I discovered that 95% of Egyptians live along the Nile.  The children learned about mummies.  We all learned the details of the marriage and fate of Cleopatra and Mark Antony.  I asked the girls if they could imagine a love so great as one could not live without the other.  Most laughed.  There were a few surprise hopeless romantics, though.  Farida, the pretty, shy but independent Pashtun girl from one of the Pakistan orphanages stood up for timeless love, and of all people Neda, normally so practically minded.  We all agreed, though, that Richard Burton made for an ugly Antony, as compared to Elizabeth’s Cleopatra.

Drama is making progress, though Parwana, new to the group but a natural performer, has expressed dismay.  “Why we have to do this over and over?”  We have obtained a real field stretcher on which Prometheus is carried to Mount Olympus where Ideology, Power and Industry chain her to a rock.  In the end it is Zeus who must be carried away forever.  Maria is Prometheus, Sahar is Zeus.  The hilarity involved in teaching Sitiza, Neda, Parwana and Sorab to properly carry a loaded stretcher pretty much deconstructed rehearsal.  At the end of the hour we always circle up and together give the actor’s cheer, basically squatting low with hands stretched forward and shaking as we hum, then slowly rise up, getting louder as we go until we leap together into the air with a culminating cheer.

On the way back to the office I told Nasir, our driver, all about my day.  He is a young man who has three children, loves Iranian pop music and dresses always in western garb.  As we crawled through a back street we both noticed a strange tiny compact car approaching.  It had been painted into thirds black, red and green.  We both yelled at the same instant.  “BASHARDOST!”  Ramazan Bashardost, the little Hazara man who ran for president last year by driving his little car to every province and appealing to all tribes with is populist message.  No bodyguards for him, and he gives most all his salary away to poor people.  (He is still a member of Parliament.)  He lived for a long time in a tent in a park in the heart of Kabul, but has recently moved his tent to the edge of the city.  It is unfathomable that he garnered several hundred thousand votes, (real votes from real people), coming in third behind Karzai and Abdulla Abdulla (who garnered each a plethora of manufactured votes).  What is even more amazing is Bashardost received votes from across the ethnic spectrum.  For a Hazara man to receive thousands of Pashto votes is akin to something as unattainable as Obama winning Mississippi.  Nasir knows how much I love Bashardost.  He slammed on the breaks and spun the poor Toyota wagon around.  A car chase ensued, and I do mean car chase.  Traffic in Kabul is as anarchic as bulls let loose from a ring.  Nasir drove up onto the sidewalk, wove into oncoming traffic head-on toward a Mercedes bus.  This continued for a few kilometers until Nasir successfully came side-by-side with Ramazan’s car.  We rolled down our windows.  I stuck my hand out and shook the hand of my first Afghan political hero.  Ramazan gestured for us to pull over, whereupon his driver followed us down a narrow side street.  We got out and greeted one another.  I felt nervous and tongue-tied, more so than even meeting Brian Williams at Andeisha’s award ceremony.  Ramazon speaks excellent English, French, and three Afghan languages.  Who knows what others.  He has three Masters degrees: Law, Diplomacy and Political Science.  His Ph.D is also in Law.  I told him who I am and what I am doing.  I told him I voted for him last August in our mock orphanage election.  He told me if he had won he would have saved American taxpayers a whole lot of money.  He added that he thinks America is indeed a beautiful country.  Our chat lasted only a minute, which is fine because my mind had gone blank.  Several men approached.  They wanted to shake Ramazon’s hand.  I demurely returned to the car but not before Dr. Bashardost stopped me.  “Here, let me give you my phone number.  Call sometime and I will meet you so we can talk.”

I have every intention of doing so.  But not for myself.  When I get the nerve up I will call him and ask if he would come visit some of my students, answer questions they might have about their country and his views.  When I later told this story to my advanced students, they screamed with excitement.  Especially Sosan, who comes from the same Hazara tribe as Bashardost.  Both have personal and tragic links to the January massacre of 2001.

Classes continued through the week in much the same fashion.  A few new boys arrived from Pakistan orphanage.  Many Afghan refugees around the world are being deported back to Afghanistan, which in turn puts more pressure on Kabul.  There are no jobs, no affordable housing.  The older children arriving from our Pakistan orphanages universally have a better educational foundation then the kids here.  I was able to give Shawkat and Faisal an exam the other boys had prepared for, and without studying they were able to pass.

A few of my classes are learning how to write a letter.  I have devised a recipe for writing just about every kind, from a diaristic letter to a request for letters of recommendation to an op-ed piece.  I call it fishing.  Its five sections include the hook, the bait, the cast, the hauling in and the letting go.  This is too advanced for most of the kids, but I teach it in stages, leave for a few weeks and then return.  I feel it is most vital.  Where would the world be without the letters of Virginia Woolf, Kafka, or Van Gogh and his brother Theo, or Jefferson and Adams?  How lessened would my life be without my grandmother’s words and my responses to them?  Letters are vanishing.  I know they and even the system by which they are carried will be gone before I die.  But at least I will have done this one thing for their cause.

My most advanced class is with Maria, Sitiza, Pashtana (Parwana’s older sister) and my hopeful young star Yasamin.  They are not the brightest students I have, and there are others who speak English better, but they have a work ethic and a combined determination of heart.  They receive an extra two hours of instruction per week.  I push them.  Yesterday I gave them Shakespeare.  After reading the speech about the seven stages in a man’s life, they looked at me in horror.  Yellow highlighters in hand, they proceeded to mark almost every word.  What is a pard, and what is this capon lined?  Explain, please, a bubble reputation, mewling and puking, and what on earth is a shrunk shank?  Then there is pronunciation.  I almost lost them.  They were distracted and tired.  (Jamshid had given them the task of cleaning the offices before class.)  I assigned specific lines to the speech.  Three of the four girls are in drama, so they took to this strategy easily, but Yasamin struggled to understand.  The others teased her, and she turned away to wipe silent tears from her eyes.  I consoled her as best I could.  I know now how fragile these girls are, but also how extraordinarily tough.  I did not turn the episode into a melodrama. Having acknowledged the tears and frustration, as Yasamin herself modeled we eased back into the lesson, undaunted.  Usually a time comes when I stop what I am doing, what they are doing, and lead the class in a short reflection.  I call it a check-in.  I put my pen down and looked at the white board.  There were the seven ages ending with the dying man who fades into oblivion, sans everything.  “This is a man’s life, yes?” I queried.  “What about a woman’s?”

“In Afghanistan?” Pashtana asked.

“Yes, does an Afghan woman follow these stages?”

It was as if the door across the room had been suddenly slammed shut by the wind.  Maria did not hesitate to answer.  “Two stages.  Infant straight to dying old woman.”

I raised my eyebrows.  “Really?” I asked the other three.  They all nodded.

“Look,” Maria adjusted in her chair, the teacher now.  “Look at these stages, after infant is schoolboy.”  She looked at me.  ”How many girls get to go to school”  I could not argue.  “Then lover.”  Pause.  We all shook our heads.  “Soldier, justice, retired man.  What woman in Afghanistan goes through these?”

Sitiza added that many women don’t go from infant to dying old lady.  They just die.

So often these children arrest me with their frankness.  They say things to me I do not know if they ever have said to an adult.  Andeisha mentioned just as an aside in passing and completely out of context the other day, “They communicate well with you.”  An odd juxtaposition, since usually it is the other way around, a good teacher who communicates well with the students.  As I negotiated the impact of Maria’s lesson, I looked each of the girls in the eyes, amazed.  They did not flinch.

“This is something you are here to change,” I said.  “You are here in this class, in this orphanage, in this city to add stages to your lives, maybe even the lives of all Afghan women.”

I will not forget the confident smiles that came upon the faces of those young ladies in that moment.  I wish I could introduce some of the American students I have known to these four.  There are many.  Though I remember their voices, their stories, their names have faded.  That will not happen here.  I will always keep these names at the fore of my mind:  Maria, Pashtana, Sitiza, Yasamin.  I sit here and my own tears begin to form.  The war machine is grinding down.  The money is running low, and the rotation of playmakers growing thin.  Ten years is about the limit to any war.  Soon, when it leaves, the world will say it tried and satisfied with its moral footing it will adjourn.  I remember the feeling after the run of a show, especially one for which I was the director.  How strange it was after so much effort, writing the script, auditions, rehearsals, revisions of the script, fundraising, advertising, ticket sales, tech and dress and finally the actual performance, and then quite suddenly it is over.  The set is torn down in less than an hour.  The stage is swept clean.  We all go home.  Sadness.  The question invariably crosses everyone’s mind, was it a success?  Did it mean anything at all?  Before letting them go I asked the girls to please put down their markers, close their eyes and listen.  I took a deep breath, sighed, and began.

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players…

I read patiently, I read with my life on my sleeve.  I wanted them to hear the poetry, the music in the words.  I wanted them to experience Shakespeare not in the abstract.  When I finished reading I let them go.  It was a half-hour early, but the afternoon had been a bit rough.  For homework they are to practice, and eventually memorize each their part in the speech.

There are those attached to the notion that life is a linear event, one stage building upon the next until it ends where it ends.  There are those attached to the notion we end exactly where we began, and begin again.  I cannot adhere to either.  Only the spiral of hair on the top of a baby’s head, or the web a spider weaves, or the way in which water eddies within a bend of stone.

As I await the end of the Peace Jurga I contemplate too much.  I am annoyed at the interruption to everyone’s life; the cost must be in the millions of dollars.  It all seems so much posturing.  I remember the schoolyard rumble.  Boys mostly.  One or two girl friends.  The boys were all puffed up and serious.  One or another had more power than one or another.  There was the clean-cut boy from old money who had a nice Camaro to drive (this was before kids started driving BMWs).  There were the guys with strong arms and big fists who mostly didn’t care if they got hurt.  There was the smart guy who managed to instigate much of the event but somehow slip away with the drugs or the money just before the cops arrived.  There was the skinny guy that everyone liked who ended up oddly being a poster child for the event due to his incarceration.  Then there were those who came to watch, who would later go home and tell the tale bigger than life as if they had been in the eye of the storm.  The next day in school the story always seemed so much more important to the ones telling it than the ones listening in the locker room.

I wonder where in their Jurga the elders and warlords and yes, Taliban MPs are discussing the plight of women and children in their country.  Are they discussing peace, or are they really just like those boys at 9pm in the parking lot, tossing stones at the streetlights, boys who are listening to a loop in their minds about the glory of revenge and duty.  Will they discuss in their Peace Jurga the facts, that today in their country the burqa is still widely used?  Rape in a marriage has been legalized.  “Honor” killings are common, as is human trafficking.  Girls continue to be intimidated and even withdrawn from school.  There has been an alarming rise in domestic violence, self-immolation and suicide.  Statistics indicate that in Afghanistan:

• Every 30 minutes a woman dies during childbirth
• 30% of drug addicts are women
• 87% of women are illiterate
• only 30% of girls have access to education
• 1 in every 3 women experience physical, psychological or sexual violence
• 44 years is the average life expectancy for women
• 70 to 80% of women face forced marriages

And where in all this is the American outrage?  The plight of women under Mul Omar’s rule was a rallying cry for the invasion of 2001, just as much or more so than the link to a Saudi prince on dialysis in a cave up in Tora Bora.  The above facts are widely acknowledged, but not by the people who have the power to stand before the press and make it an important issue.  Instead they give vague nods to how we must insure a future for Afghan women, without a word as to how things are on the ground today, nine years and 65 billion dollars later.  The ratified constitution in this country states clearly all Afghans, men and women, are equal.  Perhaps if the outrage returned, the embarrassment would be too much, and someone other than grassroots Afghan activists and their dedicated supporters would begin to do something about it.

I will never forget that amazing documentary, The Fog of War.  I would add a corollary to McNamara’s precepts; yes, it is important to know your enemy, but at some point it is advisable to ask the question who is your enemy.

On the other hand, whenever I contemplate the crimes against humanity as typified here in Afghanistan, I am equally amazed at how people relentlessly work to create normalcy in their lives.  No matter the threats, the poverty, the destruction.  Not only native Afghans, but ex-pats too.  I met with a woman from Colorado who has lived here in Kabul with her family since 1994.  She has four children.  Her two oldest are girls 15 and 17.  They will volunteer in the orphanages for a month this summer.  This woman and her husband run a micro hydro-power business and a guest lodge up in the mountains.  She takes taxis everywhere or walks without a worry.  She is tall and blond, not exactly a blend in the crowd.  And yet, here she is living as any mother lives, attending dance recitals and finding things for her children to do over school break.

This woman asked me how I take care of myself.  I realized that in the classroom, though I am tapped for all I can give, it is in this giving that I receive.  I know this won’t happen consistently, nor will it last forever.  These three days of idleness have forced me to see just how exhausted I had become without knowing it.  But for the time being the work is feeding me.  I am excited about my other duties here besides teaching, including the coordination of volunteers.  In a week a student from NYC, Chanda arrives.  For a few months she will help with teaching but also address a major issue: helping the children respond properly to letters from sponsors.  With hundreds of letters to write and only one staff on hand to assist in the process, it has gotten bogged down.  The older children need help with keeping a thread to their letters, responding to questions from their sponsors.  They are thrilled when they receive a letter but are intimidated when it comes to writing one.  Chanda will help to solicit more personalized responses.  Another volunteer from Idaho, Angela, is sacrificing husband and home for four months, fulfilling a longtime desire to get involved with something positive in the midst of war.  She will continue Chanda’s work, but also teach a martial arts class to the girls and boys.  A third volunteer is in the works.  She is a 62 year-old career Army officer who taught for years at West Point.  Linda will bring a litany of experiences to AFCECO, quite possibly beginning in September.

There is no checklist, no test to determine whom I invite.  I have not had to say no to anyone.  What I do is have a conversation.  Invariably, if the volunteer candidate is not a good match, he or she drops out on his or her own volition.  I would say about eight or nine initial inquiries did end up that way, while these three women worked their way to the end of the conversation as enthusiastic, if not more so, than they were to begin with.  To honor the spirit of AFCECO I feel that it is better to find the person, then fit that person to an appropriate job, rather than the other way around.  It has been the same with people here in Kabul who show interest in getting involved, whether from American University or Kabul University or the private sector.

Another responsibility has been writing/editing grant proposals and various other publicly released documents.  Right now I am working on a proposal to attract the attention of Hillary Clinton and the Rockefeller Foundation.  The “Secretary’s Innovation Award for the Empowerment of Women and Girls” seeks to award two $500,000 grants.  This is a little different than a typical grant; it is more like a contest.  I have spent these hours working on a concept paper, five pages worth.  I have to use every last ounce of my ability to juggle several objectives, express them as clearly and compellingly as possible, while making it seem effortless in the text.

Having these three days has been strange.  Especially waking up at 5am with nothing to do but write, drink chi, and hope my normal schedule can resume tomorrow.  I think about each class and what I will bring to it, while knowing full well I may toss it all.  One rule I do follow is that every class must contain four elements: conversation, vocabulary, grammar, and comprehension.  I bought a globe the size of a soccer ball and it goes where I go.  We have begun the process of studying 13 places on the earth: Antarctica, Australia, China, India, Thailand, Egypt, Kenya, Greece, England, America, Brazil, Panama, Cuba.  After an overview we have since visited Egypt and Australia in detail.  The globe is a natural inroad to teaching ESL.  Music, language, history, geography, flora and fauna, food.  In every case I ask the children to reflect upon their own country, similarities and differences.  When we came to the part of Australian history where women convicts from England are stuffed into “woman factories”, the girl’s eyes opened wide.  Iron necklaces, shaved heads, and enslavement by hapless men are realities they could envision all too well.  I press the issue of time, what 40,000 years means to the Aboriginal culture, what it takes to be able to identify a spot in the desert where water can be found.  I give an “exam” (the kids prefer this word to “quiz”) just about every time we get together.  Today I must download some pictures from India, and put together a two-page introduction to the country.  Choosing what to include is a challenge, and a responsibility.  There has to be a mix of imperfection and perfection that is fair to the place and the people.  I say this because the children know pretty much nothing about the world, and they absorb everything I share with them the way I remember absorbing the view when first I walked to the edge of the Grand Canyon.  Most of the children do know something about India, though.  Sometimes they watch Hindi music videos and Bollywood films in the evening.  I will have to include Gandhi, a classical dance, and of course the food.

I wrote to a friend this morning that I anticipate a day I go north or east or west (further than Paghman) and for the first time see this spectacular countryside that is the real Afghanistan.  It will be a revelation in that I’ve spent a year experiencing this country through the children.  When I actually see where it is they come from, I can only imagine the kind of connections that will take place in my heart and mind.

It is sobering to imagine too, probably more a reality than I’d like to admit, that at this very moment for the first time I think in my life I am someone’s true enemy.  This someone I have never met.  This someone would target me as if I were a soldier in the field.  I have no gun.  I know only one move a Marine taught me that would I suppose in a pinch bring an attacker down, but honestly my only weapon is education.  I remember so many times my story could have ended, most often due to my own stupidity.  I remember taking the bullets out of a handgun, once, without telling the strange man who kept it under the seat of his car.  The hitchhiker who got in as I left said he did not believe in violence.  I never told him either, that I removed the bullets.  If the gun did come out, and the trigger did get pulled, whom would the pilgrim have praised, and whom would the driver have cursed?  I don’t believe life is ironic.  Irony is only a way to understand life.  But I have found happiness in a war, and I do not want to die.  It occurs to me that making a living was something I never once in my life considered.  How childish that seems to me now.  But there it is.  Whatever I did was invariably framed in the act of being alive.  Now I am engaged in some sort of battle, a soldier myself, without ever having declared it.  As Beckett would more than likely have me say, the story ends.  There is no story.  It has no end.

Monday morning, instead of bringing me to Sitara II for classes Jamshid and Andeisha first needed to be dropped off at Mehan orphanage for a meeting.  When we arrived I knew something was up.  The porch and courtyard were empty.  I wanted to retrieve some materials I’d left in my classroom, so I climbed the steps and removed my flip-flops.  The doors to the orphanage were closed.  This almost never happens.  The latch was a little stuck, so I swung the doors open a little briskly and entered under the momentum of my push.  The high ceiling of the orphanage was suddenly filled with rose petals, red and pink and white, floating down upon my head, and in front of me sixty or so of the Mehan girls cheered.  “Happy Teacher’s Day!”  One after another roses where thrust into my arms, hand-made cards, silk flowers, balloons.  One balloon burst and confetti scattered everywhere.  Andesha was there taking photos, and to the side Jamshid.  They smiled.  I felt spoiled and self-conscious.  I basked in the attention, too, but secretly I wanted to defer it all toward the husband and wife team who are true heroes.  Slowly we walked en-mass up to the second floor and entered the library.  The room had been completely decorated, and a table decked out with flowers, a large cake and candles.  I was directed to sit behind the cake, a party hat was placed on my head, and three-year old Marwa, (who was actually born in Mehan orphanage) snuck up beside me and jumped into my lap.  Together we blew out the candles.  Parwana turned the music on and immediately a round of dancing began.  Just then an NBC News team entered the library: Jamshid and Andeisha were not making things up.  They had scheduled an important meeting concerning NBC’s desire to help with security.  Three huge, muscle bound security people entered along with two directors of the Kabul news bureau.  What they thought of this middle aged American in baggy clothes, a pointed hat on his head at the center of a room full of laughter and silliness is beyond my imagining.  The girls wasted no time in dragging me out to the center of the room.  They remember well the times we all danced into the night a year ago, nights of isolation and strangeness in the midst of this desperate city.  I did not care what the news team thought.  I only cared to show the children how happy I was.  Kawka Yasin entered.  In his hands was a gift from the staff and children of Mehan.  I opened the red Christmas paper wrapping, joyful and at this point flashing upon the ten-year old still lodged in my heart, the boy who had been showered with love from his family, a mother and father, the child so fortunate as to have been born in America, comforted, gifts piled high on the dinner table, tuna-noodle casserole, a board game called RISK, a nice gold and blue rugby shirt, a Spitfire model airplane kit.  The gift my Afghan family chose for me was a hand-stitched outfit, more Afghan than any other clothes I have, a light pastel violet such as the clouds appear just before dawn, or sometimes I remember in Alaska those summer nights that ended just as soon as they had arrived.  Shagofa took my hand.  She had in my absence over the winter been practicing the swing dance I had taught her.  Then Sadaf wanted to give it a try.  Then it was time for the real dancers, Parwana, Pashtana and Farida who brought with them from the orphanage in Pakistan a flavor of Indian culture.  One after another each of the children either took her turn or was dragged out onto the dance floor by her teasing friends.  Reluctantly it was then I took my leave, as the meeting upstairs had to do with my as well as Andeisha’s security.  It was a sober meeting, difficult to tolerate while one floor below roars of laughter and cheering continued to emanate from the library.  A seasoned ex-special forces officer from England asked an array of questions and hinted his professional opinions.  This was such an abstract protocol, given my mood.  I only wanted to get back to the party.  This business of being American, a prime target, annoyed me.  In my mind I am only a volunteer with a simple story:  I teach twelve different groups of children, ages 7 to 17.  I stumbled into their lives, and we changed one another.  I left, not able to clarify if we would ever meet again.  When I returned, a contract was signed across our hearts.  There is a level of trust between us now.  On this day it was fathomed.  Lunch was served and I left the meeting to join the girls who had gathered around a plastic red mat on the first floor.  I feel safe around this mat, one knee tucked and the other bent beneath my chin.  I feel most comfortable. Members of Mehan’s staff, Nasifa and Laila served us rice and chicken.  We told some of the same old jokes.  At every opportunity I reinforce an atmosphere of storytelling, but also story-making; observing elements of any experience that can and will go into future tales that help to define our lives, direct our awareness and reinforce the power of love over fear.  I take pride in every teacherly moment of every day, but on this day I eventually came to think not of myself, but of all the real teachers who brave the dangers of their profession here among fundamentalists, as well as the stigma of being just above barbers and carpenters, the lowest rungs of society.  Teachers in Afghanistan are the poorest class of professionals in the country.  They make a salary of $100 a month.  Oftentimes the government fails to pay them even this meager fee.  It requires the teachers to collect from a (corrupt?) bank.  To do this, the teachers are required to open accounts, whereupon they stand in line all day.  When they have finally opened an account they find their salaries have not been deposited.  The emphasis on spending millions of public dollars to train and equip police and soldiers seems more aimed to protect the established (corrupt?) government than to establish a democratic society to protect in the first place.  Education, especially higher education, has been thoroughly neglected by the international community and the Karzai government.  Instead, it has primarily been left to the fraudulent business people looking to make a killing, opening “private” schools and training centers where young Afghans spend their last dollar for marginal and often meaningless certificates.  It is not an innovative idea to invest in people, but in reality it remains only a comforting idea because in the short run there is little money to be made in it and there are no guarantees to investors.  Contractors, construction companies, consulting companies, military supply companies, security companies, trucking companies, fuel companies, aide distribution bureaucracies… these are the gears of modern nation building, not education.  These things look good on paper and in power-point presentations.  But in reality while only 8% of the Afghan population actually benefits, and the bank accounts of foreigners are fattened up, thousands of children are fast becoming a population of young adults susceptible to the rhetoric of illiterate, angry, ideologues.  The argument that there are no jobs for educated Afghans is a deflection.  Case in point: teachers.  Look at what Afghan teachers are willing to do to continue their profession, if only because they know it is good for their country.  The same will be true for Afghan reporters, engineers, doctors and lawyers.  These were the thoughts running through my mind, the desire running through my veins.  Why, why has so little been invested in people?  How else, I ask, is a nation to be built?  The answer to this is logical, that nation-building was not in the beginning nor is it now the aim of the international community of governments.  The implications of this admission, I believe, are harrowing.  In this respect it is not so complicated a question as to why I must teach, even if I have doubts about my ability or the fruits of my labor.  All other reasons have trailed off into the stories I will tell.  Freedom is love; teacher is book. Dariush put that exclamation point to Teacher’s Day on the wall in the new orphanage for older boys.  It was there I spent that afternoon.  Once again the exploding confetti, the flowers, the cards.  This time I received a pair of stylish shiny black leather sandals, to go with my new Afghan clothes.  The boys don’t yet have a radio or television, so Farid Gul grabbed a water cooler and played it like a tabla drum.  We danced as if dervishes working ourselves into a trance.  And we laughed.  At times I feel so thoroughly inadequate, inept, and wonder if I am deluded, needlessly spending what remains of my health on a life restricted by my identity in a country with wheels too large to comprehend turning regardless of my efforts.  Unlike last year this is not some sort of adventure.  There is nothing to prove to anyone, not to myself, not even to the children.  Yet here I am.  There is no greater gift than to be appreciated for the work you do.  To be so completely the center of attention while trying to be as invisible as humanly possible is at first glance paradoxical, but then again that is what any teacher worth her or his weight in salt will strive for day after day, year after year.  The children have signaled to me a clear message, and I must in the end take their word for it.  Perhaps I am here, after all, because this is who I am.