Hope for Afghan Children

Winter solstice has always been my New Year, not for any pagan belief system but for a darkness that comes on the heels of my birthday and the anniversary of my mother’s passing. Inside, at least, I tend to be still. There is no frenzied buildup to the actual holidays. This was reflected in the tone and temper of the talks I gave on Friday. I spoke to an entire sophomore class of 300 students broken up into eight sessions, 45 minutes each. Adding to the depth of my reflection, this event was held at my alma mater. Pomperaug is a regional high school in western Connecticut. Thirty years ago it was an assemblage of cow tipping pumpkin smashing river dipping yokels. Now it is an affluent stopover for people migrating into or out of Manhattan.

Rather than replicate the same talk over and over, subconsciously I was compelled to continue the narrative from one session into the next. If the students from different groups compared notes they would find they were the beneficiaries of a one-time event, while equally having missed out on seven others. I didn’t always show the same video either, but mixed in various clips from Mehan orphanage to the Art Party to the refugee camp and Kabul in general. I spoke about my journey, the individual kids, and the vision of democracy created from within. I spoke about the war and who is fighting it, not only for the opposition but also on our side the role class has played in the shaping of our military. I spoke about caring, and how I discovered what is great about America and what freedom truly is while stowed away in the orphanage. The extent to which the students were transfixed was revealed by their utter silence during the part of the video when Farzana reads Rumi and for fifteen seconds the children are shown screaming on the carnival ride, but with no sound. Questions were compelling and nuanced, increasing the level of discourse. For example, one tall blond boy with large eyeglasses asked if cultural differences modified the effectiveness of my teaching the orphans and similarly, their ability to learn. A girl who looked to be an athlete from the mold of Picaboo Street asked about diet and nutrition in the orphanage, and how it is the children look so healthy. By the time my last group of students filed in, my voice was cracking and my narrative had begun to waver. Still, this was the largest single group of the day, and I couldn’t allow myself to drop the ball. Just as I was introduced, it came upon me to forego all preambles and subject headings. I decided to tell the story of my last few days in Afghanistan. Every step of this narrative gave opportunity to weave issues of wider import, from the distribution of food to the refugees to running through the games I played with the younger children. Gender, women’s rights, culture, and even history have a place at the table of this story, culminating with the rooftop finger of whiskey given to me by Kaka Ryan, his ensuing reminiscence of five years of torture, civil war, Taliban and now the eight years of occupation and struggle. As his moonlit eyes looked into mine and told of how he would never forget me, so I looked into the eyes of the students before me, attentive, unglued from their routine, actively hinging their lives with the soldiers and marines, the suffering urchins and widows, recognizing in the orphans a bit of themselves, something essential, beneath their skin and not far from their core.

Mr. Bass, the history teacher who organized the visit is the only one to have experienced in its entirety what turned out to be my six-hour “talk”. He is a barrel chested, salt and pepper bearded kindly man dressed in wool with the soft eyes of the kind of teacher students might remember more as an uncle. He approached me after the last of the sophomores had filtered away. He wanted to say many things, but in the end just shook his head. His eyes were wet. He handed me $350 raised by the students and faculty, then grabbed his wallet and pulled whatever money was in there, stuffed it into my hand and wrapped my fingers around it into a fist. His voice shaking, he told me if there is ever anything I can do for you… and left it at that.

This experience was in the making long before I stepped into that school. Here I was being welcomed by my old football coach, my French teacher, English and Phys Ed teachers who somehow remember every detail about the Class of ’79, and I couldn’t help but wonder how far back a story can be set into motion. Whatever the case, these past few weeks have revealed the extent to which the wayfarer’s “boon” can be gifted again and again, only to increase the more it is given away. Two silver-haired men recently gave proof to the effects of this alchemic paradox. Only an hour from our meeting one of them connected me to the upper echelons of the United Nations as well as the headquarters of Rotary International, and the other wrote a check for five thousand dollars. Whether a random conversation at a holiday party or speaking at the Harvard Club, the narrative is a living, breathing entity. There is nothing to sell, only a story that is somehow more real than, as Frank Rich bluntly identified in his latest editorial, this decade of fraud. From Enron to Iraq, from John Edwards to Tiger Woods, from “Reality TV” to Wall Street the narrative has exhausted Americans of our wits, our ability to believe in anything worldly. But it doesn’t stop with us. Everywhere is a seeming endless array of smoke and mirrors. No wonder fundamentalism has surged in every major religion extant in every corner of human society. It appears to many as our only escape.

In the last few weeks I have spoken to some New York philanthropists, sixth graders from St. Pius elementary school, actors, builders, writers, veterans, entrepreneurs and even the denizens of my hometown from whence thirty years ago I ran away. Everywhere this notion on the airwaves there is some sort of culture war is proven to me to be a myth. Already I have in hand ten thousand dollars, the backing of an assortment of individuals and institutions intent on providing education to the orphans, and the interest and best wishes of some thousands of Americans, not for a spell of rhetoric I’ve concocted but for the universality of our experience. The only way out is through… goes the old lyric. That is how the myth is disempowered, replaced with something we can taste, hear, speak to and see with our own eyes. Something we can actually feel.

While giving a radio interview in Westerly, Rhode Island I fielded a call from a woman who with a deep breath and a sigh asked the most dreamy of questions. “When do you suppose,” she said, “people will stop treating each other inhumanely and realize we are all one?”

Increasingly, as I wander back to my beloved orphans by way of this immersion with my own people I see the oneness that woman spoke of is not so nearly as mythological as the notion we are destined to war ad infinitum. Peace exists all right, like the man donning Afghan clothes and speaking for six hours about transcending distance existed in the shy, goofy, curly haired boy I was when traipsing the hallways of Pomperaug High School so many years ago. All that remains is mere recognition.

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Early this week I was sitting in the library of a small community college in northwestern Connecticut, trying to decide what kind of talk I would give that evening. A childhood friend who I had not seen in over a decade invited me to speak at her home in Granby. I anticipated at least thirty people, many of them also hailing from my past, people from whom I had drifted far away. No matter how many times I stand in front of an audience I get tremendously nervous. The prospect of a pseudo high school reunion made me doubly nervous. I wanted to address them directly. I wanted to somehow combine the story of the orphanage with the story of what in the name of God had happened to me all these years. Searching for inspiration I moved about in the library from workstation to lounge chair to periodicals to the rare books room. My mind drew nothing but blanks.

The sun had sunk into that three o’clock low that always seems so disorienting this time of year. I considered heading out early. I could get to my friend’s house and spend some time loosening up with a beer or two. Then I thought better of it, not wanting to put myself in the position of having no compass at all. I walked down the stairs to a remote corner of the library and sat looking out a window at a narrow river flowing by. This was not going well at all. To let an audience down would be my own singular failure. I fell asleep with my head on a writing desk, my yellow-lined note pad tucked under one elbow, betraying my emptiness. I imagine I was in and out for half an hour. Pressure was building in my stomach, in my head. I had to do something to jar my body into action. I opened one eye. Several shelves filled the center of the room in the fashion of all college libraries. There they were, hundreds of books, potential sparks for whatever ideas can be hatched. Who knows when last any of them had been handled? In a burst of spontaneity I got up from the little desk and, randomly entering one aisle I closed my eyes, reached up and removed the first book my hand touched. It was a little thing, thin, the size of an address book. On Caring, by Milton Mayeroff, published by Harper & Row in 1971. I almost replaced it on the shelf, but decided the better thing would be to at least look through it. Maybe somewhere I’d find the auspicious information that would ignite my pending presentation. One hour later I was still reading.

In Mayeroff’s book there are identifiable segments to caring that include an effort to know, sensitivity to alternating rhythms, patience, honesty, trust, humility and courage. What is so capturing about this text is it gives lift to those words, injects them with astonishing vitality that equates the act of caring with being truly alive. It is not, as our collective consciousness seems to have it, an easy thing to care. It is, however, a human need so strong as to rival the need to eat or procreate. The repercussions are not as blunt as starvation or extinction, but they are nevertheless daunting. I think of how much the history of the world turns on the need to feel alive.

The light outside had dimmed into gray the way only November can do. I began to scribble words on that empty notepad and they could not materialize fast enough. It occurred to me that all my life I have been searching for freedom. Hitchhiking ten thousand miles around the continent, jumping from an airplane, skiing high in the Rockies, kayaking with whales. I wanted every aspect of my life to be infused with this sense of freedom, including my relationships and my non-career. How is it that not until I was sequestered away in an orphanage from which I couldn’t even show my face had I ever been truly free? How odd that I had to randomly choose a book from the shelf to find a reasonable answer. What a dangerously misguiding word, carefree.

I knew what I would say to those thirty people. Who knows what they expected. An hour and a half they listened, then another half hour of questions and answers. The children of Mehan once again lit a flame, but this time they shared the bill with the story of a crippled man stumbling and then clawing his way to their doorstep. It turned out to be the biggest single fundraising event thus far on my “tour”. They gave $745. People everywhere, of every age and every political persuasion are dying to care in a world that in weaker moments seems devoid of it.

As I peruse this open journal from beginning to the present entry I realize here is a simple account of how I learned to care, and in so doing for a little while became free. Must it take such a journey? Whether in spirit or in body Joseph Campbell, author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces would undoubtedly say yes. Implicitly this includes the journey home, and most importantly the offering of a “boon” to the world. I cannot say how important it is for me to recognize something of my own path in this universal map. I have experienced dark evenings these past weeks; sleeping in a kid’s room, on the floor, an army cot. There are times when for a moment I do not know where I am. And people back home in Vermont shake their heads as they pass the “for sale” sign in front of my house, as I do just thinking of it. It is not a good time to hinge upon property to sell, or a book, or a grant of some sort. But I do have a compass, and I keep it there in the palm of my hand. It directs me straight to you.

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For the first time I dreamed I was back in Mehan orphanage in Kabul. The presence of new children along with the girls I know indicated to me I’d gone into the future. I felt nervous and at once relieved. I’d come to the end of this zigzagging road. I looked forward to staying in one place. The new orphans introduced themselves one by one. Theirs were unfamiliar names, and I was sorry I hadn’t brought my little brown pocket-sized notebook to write them down. Nothing dream-like about this dream, it was real and natural. The only oddity is the children seem to me in retrospect amalgamations of the Afghan faces I know so well and the faces of American kids imprinted upon my mind’s eye after so many visits to so many schools. Even the names were a strange blending of the two, a Fatima with Denise that becomes Fanise. More than Farzana and Ali and Fahima I see the shocked faces of my present students as I tell them about the horrors witnessed by those three. I see these students giggle while watching the video of Omid screaming on the pirate ship ride, or Sitiza slipping and falling in a water fight with Nafisa, and when I tell them about teaching the girls how to spit a watermelon seed, their capitulating eyes as they finish the story for me, knowing full well the inevitability of an all-out spitting war. This pendulum swing from utter estrangement to the most basic elements of familiarity is the plot I unabashedly manipulate into play. My dream indicates to me this life hop-frogging around the country, eliciting in audiences wonder and hope for a country’s people where we currently enter our ninth year of war has penetrated my psyche.

There is a tension in that juxtaposition; no matter what the war, the enemy must be vilified, simplified, less than human for us to kill. I ask the students what an average Afghan looks like. Not until I wrap my scarf around my head, scream and shoot an imaginary rifle like a banshee on opium do they nervously laugh with familiarity. But what if that enemy is by generous estimation about 12,000 members of the opposition called Taliban? There are 28 million people living in Afghanistan. Even if we subscribe to the further characterization of Afghans as being tribal (euphemism for feudal, even stone-age), to see a house full of same-said tribal children behaving in just about every way more civilized, disciplined, playful, appreciative and happy than the children in the very classrooms I now visit casts a spell I have rarely witnessed in adolescents. They are humbled, intrigued, so quiet that during the silent sections of the video not a whisper, not even a shifting in a chair can be heard. And then come the questions, invariably more than time allows. It is the kind of questions, the way they are asked that confirms my suspicion. They want to know, and then afterwards they want to thank. What is happening here? I believe it is something as simple and universal as, once tasted, the desire for freedom. If the Mehan girls can do it, so can we.

I cannot say truthfully why I do what I do. Oftentimes I think I go on a simple hunch, and the storyline gets imprinted upon the outcome of my actions. I wanted to go to Afghanistan. I want to raise money for the orphanages. I want to improve people’s understanding of the complexities and realities for the average Afghan. These goals are no more fantastical than saying when we are young we want to get married and have children. We know nothing about marriage and we certainly don’t know a thing about what it means to have children. On one level, if we really look at it, these goals are random by nature. We think these are goals but if for example what we actually want is love then any book in the self-help section of Barns and Noble will tell you there is little to no evidence love is remotely guaranteed. The truth is, and I didn’t know this until a fellow Omprakash volunteer pointed it out, I am trying to keep the orphans alive in my heart. I am trying to be with them even while trapped in my own country on the opposite side of the world. And here we go, the actual story as so kindly hinted by my dream; my countrymen and women are adopting me even as I cling to my orphan-ness. Slowly, I acquiesce.

It is a dalliance with ego to speak as I do about my inner workings through all of these entries as much as I speak of the world and its people. I trust you will forgive any indulgences. Hermann Hesse wrote that as a body everyone is single, as a soul never. And yet he also wrote that one man is more than just himself, that he also represents the “significant and remarkable point at which the world’s phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again”. Whatever the case, universal or unique, East or West, what this continuing journey reflects is a naïve and preposterous urge to build a bridge between the two.

Thus far people and host organizations have contributed $3,200 to this “tour” of mine. My hope is to have ten thousand by the end of February. I have decided that all money will go into an education fund for the orphans. Though scholarships will undoubtedly be available to cover tuitions, there will be numerous other costs such as airfare to Bangladesh where a Farzana Nori may well one day attend the Asian University for Women. There will be books and supplies to purchase, and most direly there is a need for tutors and fulltime teachers to augment the vastly inadequate public school in Kabul. To be sure, this is just a beginning, but we have two years to get the fund up to speed, before the oldest children turn eighteen. They each in their own way must experience a fall from the nest. To make great sky circles of their freedom I wager these children would somehow lift themselves no matter how depraved their world. Still, I cannot imagine standing by without doing whatever I can to improve the span of their wings.

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Hollis, Maine is a small inland town just beyond shooting distance for would-be commuters to Portland. There is nothing much in the way of prosperity there. No timber, to tourism, not even a potato farm. The students at Bonny Eagle High School live with a reputation of underachievement, academic probation in a climate of shifting leadership from year to year. The students close to failing there have one last stop, an off-site alternative education program lodged in a now defunct elementary school. When asked what they dream of doing with their lives, the girls clam up and the boys, when pushed, express their disgust with anything less than getting out of Hollis. I have visited twelve schools since my return to the states, all of them private or otherwise representative of well-off communities. In every case a smattering, three or four students claimed to know someone serving in the armed forces in Afghanistan. When I asked the twenty-three Bonny Eagle kids, sixteen hands went up without hesitation. There was no searching of their collective memory for a friend of a big sister’s boyfriend’s cousin. Here we are talking about something a whole lot closer to home.

I calculate that in the past two months I have given thirty-seven presentations. Some have been a half hour in length, most have been an hour to ninety minutes. I have yet to give the same one twice. The moment I stand in front of all those eyes the script is discarded. None more immediately and completely than when those Bonny Eagle hands went up. I was humbled. I’d been prepped on these kids. It requires a tire iron to wedge them from their defeatedness, their resistance, their weariness from a world that seems to do nothing but talk at them. The small corps of devoted teachers and administrators I met have big hearts, but I recognized in them the kind of pall that many times came over me during my years counseling a similar group of Alt-eders in Washington State, in Connecticut and Vermont. There is so little support, so little return while operating in isolation. It is unfortunate and natural that school systems, if not society in general render these children invisible. But nothing was more visible than the sacrifice indicated by those sixteen hands.

I told them how honored I was to stand before them, to have their attention and interest as I did my best to bring them on my journey to Kabul. I told them it was my wish that by the time the hour was over each of them would recognize in him or her self at least one strength someone somewhere in the world could benefit from, and that should they choose to, through the sharing of that strength lies the path to a dream beyond just getting out of Hollis. We talked about stereotypes, about opium crazed mujahadin with AK47 rifles, head turbans, screaming Arabic quotes from the Koran about going to Paradise where they will encounter 99 green eyed lily skinned raven haired virgins and rivers of milk and honey and figs that continuously sprout from branches that are continuously plucked. We talked about the history of civilization, about crossroads where bargains are made with the Devil, where wars are hatched and nature clashes with the human spirit. We talked about money, we talked about loss. We talked about a boy I know who held his mother’s hand as she was ripped open, drugs were stuffed into her torso, her skin sewed up so she could walk across the border, deliver her secret to a dealer in Iran, again and again and again. We talked about giving up.

Then I showed them my video of Sitiza trying to spray me with the garden hose, Medena teaching Meena to read English, the girl’s cheering as their bus passed the boy’s bus on their way up to Paghman, and Farzana taking her time in answering what to her is the best thing about Mehan orphanage: working together. When the lights came on it was as if a magic spell had been cast, or merely lifted. As it was for Brian Williams and the thousands of people watching NBC News, as it was for me the day I entered the orphanage, the Mehan girls once again had dissolved whatever had been thought into whatever could be dreamed. An hour and a half those Hollis kids gave me. Orphans themselves, they had lost their fathers and mothers to the only ticket out of town. The lights revealed something different in their eyes, in the way they held their bodies, their elbows on the tops of their desks. Their little school was for at least a few hours not some sort of prison, but an orphanage, a place where, though a war and maybe even the world is crashing outside its walls, they too can work together.

Two of the girls asked for the web address of Omprakash. One boy told me he would like to donate his collection of dvd movies, and asked me if when I return to Kabul I might pack them along. One boy who must weigh two hundred and fifty pounds, who exhibited a baddest of the bunch attitude when I first walked into the classroom, came up to me and shook my hand. He thanked me. He faced me square-on and he smiled a knowing smile. I had been accepted into yet another family.

Later this week I presented at Brunswick High School and Longfellow Elementary, as well as to a group of Bowdoin College students. I was invited to join the Brunswick kids on their field trip to a Portland theater. The Yomato taiko players had come to town. I sat next to a teenager so giddy with excitement she bounced up and down on her seat to the rhythm of the drum. I was invited to judge at a statewide competition in speech and debate up near Bangor. I watched fourteen year olds argue the case of failed-state dangers versus the dangers of powerful countries. I walked to the edge of land near Bath, and I watched a seabird dive for silver fish and hermit crabs and mollusks and weeds. I hung out in the evenings with twenty-somethings who managed despite my presence to be themselves, to laugh and drink and illuminate one another’s vision of a world that can be healed. Everywhere I went I felt the softness of Maine’s touch, even in the midst of a Nor’easter, even among rocky shores and rivers rising with tides. Here is a state in the shape of a mitten, whose motto is dirigo. Where it guides me I do not know, but I trust it as much as I would a compass in the palm of my hand. November has been the kindest of months. I can hardly wait until the day I give thanks, but I dread the coming of tomorrow when I must say goodbye to this place.

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Vermont is paradoxical. Most people elsewhere in the country think of Vermont as a bastion of tree hugging, gay loving, war protesting Liberals. Yet for three terms in a row the state has elected a conservative Republican governor. It was first to outlaw slavery (1777), yet a visitor is hard pressed to find one person of color out of a hundred. Vermont was the last state in the union to get a Walmart, yet it has a nuclear plant and receives the remaining bulk of its power from Quebec. On average it is two hours to Albany, three to Boston, four to New York and two to Montreal, yet Vermont is by all measurements the most rural state. Maybe this dichotomic nature has something to do with the fact you are not considered a true Vermonter unless your family goes back five generations stacking six cords of firewood in October, digging out in waist-high January snow, pulling a car (or cart) from the mud in March, and eating black flies in June. There is a profound attachment to the land that is becoming scarce beyond its borders. Such attachment breeds a different temperament than liberal or conservative; it is slate, it is marble, it is pine, it is hay. It is snow geese flying south; it is what it means to stay.

The place where I spoke this week, Middlebury College, has been around since 1800. In many ways it is a microcosm of Vermont, far enough from the interstate to pause, absorb the swelling farmland littered with seven-foot rolled bales like earthen dot candy, behold the timorous sugar maple as it clings to its remaining leaves, and stand on a high enough bluff to peripherally admire the ancient worn Green Mountains to one side, the still uplifting youthful Adirondacks to the other. Middlebury is the breeding ground for Harvard MBAs, Wall Street brokers and CEOs. Yet it has the knack to matriculate someone capable of writing The Vagina Monologues. The locals criticize the sense of elitism that permeates the campus, yet they froth over the 6 million dollars the college pumps into the economy each year. This has been my home since 1993. Though I have given my presentation thirty times in thirty different ways, I was tremendously nervous, trembling even before I stood at the lectern. This was about so much more than my message. Beneath it something inevitable stirred. I hadn’t felt this way since stepping onto the Kam Air flight from Delhi to Kabul. Time to let go. Time to act in accordance with the truism that I am, in the most honest sense, beside the point. I struggle once again with the question of whether or not what I do is more important than who I am.

Did you ever notice how after you buy a car you suddenly see it everywhere on the road? It is like walking through the forest never once seeing a mushroom until you go back and actually look. See? Dozens of chanterelles, chicken of the woods, pink ones white ones and lone brutes that are blood-red. So it has been for me as I fulfill invitations around the country to stand and speak about Afghanistan. Afghans in every crowd. A woman in her thirties from Kabul, living in Portland, Maine. Two juniors in a San Diego high school. Zoya, representing RAWA, touring the states in her attempt to alert Americans to the actualities of the war, and here, Middlebury College, two students among the crowd rooting for me to gift to them a piece of home, but wary that I might as easily as a kite that has lost its string, fail.

The two Middlebury students came up to me and spoke Dari. I answered. It was a verbal hug, a piece of khawk in a sea of first-world mirages. There were people in the room who have known me twelve years, some almost twenty-five. Very smart people, thoughtful people not easily hypnotized by a dancing voice of little substance. Add into the mix native Afghans and the effect was unsettling. I shook hands I could not match with faces. I fumbled with the projection system and hardly sipped the tea my host had steeped for me. In my life I had never been introduced the way real scholars and authors are introduced. “Ian Pounds this and that, Semester at Sea, Oxford, Bread Loaf, memoir…” I was flattered as hell and enjoyed my moment of validity and honor, but the real introduction should have gone like this: Mister Pounds gained his education traveling 10,000 miles on the angle of a genetically transmitted hitchhiker’s thumb. He is lucky. He should be dead, not of bravery or some sense of adventure but from his own stupidity. As a youngster he drove cars at night drunk. He jumped from bridges and he slept on park benches. He drank venom on snake alley in Manila. Time went by, but it is difficult to say where it went. Naturally, he traveled to Kabul. Here he is, as far as we know, still alive.

It is true I have not, out of thirty talks, given the same one twice. Though I painstakingly prepare, the instant I stand before a group of people the script goes out the window. I have to read it in their eyes. On this occasion there was no need for a getting to know you, trust me story. I launched into the harsh realities for women and children in Afghanistan. “Right now…” I prefaced each fact, because right now is non negotiable. Right now is at the same exact moment you are listening and I am talking. Right now is not a story someone told or a prediction of inevitability. Though my talks differ there are certain congruities; I usually get around to telling the story about teaching the girls how to spit watermelon seeds, and often I read the poem Farzana chose from her book of Rumi. There is the video, a hinge in the middle of the presentation that shocks people with the full summer breeze of hope. One story always gets them, the time Mahbooba and the rest of the students would not be dismissed early from class. “We want our five minutes,” she said. Most people smile and laugh, but it is laced with self-awareness, even shame, because none of us has gone through our American life having not wasted, time and again, that five minutes.

The questions that come after my presentation reflect a level of interest I have not seen in my life. I have been told the sixth most used word in all Google searches is Afghanistan. I believe it. The questions are focused, non rhetorical, earnest and almost pensive. We tend to go on for another thirty to forty minutes beyond the one-hour talk. There are the people who have decided how they feel about troop levels. I sideswipe them by simply talking about the population, the history, the evolution of an aide dollar, the landscape, the vision of inclusiveness in the orphanage, the effectiveness of working separately from institutions of government and religion and NGOs, service working face to face with those being served, and of course there are the children. I talk about everything but troop levels, until quite magically the answer becomes a foregone conclusion without ever actually answering the question. Usually there is a third way when we are all bouncing between two options. It is in a sense the way of a man nobody mentions, Ramazon Bashardost, who came in third in the presidential election behind Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah. He did not stuff any boxes with ballots. He did not buy any votes. He drove around in a beat-up Toyota to every province of Afghanistan without a single bodyguard. He got votes from thousands of Pashtuns even though he’s Hezara. They say he is crazy. But there he is.

A ten-year old girl asked why is it important for the children to stay in Afghanistan. Why not give them a good life in America? This got me to thinking. What, I wonder, is this yearning to adopt? Why this urge to fold the world in our arms? Is it greed, is it compassion? Hubris? Love? I spoke to the girl about peace coming from within, that it could not exist if all the peace loving people left Afghanistan. What I should have told her was a story, how I once built a cabin on a deserted island in southeast Alaska, how I sat for days on a rock between three giant trees, a hemlock, a spruce and a yellow cedar, how I listened to the waves crash only fifty yards away, the raven croaking like a shaman in the woods, until finally the island told me where to build.

Then the inevitable happened; the Afghan student Tabasum Wolayat raised his hand. He appreciated my meaning, and he meant no disrespect, but how can there be security letting madmen run about? In other words he wanted an answer to the ten zillion dollar question everyone has been asking for months; the one I had been avoiding. This time it was a direct hit. “Withdraw or build up?” I liken that question to asking a suicidal person whether it is better to live or to die. What, I wonder, would a real Vermonter say? I suspect he or she would summon up an anecdotal phrase. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting to get different results. Withdrawing feeds the enemy; building up feeds the enemy. Perhaps it is not the enemy that should dictate our action. Perhaps we should find the light, and protect it. I think of the Friday evening back in Mehan orphanage when Sadof pulled the chair out from under me. What would have happened if I left the party for good, or scorned her into a corner where all her friends might scorn her too? The enemy there was a naughty disrespectful girl, and my pride could see only two courses of action. What if there was a third way? What if I held the other part of her by the hand, squeezed it in my own? What if for days I invited her to be a star, the part of her that likes to perform, rather than banishing her from the show? What if I want her in the end to thrive, to be loved and to love me back? The answer is that Sadof is Afghanistan, and the only way to get a girl like that up off the ground it to give the strength that is hers a place to shine.

I think that Tabasum was satisfied with my response. It is a dangerous thing to let hope creep back under the skin when time and again it has been peeled away. He gleamed. We exchanged email addresses. His English is impeccable. He will undoubtedly go on to achieve great things. It is, after all, Middlebury. I wonder what he sees in those mountains, those fields that matches his own spirit. The native’s relationship to the land must resonate with him. How strange a reversal it was, this Afghan Vermonter shaking hands with a Vermonter from Afghanistan. I remind myself we are all in our own way orphans.

The following day I called a realtor. I visited old schoolhouse #7 one more time, put my hands against the fieldstone walls in its kitchen. My hands remembered gripping the mason’s hoe, the cold river the stones had once been home to, the throbbing poison of cement. Home is never where you are, Farzana?

Her answer is clear as my memory of her smile.

Never

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