Hope for Afghan Children

It was Hala’s turn to address her parwarishga sisters and fellow students in Leadership Workshop. She had practiced her speech for some days previous to her presentation. Thus the words of Susan B. Anthony had filled the bus on our way to football practice the day before, over the Iranian pop music blaring from the radio, over the chatter of all the other girls excited once again to be on their way to the field.

To them (women) this government has no just powers derived from the consent of the governed. To them this government is not a democracy. It is not a republic. It is an odious aristocracy; a hateful oligarchy of sex; the most hateful aristocracy ever established on the face of the globe; an oligarchy of wealth, where the rich govern the poor, an oligarchy of learning, where the educated govern the ignorant, or even an oligarchy of race, where the Saxon rules the African, might be endured; but this oligarchy of sex, which makes father, brothers, husband, sons, the oligarchs over the mother and sisters, the wife and daughters, of every household – which ordains all men sovereigns, all women subjects, carries dissension, discord, and rebellion into every home of the nation.

Hala had determined to memorize the speech, even though I did not require it. By the time she stood up in class on Wednesday afternoon she had even developed a good ehsâs, or feeling for what could be esteemed as one of the top five speeches ever given by an American.

Then came Yasamin, my quiet, demure student from Nuristan who is gradually developing a strength of conviction, a courage to stand up for the acute intelligence she possesses, who until that day had never stood alone before an audience. She recited the words of the very woman who had addressed the Congress of the United States this week, Aung San Suu Kyi:

The last six years in prison gave me much time for thought. I came to the conclusion that the human race is not divided into good and evil. It is made up of those who are capable of learning and those who are incapable of doing so. Here I am not talking of learning in the narrow sense of acquiring an academic education, but of learning as the process of absorbing those lessons of life that enable us to increase peace and happiness in our world…

Then there was Sosan, Farida, Shagofa, and all the others taking each their turn in the stead of three trumpeters of human rights from three corners of history, the third being Benazir Bhutto, whose words almost half the girls chose to recite:

When I get up to speak I usually start slowly, and then I build up. I like to come up with arguments and I talk of the contrast. I talk of what we did, the Pakistan we inherited. Then I come to how we built it up and we built it up because we had your strength, your support, your confidence, the importance of the people in developing a society. I look at the people because when I look at them, then I can feel that strength just run into my body. I feel strong, I feel more determined and I feel that when I have this strength with me then I can move any mountain. It just seemed to me as I looked out and just saw a sea of humanity, that the fight for the truth is important because the day does come when you see the response to your struggle.

It has been a good week with the children of AFCECO orphanages. Spectacular, really. The girls of Leadership didn’t have to put so much effort into their speeches, but they did, and each excelled in her own way. The award would nevertheless have to go to Hala, loud, happy, animated, humerous Hala, a girl from the north, Mazar, who I have nicknamed Hala mandala for the balanced, symmetrical spiraling circles found in every religious tradition.

Another of my students, Manila, who I have been encouraging through up and down times, who is pictured on the porch of Mehan in that now familiar photo of the girls greeting me in April two years ago, got 100% on a particularly difficult quiz. She is in 8^th grade, daughter of Shahima, one of the many widows who help keep the orphanages afloat. Manila was so happy as she was first to hand her paper in. She refused to show her pride, only in her motions and her eyes. “I failed. Zero!” she said, and started to pack her book bag. But she couldn’t stand it, and walked all the way around the table and to my side. “Correct it!” she ordered. And so I did. I muttered khoob twenty times as I marked each correct word in the text. The other girls in the room strained their necks to see, then dove into their own papers, doubly determined to do well in the wake of Manila’s performance.

I share the quiz here, so you can estimate for yourselves Manila’s achievement. Consider also that the students had no previous idea which words I would extract from the text for the exam.

In a remote ________ in Ghor province stands one of the most famous ________ of Afghanistan, the ________ of Jam. The Hari Rud River ________ rapidly by the lonely tower which is ________ by barren mountains. The tower lies 215 km east of Herat. It was only ________ fifty years ago. Built in the 12th century, it is the only well-preserved monument of the ________ empire. It is 65 meters tall, second ________ in the Islamic world.

The tower ________ on top of a low octagonal base some 8m across. The tower is made of three cylindrical stages. A wide band of blue tiles with a Kufi ________ runs around the top. The inscription includes the complete Sura 19 of the Holy ________ called Maryam. The minaret’s beauty is not its only ________ . It is also important for understanding the ________ of Islamic civilization. Much of its mystery has yet to be solved. ________ do not know why the tower was built.

For years, the unguarded site has been the target of ________ . Experts say many items have ________ . Sections of the minaret have been ________ out and stones have been removed from the wall and taken away. The minaret is also in danger of ________ . Built at the junction of two ________ the minaret is also threatened by water. Finally, another problem is a planned ________ that would cross the site.

torn / valley / monuments / disappeared / sits / Minaret / attraction / Archaeologists / flows / surrounded / inscription / history / discovered / rivers / collapsing / road / looting / Ghorid / tallest / Quran

Though I do list the missing words, this exercise circumvents rote memorization because it is suddenly very confusing to see twenty random words missing and then scattered about on the table out of context. It takes the faster students around thirty minutes to complete this kind of exam. For the girls of my 8^th grade class this was a particularly difficult passage to comprehend. We do a variety of games to learn the meaning of each word, including pantomime, synonyms, drawn pictures, team competitions and even song. Manila had chosen to shine this week. There have been times in the past when she would cut herself down, become depressed even. There is so much for such young spirits to rise above, to grow through, and they do it without an army of specialists poking and prodding them for symptoms of textbook afflictions. Yes, AFCECO provides the environment, the opportunities, the ripe conditions to not only survive the past but to flourish. Still, these children do what they do with the arms of their fellow orphans around them and that is, when we get down to it, everything.

There have been times this semester when I had doubts about my teaching ability. It was doubly difficult given that you’d think after two years of doing this I’d have developed a strategy, a confidence of my own. But there comes a time in the classroom and I suppose in life when you’ve exhausted all your “gifts”, your tricks and smoke and mirrors and all the other goodies we use to make ourselves attractive to other human beings. Under it all I believe we do, even the perceived stern and strict among us, want to be liked or even loved. But in my particular situation, unlike most teachers I do not get a new crop of children each autumn with which I can re-run my tricks. Sure, a smattering of new faces pop up each year, but for the most part I have been teaching the same children approaching the end of a fifth semester in a row. This is exciting, challenging and it has its unique benefits. I know these children so well, I know their learning styles, and I also know their tricks! But it also has its dangers. Manila has seen me on my worst days. She knows every string I pull. She knows every button she can push and she knows that she doesn’t have to perform well in my class if she doesn’t care to. There is no leverage, no grade, no decisive consequence other than not learning what I decide to teach. I am no longer exotic, mysterious, or even particularly interesting, given that the orphanage is always introducing new and wonderful things, ideas, activities and people to discover. I am just Moma Aziz, whose hair needs a good cut and who goes on incessantly about Ahmad Zahir’s songs, a love of dogh and distaste for shola. I am, in the end, forced to choose: either grow along with the children or give up. It may seem like a simple choice, growth over failure, but we must never underestimate the allure of giving up. I believe for anyone it can seem the most attractive of options. But as with that long foot race I ran three years ago, the Marine Corps Marathon, I’d sooner die than give up. A young man that I helped raise from the time he was two to the time he was sixteen recently told me about a latest lesson in psychotherapy as part of his masters program in San Francisco. “Since experience is so subjective,” he wrote, “tolerance of experience is the only constant which we can aspire towards when trying to become healthier.” I agree, but I contend that more is required than a sort of stoic equanimity, at least here in Kabul, in the orphanage, in my classroom. I cannot escape nor abandon relationship, even though it inherently involves risk, a risk that is exasperated if supposed authority is a part of the equation. My students excelled this week, and consequently I am a rejuvenated, happy teacher.

This week was also special in that I shared a video with all the girls, a wonderful celebration of Afghanistan, of women, an empowering performance by a group of dancers from the Bay Area that call themselves Ballet Afsaneh. This particular performance features some tremendous choreography that is based on Central Asian traditions, in particular the Afghan Attan. It also features extraordinary rabab and tabla that are the mainstay of Afghan music. All my students were transfixed by the performance, applauding and cheering in the end. They are very much familiar with this long suppressed expression of woman-power. When some of the dancers removed their chardas and started throwing their long hair around, I could sense a great celebratory yes! in the room. There are just a few among AFCECO’s girls who still initially react according to the wiring they received from their earliest years, where a girl who dances is considered only one step short of a prostitute. But when I called their bluff, motioned to shut down my computer, they stopped me outright. They could not resist the liberating energy of the dance and the heartbeat of freedom from bondage and dependence. Here is the link:

YouTube – Afghan Dance: Ballet Afsaneh

This week culminated with the first concert performances by all the children enrolled in the music program at The Afghanistan National Institute of Music (ANIM). AFCECO has found a most dear companion in ANIM. Its director and founder Ahmad Sarmast is an Afghan with kindred spirit to Andeisha’s in terms of sacrifice and purpose. He too was there at the concert, offering his support to the children. Numerous instruments have been donated to fill out our own blossoming music program at the Center, all thanks to him. Last night the New Recourse Center was vibrant as ever, filled with children, staff and guests. Our budding musicians and singers took the stage with their teachers, aplomb as any veteran and yet exquisitely bursting with joy in this the first performance of their lives. There was Nasira on cello doing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, and then Mosan on clarinet, plucking out the at once forlorn, timeless and celebratory notes of ai saraban. Gulalai on sitar, Negin on sarod, and Muzhgan on gheychak. Piano, hand drum, and corno were also represented. In all about 15 children performed. Their instructors gave short recitals of their own, from Bach to Bassa nova. The concert concluded with a twelve-minute raga by sarod master Irfan Muhammad Khan accompanied by tabla.

In the meantime AFCECO’s staff and students had prepared a festive banquet in the beautiful rose garden courtyard in front of the Center, so we all strolled out to enjoy the beginning of summer as I can’t imagine it ever being matched. It was a celebration of hard work, of a stick-to-it attitude in both children and the AFCECO staff, the music instructors, the cooks and guards and organizers who somehow manage in the midst of one of the most dysfunctional cities in the world to make magic happen, the magic and happiness in reaching and achieving. Culture is returning to Afghanistan. It is rising up from the dust of 30 long years of suppression no differently than the fact that longing itself cannot be smothered. I sat with a woman from Mexico who teaches drum, the sarad master Irfan, a pianist from Italy and beside me a new instructor from Jalalabad who had come to teach the children computer skills. Across the green the children ate their kabali polao and sipped their white dogh, and up above us the lights of the “Pink House” glistened deeper and brighter as dusk descended upon Kabul. The air was hot, dry and yet refreshing. A slight breeze kicked up, but not enough to stir the khawk from the streets. It was Thursday night, and the city was finally at rest.

As we loaded up the mini bus to go home, children and faculty and staff, and as we bumped through the empty streets under the still solstice feel of the night, I could not imagine a better place in the world to be. The struggle we read about is raging everywhere around us, it is almost impossible to imagine how it will ever end, the children I see every day eating from garbage, the widows sun-baked and begging in their burqas, the men without limbs, without pride, sitting down in the middle of the street with outstretched hands, and the thievery, the bombs, the raping and the starvation. There are an estimated 43.7 million refugees in the world, and one third of them are Afghans. The Goliath that is the human disaster of this country can drive anyone away, even the most powerful and prosperous nation in the history of civilization. But this week I saw a crack in the armor of all that hopelessness. I saw something so beautiful in the heart of Afghanistan that is the heart of Asia, land of the conqueror’s conqueror, Alexander, Babur, and Khan, of dreamers who dream of heaven and riches, people the likes of Rumi and Marco Polo, of the Zoroastrians, the first people to believe in only one God, of caravans and emeralds and pistachios and olives and orange blossoms and plums, of the solitary Pashtun shepherd and his flock, singing his song to the stars and their night, learning the language of the Universe that has no words, feigning there are no wolves but fear of wolves, believing instead that the sustenance of life is not the purging of death, but within the belief that each moment is eternity, that I cannot imagine failure, that time is always on the side of love, and through the children the path to wisdom and a higher existence as if Earth itself matters will become clear, and steadfast, and ever present as songbirds that do not fail the morning, and the wind of seasons changing that never fails the setting of the sun.

Hala giving Susan B. Anthony speech

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Future Leaders,

It is hard for me to believe we are coming to the end of our second Leadership Workshop. It has been my honor to stand here, to build upon all we have learned together. Each class only happens once. Take advantage of what you have.

We began this class talking about the power of words. We read a poem by Meena. The poem ends with these words:

Along with you I’ve stepped up to the path of my nation,

To break all these sufferings all these fetters of slavery,

Oh compatriot, Oh brother, I’m not what I was

I’m the woman who has awoken

I’ve found my path and will never return.

It is my hope that at the end of every Leadership Workshop we too have “awoken” in some small way. We’ve learned that words have the power to inform, educate, motivate, and inspire us to take action. We know that words also have the power to make us sheep, or worse, slaves. We have listened carefully to the words of George Orwell, to the dream of old Major that gave him the song, “Beasts of England”, a simple song that inspired all the animals to change their world. We listened to characters named Snowball and Napoleon at the same time that we learned about revolutionaries named Robespierre and Marat. We talked about revolution, and counter-revolution. We learned about something called the Rights of Man and how these words brought the end of tyranny. We also learned about something called propaganda, how it was used in the past and how it is used today, here in Afghanistan, how propaganda has become one of the most important weapons for all sides engaged in war, not only to fight a war but even more dangerously to lead people into war.

We learned how words can be changed from doing good to doing bad, how all of us are equal, while some can be more equal than others.

Then we learned about another kind of revolution, that of non-violence. We learned about Civil Disobedience and how the words of a man named Thoreau were read by a man named Gandhi and then by a man named Dr. Martin Luther King. We learned about a group of young students who put Civil Disobedience into action by getting on buses and taking “Freedom Rides” into the heart of segregation in the deep south of America. We saw in the beginning how alone the students were, abandoned even by the leaders of change, and we saw how their solidarity and the media gave them the momentum they needed to change the most powerful country in the world.

We didn’t stop there. We followed the words of Thoreau as they arrived in Egypt, how organizers of a peaceful revolution have pointed toward the Freedom Riders and Dr. King as guiding lights. We watched as these young people managed to remove a dictator named Mubarak. There was violence, but nothing compared to some of the other revolutions in this “Arab Spring”. We watch all of these revolutions now, and we see how so much of what we learned in this class plays out like a movie before our eyes.

And through it all we asked the question, “What about the women?” There was Marie Antoinette, and then there were the peasant women who stormed her palace. There was a woman named Charlotte who changed history by killing Marat. There were the women who took those Freedom Rides, and the women who have been martyred in revolutions from Iran to Libya. We were introduced to four women who each in her own way devoted her life to the inalienable rights of all people. First a slave named Sojourner Truth, then a woman born into privilege named Benazir Bhutto. We met a little woman named Suu Kye who was compelled to honor the death of her hero-father and turned a military coup upside down. Finally we listened to an American named Susan B. Anthony, how her words demanding the right to vote ring loud and clear even today, a hundred and forty years later.

We learned that not all revolutions must occur from the outside. We looked at the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. There in Article 7 we found a full endorsement of the International Declaration of Human Rights. We read all 30 Articles of that Declaration, and we could not believe our eyes and our ears. We discussed if it is possible to make such words come true in Afghanistan, to seat Judges and Members of Parliament who are scholars of Islamic Law that can point to these words and enforce them, who understand that the Islam of 1,400 years ago established that woman is equal to man, that she has the right to work, to independence, to choose a husband and own property. We discussed how these Islamic scholars would need to be joined by scholars of Civil Law who promote the ideas of secularism. But these new judges and MPs would have to battle contradictions within the very same Constitution, where it still says that two women are required to equal the testimony of one man.

At the beginning of this workshop I asked you what percent of your life you believe is destiny, and what percent is self determination, what percent of you is the Idealist, and what percent the Realist. Mostly you say you are realists, but none of you give destiny more than fifty percent. In fact most of you said that 70 to 90 percent of your life is self-determined. I watch you on the football field, I watch you in karate class, I watch you in the library, and I watch you in class. I believe you. The determination I see makes me proud to know you, and proud to have the chance to be your teacher.

As always, I am compelled to leave you with a story.

A long time ago I was in Scotland, a country north of England where my ancestors came from. I had just finished the last exam of my semester at Oxford. My professor had given me a 95%. That was the first time I ever scored such a high mark. I was very happy and proud, so I decided I would climb the highest mountain in Scotland, a mountain called Ben Nevis. I was only half way to the top of the mountain when a very old lady passed me on the trail. She had white hair and used a crooked walking stick. I could not keep up with her, though I tried very hard. An hour later I reached the top of Ben Nevis and the old lady was just getting ready to walk back down the mountain. I nodded to her, breathing heavily. She smiled. Then she pointed her stick at me, and this is what she said:

“No matter where you go in the world, there you are.”

That was all, and she disappeared down the trail and I never saw her again. I believe within these eleven words are many lessons, but most of all they tell us we can never run away from our weaknesses, nor are we ever without our strengths. The struggle to find your path is not unlike the struggle for freedom. It is a great risk to take, but the fact is you are already on your way. You are no longer the same students who first walked into this class, just as you are no longer the girls who first stepped into the parwarishga. The question of whether you are living your life or life is living you is not so important, once you find your path. Like in Meena’s poem there is a moment of great joy in finding this path, and without fear taking the next step, celebrating the realization that you will never return.

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Warning: It has been a few weeks and I’m thinking too much and I’m going to write a lot and I’m afraid it will be heavy on the editorial and opinion side and though I promise to include news about the children I can’t say how much or when in this expose I’ll get to it, so you can just skip it, or skip through if you are not inclined to hear lecturing volunteer excommunicated expatriated teacher voice mode.

Additionally, though I have never mentioned this because it went without saying, I should say it now: everything I write here is completely independent of the views and opinions of AFCECO and any of the people associated with that organization.

Here goes…

I watched two documentaries this week, one about the Freedom Riders of 1961 (PBS American Experience) and one about the life of Benazir Bhutto (Bhutto: you can’t murder a legacy). In one we have people working together collectively, and in the other we have an individual placed in a certain position, both effecting historic revolutionary waves. These are stories of non-violence as a means to bringing positive change, though they are stories dotted with violence heinous in its blindness of rage and ideology and hunger for power. These are well-researched documentaries. Though to a certain degree they can’t help showing their hands, the films make a good effort at integrity, careful to skirt over-glorification of their subjects. In Freedom Riders, the establishment we so love to revere: Kennedy and in particular Bobby, and Dr. M. L. King are shown to have been more wary and even obstructive than supportive, until eventually they were forced to act due to international attention and the inherent disgrace. In Bhutto we find a sharp albeit brief nod to the view that she was corrupt or worse, had a hand in the bloodshed as well as complacency in dealing with the rising Taliban (which, by the way, originated in Pakistan, not Kandahar as news agencies persist in misinforming). One common thread in both films that intrigues me is that these people at various times felt and in fact were terribly alone in their endeavor to combat institutionalized injustice. Relief for their efforts eventually came in the form of ensuing waves of Freedom Riders filling up the jails of Mississippi, and for Bhutto the thousands upon thousands of supporters who came out to cheer their hopeful champion of civilian rule and democracy. But at the end of both films what stuck with me was the depth of solitude these people must have felt in their lives in the moments when they had to accept death as a cost of going forward and then later on, the Riders going forward with their lives and Bhutto in exile while her notorious husband was in jail. Among all Bhutto’s reasons for going back the last time in 2007 I wonder if there was also a certain level of guilt for having survived, perhaps something similar to what combat veterans feel upon their return from war.

The latest full moon was one of those “bad moon a risin’” kind of moons that come once a year. You know it, the things out of kilter kind of moon. I’m relieved it has passed. Many students have battled a nasty cold that has made the rounds just as it does in school systems everywhere. I didn’t have a class where there wasn’t at least one student missing due to illness. Then Manizha broke a bone in her ankle playing football, which required the application of a small cast, and my knee got a bad twist that is rather painful. Most distressing is one of my best students who I’ve taught since I arrived in 2009 is fighting a degenerative eye disease. My understanding is that he may require a transplant of some sort, which of course is not available here. Meanwhile news is filtering in from all corners of Afghanistan, riots, more bombs, and building animosity toward occupation forces. The killing of O.B. Laden was initially welcomed, there was a kind of spontaneous impulse to think that this means some sort of shift will occur in the mission of NATO or reticence of Taliban, but after the revelry almost everyone underwent a soul search, a kind of deflation that comes with realizing that the death of Laden means nothing in regard to the war and the present government and the people who retain power and those who are well positioned to replace them.

During that last moon phase I observed a brief but notable depression pass across the brows of many Afghans, young and old. It comes and goes quickly; these are the least self-pitying people I’ve ever known. Still, from time to time I detect a despondency, a silence, a shrug of the shoulder, a particular reaction to wind slamming a window or door, some bodily indication of the cumulative effect of an entire population that has known war, oppression, poverty, drought, marginalization, racism, sickness, injury, rape and/or death from the moment of birth.

It was appropriate, I guess, that one of my classes was reading about the moon and that Maria wanted to borrow the telescope to look at that glowing, confounding satellite more intently. It seemed to me that damned moon was completely full three nights in a row.

The degree to which the children and adults in the orphanages maintain a sense of humor, appreciate what they have in life and steadfastly apply themselves to what they understand is a quiet, peaceful yet nonetheless revolutionary undertaking is astounding. It picks me up and puts me in my place day after day. This is particularly astounding given we live in a country where placing any amount of energy into hope has for so many for so long been as much a waste of time and even laughable as expecting the dust to leave Kabul for good. But it would be equally ridiculous to imagine the children and widows and all the struggling students and husbands have been miraculously inoculated from ever lapsing into despair. What they have seen and experienced is behind their eyes and though it has built unparalleled character it has also taken its toll. On top of this is a calling from which it is impossible to turn away. Every one of these children, even the youngest at some unconscious level understands what they are embarking upon; they are in a sense Freedom Riders in their own right, and quite possibly a few of them will one day even be thrust onto the national stage to stand up for human decency and the rights to food, shelter, health, education and equality under the law. I work primarily with the 12 to 19 year olds now, and I can see clearly their growing realization of not only the privilege they’ve enjoyed, but also the responsibility they more than anyone have placed upon their shoulders.

There is a moment when a Freedom Rider in the film is asked why he is getting on the bus, and he answers quite simply it is his responsibility as an American citizen aware of the injustice. I watched that video twice and nowhere did I detect bravado or a sense of heroics or even rebelliousness. In fact later when the National Guard came in to handle the buses, I think the Riders were more embarrassed than anything else. Of course the children of AFCECO are not so clearly targeting their lives on some specific mission, but the oldest ones do remind me of the faces, voices and convictions captured in the fifty-year old footage of those students journeying to Alabama and Mississippi. The Freedom Riders did not fit some movie script caricature. There is the naïveté, the youthful belief in ideals, and yes a certain amount of the lonesome dove, but there is also a unique overarching and almost serene maturity as illustrated by the “lesson” given Kennedy’s envoy over the phone by one of the 18 year-old organizers when the envoy was trying to get her to call the whole thing off. You’ll have to see the documentary to hear what this lesson was.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/freedomriders/

I admit I am hyper critical of my country, my culture, and I struggle with being judgmental, as it creates conflict in my heart. But entering my third year here in Kabul and being privy to a different Afghanistan than is reported to the world, I cannot help but see my country through a different lens. The degree to which idealism is infantilized and fear (and therefore denial) of failure permeates and pollutes imagination feeds the recklessness, consolidation of power, and old-world downward spiraling of what stands to be just another in a long line of has-been empires. I am of the opinion that poets are benevolent liars, that when we point in one direction we are actually trying to get people to move in another. If we point to the center we would like people to work their way to the edge, and when we point to the outer limits we want voyagers to find their way home. We have an inkling this is how we learn about truth. Unfortunately poetry has been marginalized as useless, and propaganda has been so refined and widespread as to seem as sure fired and acceptable a source of useful information as a weather report. When the machine starts malfunctioning, when we press the button for steak and get Mozart as in E.M. Forster’s story The Machine Stops, the machine somehow is able to spin these symptoms as profound examples of its supremacy and adaptability. I do not believe Forster’s story is so much a treatise on the dangers of technology as on the dangers of complacency. That is why it meant so much for me to see the PBS film about those Freedom Riders, to go back to 1961, my first year of life and see a small group of young people reject complacency to the point of risking and even giving up the golden opportunities laid before them, to instead “get on the bus”.

Contrary to my own rancor, from my experience speaking to several thousand Americans over the course of two winter tours, I firmly understand that we are not simple minded, and we do care. When China’s Vice-Premier Wang Qishan remarked about Americans being “simple”, he got away with the insult because, whether accurate or not plenty of people around the world see Americans similarly, both critically and admirably. Foreigners believe Americans are full of gumption. They believe we see the world in black and white more than shades of gray, and most importantly that we can “get things done”. But foreigners also see America as the juvenile that likes to get into trouble. We are the cowboys. Even though Americans are of every shade and every temperament, our persona as a collective people gets re-cast into this simplified caricature. It may be we have a weakness and fondness for this image. (Why the immensely popular re-visiting last year of True Grit of all things?) Well, who can blame us? It is the cowboy and the youthful upstart that are secretly envied by all. But Rooster Cogburn and James Dean were never equipped nor even wanted to be in charge, and being in charge is something America, since the collapse of the Soviet Union has been about as inept at acceding as that drunken loner on his horse or that boy with his fast car and his cigarettes rolled up into his T-shirt sleeve. We as a culture can ill-afford to cling to that identity, because it fogs our vision and distracts us from the increasing level of decay in our own heart.

We can look at a variety of people and their actions since 1990, but I’ll stay current. First case in point: our Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s response to Wang’s remark about Americans being “simple” people. According to CNN, when asked for a response, Geithner said, “You know, the thing about America and the world is that our role in the world, we took on this huge role in the world well ahead of the understanding of Americans about what was happening in the world. And that’s changing now. When I went to China to study Chinese 30 years ago, it was a unique, exceptional thing,” Geithner continued. “And now, of course, there’s tens of thousands of Americans sitting in China all across the United States. And you’re starting to see a much greater investment by Americans in understanding – not just China – but all the countries that are so important to our interests.”

Now, I know what he was getting at, and in many ways it is just about what I am saying here, but what on earth is cluttering his brain? There’s tens of thousands of Americans sitting in China all across the United States? Bad enough this and the rest of the quote is Sarah Palinesque, but what embarrasses me more are the first and last sentences. It hearkens back to the Wall Street criminals who were “too big to fail”. The first sentence insults our own people more than the Chinese dignitary did by insinuating we were incapable of fathoming the role our country was taking on in the world as it was happening, and are playing catch up. Even worse is the inherent hubris, the reveling once again in our role as “superpower” and in the last sentence revisiting that ever dangerous, selective and practically imperial euphemism: our interests. Along the way Geithner congratulated himself on having gone to China 30 years ago, by inference expressing how unique and exceptional he is.

Anybody can flub up a live interview, but not people of his caliber and standing in society. He could have predicted this exchange and come up with a groomed statement. Thinking in terms of having to stand up for America while moving forward with relations, why couldn’t he have said, “There no doubt continues to be a schism between western and eastern thought, and it goes both ways, but here in the United States we have enormous communities of people from China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand and other east Asian nations. These people not only connect America to millions of relatives back in their own homelands, but of course add to the collective spirit of America, and contribute vitally to our understanding of the world. Simultaneously, thousands of Americans actually work in China, are learning languages and doing business and teaching. If anything, perhaps it is our respective governments that are lagging behind our own people in terms of understanding one another and working toward a better future for all.”

If the King of England can overcome a speech impediment, Geithner (and the endless cast of characters before him) can learn how to do a live interview and think quickly and articulate those thoughts.

Another case in point: The U.S. government hit the debt ceiling. Secretary Geithner had the unenviable task of telling Congress in person. He said he would have to suspend investments in federal retirement funds until August in order to create room for the government to continue borrowing in the debt markets. He went on to urge Congress once again to raise our country’s legal borrowing limit soon “to protect the full faith and credit of the United States and avoid catastrophic economic consequences for citizens.” Does this worry anyone? I don’t know, but if I have a maxed out credit card and the company simply raises my limit, I am not inclined to change my behavior.

Case in point number three: President Obama and P.M. Cameron on stage assuring everyone in short the old world order is still in tact, that we in the west are not in decline. Their language reminded some observers of the good old days of Empire and Righteousness, while in the background the aged and beloved Monarch muddled about her pomp and ceremony, the Royal Wedding still glistening in our collective memory. Mixed in there was a co-opting of the “Arab Spring” as a shining example of our way of life and our love of freedom spreading democracy across the globe. In my limited understanding it was not American policy that sparked these revolutions, unless we acknowledge our involvement in supporting dictators such as Mubarak over the years. In fact I’ve read that it was pamphlets and books translating the words of Dr. Martin L. King and non-violent disobedience that spurred many of the organizers in Egypt and Tunisia, as well as video clips Arab students have hailed as inspirational, clips of among other things the Freedom Riders.

In studying once again the French Revolution, I am reminded that the greater the distance between the people and the ones who rule them, the greater the risk of not only the removal of those in power, but in extreme cases outright revolution. It worries me how much those in power today exhibit symptoms of being out of touch. It haunts me— a very early interview with Obama at the White House, his expressed and singular frustration being that he was unable to simply sit at a counter with someone in a café and listen to what is being said, that he has to depend upon a select group of individuals to keep his finger on the pulse. It is likewise here in Kabul, where literally those in power, westerners and Afghans alike, live in fortresses and armed, tinted windowed convoys between fortresses.

And so these are my musings and I reveal them here because ultimately I do care about America, and I care deeply about my country’s hand in the lives that have become my Afghan family. In contrast to these thoughts, the truth is my life has become very simple. In fact I feel as a person simpler and simpler. I am only sure of my commitment to the children of AFCECO. What I should be telling you is what I know, and what I know is this: I no longer bounce between orphanages, but merely commute to the New School in the morning, and commute back around 7pm. I play a game of chess on the computer, I think about tomorrow, I’m asleep by 9. I wake up at 4:00 and prepare for classes. Some days the progress is great, when one of the children suddenly realizes when to use present perfect tense, or past perfect continuous, or that an irregular verb has yet another spelling— eat, ate, eaten or see, saw, seen. Other days I am inclined to drop the lesson and simply have a conversation with the group of eight or so girls or boys in my class, because they crave it, because there is something on their minds, or simply because they just want to wander with their thoughts. Sometimes the talk is serious, sometimes light. We talk about proverbs such as, When elephants fight it is the grass that suffers or A friend is someone who remembers the song in your heart and can sing it back to you. We tell jokes. “A horse walks into a café and the waiter asks, ‘Why the long face?’” The Leadership girls thought this was absolutely hilarious. Once in a while the older children are sparked into a debate about their country, about the future, about Taliban and NATO and Karzai. Sometimes they are tired, they may be sick. They do not see family, if there is family at all, and they shudder when a pair of choppers fly low overhead. They have exams at school, exams at the New School, sports programs, special training in music, art and medicine, and they have very large households to manage. And…

They are happy.

I see them dance to a special tune on the radio. I see them tease one another and I revel in their freedom to sometimes tease me. There are moments I am weak. I do not know how or where to ask for help and I don’t want to anyway. But the children see right through me, right into my very essence. During that last bad moon I became a little reflective, about my own family and things they are going through, about my own life. I too felt a sudden deflation, maybe a weariness. One by one the girls of Leadership Workshop came up to me throughout that day. They don’t ever ask me if I am okay, they cut straight to the mark. “Why are you sad, Ian-jan?” It horrifies me to think that they might feel they must take care of me, on top of everything else. “I’m fine,” I lie, and then I tell the truth, and then we pick ourselves up, and soon we are all laughing again. One of the girls confided in me this week, that at times in her life she had contemplated “giving up”. These children are so resilient and so full of strength of character and so pure of spirit it is easy to forget they are children, that they have fears and heavy memories that most of us don’t carry until mid life. I worked for years with actively suicidal adolescents. In my view this girl was not intimating a suicidal impulse, and interestingly she was not remotely blaming the world. Instead, aside from that ever brief moment of Afghan exhaustion I mentioned earlier, I think it was her way of learning to emote in a land where women still by and large don’t have the luxury of contemplating emotions and giving others the chance to empathize with them. This week I asked my Leadership girls to give presentations on Civil Disobedience and Afghanistan. This girl who confided in me was chosen by her group to speak for them. She was professional, thorough, informational, logical, articulate and passionate. She spoke about women’s rights, and she did it all in English. Afterwards, quite a bit later she could no longer contain herself and whispered across the table to me. “How did I do?” she asked. “Ian-jan,” she added, “It is the first time I ever give speech by myself, before people.”

These are the moments that make up the bulk of my life. I don’t drive to visit friends or family, or go to the movies, or the bank, or even the grocery store. I don’t spend time on the phone, nor do I plan for my future. I just stand in front of these children six days a week, eleven different classes, and I try not to blow it. I fail, frequently. Except for the grammar lessons, I do my best to give each group something different from the others. They are all that special. Oftentimes I tell stories. Stories from my own life, or stories from history as if they too are a part of my life. As far back as I can remember I have wanted to become a storyteller. Perhaps selfishly most of the time this is what I do as a teacher. I am happy and fortunate to have stories to tell, and the only thing that gives me greater joy is to see my students develop into storytellers themselves.

“Yes,” I answered that brave student who stood up and gave her first and perhaps the most important speech of her life. “You did very, very well.”

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I honestly cannot remember if I ever posted this. To be sure, here it is:

Dear Volunteer (and for that matter anyone of thousands of westerners writing about Afghanistan),

Once I get you, the long term volunteer settled in, I purposely do not look over your shoulder.  Your classroom is yours. I merely check in to make sure you are doing ok, otherwise this experience is what you make of it. If I’ve already “vetted” you then you are good enough for me. The same is true about blog writing. It is your experience, as a volunteer, and you share it in your unique way. I do not in any way wish to censor a volunteer. That said, as a writer and as a westerner with my feet planted on the ground here in Afghanistan, and as a man who has made some mistakes and who loves these people as dearly as he loves life, there are some guidelines I’d like you to seriously consider before placing an entry in your blog, and think about before every public speaking event.

First, when you arrive, take your time. Don’t rush into reporting everything you see or hear. Let things sink in, and read, and learn. Get to know what it is you are writing about and (unavoidably because it is the nature of any writing) what it is you are judging. There is much to judge upon arrival. Everything may seem different, even cruel or ugly. Wait. Look inside as much as you are looking outside.

You are now a member of a family. Some time during your months here you will feel a shift from being a tourist to being a witness. A witness reports very differently than a tourist. Think about two things: how will this blog, available to the world, affect the audience and how will it affect the people you are writing about? What is your goal with this entry or that? The audience by and large already thinks of Afghanistan as the Land of the Barbarians. Even the language supports this- Taliban, drug lords, war lords, tribal this and tribal that.  If at any time what you write down merely feeds this mythology, I suggest you consider another way to tell your story. Most everyone in Afghanistan, even the bad guys, for thirty years have been victims of outsiders and the games they have played with people’s lives. Who really are the Barbarians? (Actually, Afghanistan’s entire history is dotted with invasion, from Alexander to Khan to Babur to Tamerlane on through the ages. Pakistan, Iran, Italy, U.S., England, Germany, Russia, China, India are all presently playing their hands here.)

Thinking about how your entry might affect AFCECO’s family, consider if you were writing about your own sister or mother. What would you say? What would you never say? This is where the tourist in you needs to sit down (we are all tourists to one degree or another). Afghans are especially private people. If something personal about them, their family gets broadcast to the world, they become more like objects that we saw on one of our travels, another exotic thing on the side of the road. I have made this mistake, and when one girl found out from her sponsor I had written about something too personal, she was shocked and needed a lot of explanation. I’d lost a little trust. Worse would be if a sponsor mentions something she read in your blog to her child that is sensitive and not for the children’s ears, that an uncle, for example, is aiming to sell his daughter. A devastating ripple would race through the orphanage.

Imagine your work is being read by a sponsor, a fundamentalist Moslem, Hillary Clinton, a blood red blue collar Republican from Texas and a San Francisco gay activist. And most of all, imagine your work is also being read by the people you are writing about.

The world thinks Afghanistan is a freak show. When the NY TImes did a huge article that focused solely on the trend of some families to dress their daughters up as boys because they don’t have a son was sensational. They couldn’t resist, it was too good a story. But what was the point? One little line in the middle was useful and meaningful: that a woman because of a college education was able to put all her abusers to rest because she became a wage earner and had respect. The rest of the lengthy piece merely added to the freak show.

I do not see a freak show in the streets of Kabul, or Jalalabad, or Mazar or Herat. I see people very much like us. The only significant difference is they are trying to create sanity after being squashed by 30 years of war. There is not a wide gap between us and the drug lord, or the woman hiding under her burqa. None of these things are “cultural”. They are scars and open wounds.

I leave you with this thought, and then the rest is in your hands:

Remember, less is more. Not every titillating story needs to be reported. The story, the real story, is what is in your own heart. Report that. Report the way one of your students gets all excited when there is an exam, as if it is the greatest gift, or the way you struggled trying to teach what the word “pride” means. Report a dream you had last night, or how you feel something changing, a strange shifting behind your eyes.

With sincere thanks, and utmost respect,

Ian

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About half-way to the New School there is a man with one leg who stands with his crutches in the same spot on the same street every day. I see him only on my morning commute. He does not appear to be begging because it is a poor spot to be doing so. He looks at the people passing, the cars. I looked into his eyes once. He seems to be a gentle, kind man. Not angry or forlorn. He has a salt and pepper beard, very deep-set eyes. He wears typical village garb, a black and white shawl over his shoulder, a turban. Pashtun. I wonder of course how he lost his leg. Afghans are still suffering from the Soviet war, on top of the current duel war. (I redefine the current conflicts thusly: NATO vs. Insurgency and Taliban vs. Northern Alliance Jihadi Warlords.) Personnel land mines littler the landscape, including the kind dropped from the sky like Biblical frogs. But there are a multitude of possible limb threatening events in Kabul alone. The man could have simply been caught between two cars. Sometimes when I go off the soccer field into the weeds to retrieve a stray ball I think about where I place my feet, which makes me think about destiny.

I asked the older boys the question I’d asked the girls, what percent of their lives they owe to destiny and what percent to self-determination. They answered unequivocally in favor of destiny, all eight of them 90% or above. This is paradoxical. Albeit some of the girls said fifty/fifty, they were primarily on the side of self-determination. How much this has to do with their unique AFCECO upbringing in a country where men rule like slave owners and two women are required as legal witnesses to equal one man’s testimony, I leave to your imagination. I can say that the boys are not simply espousing a religious fatalism that we in the west have come to stigmatize Moslems with, given the focus on vest bombers raised to believe they are doing God’s will on their way to Paradise. At least for the boys in my class, I think this nod toward destiny comes more from a place of humility. You can just sense it in the room. We’ve talked about religion before. To varying degrees, though they identify themselves to be Moslem, they are not ideologues. I do not think they would look at the one-legged man and say it was his destiny to be crippled.

Never before as an educator or a counselor have I been so inclined and able to compare boys and girls to such a degree. Having them in separate classes I do my best to be the same teacher, the same person. I’m sure I am different in certain ways, though I can’t pinpoint them exactly. Generally the girls are freer, the boys more disciplined, the girls exhibit more rounded wisdom, the boys an aura of service and purposefulness. When I set limits on the girls, they practically laugh, at first. The boys take me entirely seriously. The girls bond, the boys stand together but separately. In some ways I may as well be comparing south to north, tropical climate culture to cold. When we talk about equality, we know what we mean, not that we are all the same. What we mean is equal opportunity, equal rights, equal support. One group of girls is reading The Miracle Worker, the other group is reading Animal Farm. In one, a strange woman (culture) is gradually liberating a child and by proxy her entire family and perhaps an old social system from darkness, while in the other a society through revolution lifts the darkness but slowly allows the darkness to descend once again. In one there is apotheosis for all, in the other only a vicious cycle. I believe that the one is a model for just how the empowerment of women could and would break some of these vicious cycles of human history, and the latter is sadly still a relevant model for how things have continued in our patriarchal world. Though Orwell’s fable was specifically directed toward a fascist realm in the early 1940s and Stalin’s Soviet Union, we need not look far from our own back yard to find all the familiar characters, Napoleon and his Squealer, the revisionists and propagandists and the various methods of obtaining and retaining power at the expense of original ideals. When I go to class, when I converse with the girls and then the boys, back and forth over and over again, I begin to see a light, a balance that can exist even though they are artificially seperated. The more months I spend with AFCECO, the more I believe that the path to progress for civilization depends not so much on faith, on philosophical innovations, on invention and ideals, but on something so entirely basic it passes through the discerning sieve of academia, the media and the lawmakers without nary a serious and definitive nod: an end to the dominance by men, equality for women, and an ennoblement of women as go-to people for the affairs of civilized society.

Ok, here’s a highfalutin statement almost as bombastic as Tolstoy proclaiming the righteousness of celibacy after having 13 children: Freud needs to be put to rest. With almost seven billion people in the world and diminishing resources we (in particular men) as sentient beings, if that is indeed what we are, must transcend procreation and sexuality as the primary forces in the categories of survival, pleasure and self-worth. They will be there, they will always be there, but the liberation I experience in both boys and girls in my classes has to be considered as some sort of barometer. It is not as if they are suppressed and this separation results in their inability to work together. They are together on committees, in organizing events, in extracurriculars, and as I watch their mentors, college students who have graduated from this temporary cloistering, both young men and women working together, I see a mutual respect and collective spirit that is refreshing.

Even as I try to be decisive I don’t know what I believe. I think both groups would just as soon prefer to have co-educational classrooms. There is a stigma attached to separation that carries with it the aura of inequality on one level or another, that girls are somehow “different” and therefore should be treated differently. I can only say that from my perspective, I simply don’t see things so clear cut as I used to.

When I watch the girls compete on the soccer field, I see the same determination, the same ability to work as a team, the same rejoicing in victory and the same desire to get up off the grass and start again. When I see the boys dancing together at a wedding, holding hands, huddling around one another to tell secret stories I do not see them as weak. These juxtapositions dominate our discourse, still, about gender. I’m talking about something else, I hope. I remember Mahbooba, the first month I lived in Mehan orphanage, waiting with me to get a plate of shola for dinner. I waved her on, “You go first,” I said. She looked at me with such scorn. Why? she asked. Do you think I am so weak that I must be fed before you? My very own chivalry had been blown to pieces. I look around Kabul and I see men without legs, and women begging for food. I see children, girls as much as boys scampering through traffic like so many little blood cells swimming through arteries, looking for oxygen. War and the endless cycle of patriarchal decision making has yet to prove to this teacher the two can pave the way for a promised land. I would like to see what the Annie Sullivan’s of the world might make of it, if given their chance.

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