Hope for Afghan Children

In Leadership Workshop this week we discussed two forces that direct our lives, destiny (in which I include genetics, God’s design, environmental factors, dumb luck, what-have-you) and self-determination. We talked about the concept of a Personal Calling, and how we feel “alive”, so to speak, when those two forces seem to be working in balance with one another. This is not to be equated with happiness or contentment, per se, but to be a part of the struggle that is life in all its multiplicity. I asked the girls what percent of their lives they think is governed by these two forces. Five of them said 50 / 50. Others ranged around 25% destiny and 75% self-determination. None of the fourteen students gave destiny the upper hand. This is fairly dramatic, given the society they come from where girls are still considered exactly half the value of boys and lives for most girls are determined well before they even have a dream of their own. We went on to discuss Realism and Idealism, Materialism and Dualism. Most of the girls are very pragmatic, leaning well toward Realism, but when it came to discussing if there is a division between thought and the material world, the stepping-stone toward the concept of the soul, they land on the side of Dualism. There are a number of reasons I begin this year’s workshop with philosophical discourse. In their minds has blossomed the notion they can and will be leaders of one sort or another in Afghan society, to think of adding stages to their lives between little girl and old woman, as Maria once discussed when reviewing Shakespeare. I cannot stress deeply enough the unique and vital commitment they and a whole swath of young Afghans from 14 to 34 years of age have made toward making a better future not for themselves so much, but for their people. I hope to nurture the strength of their own developing convictions, as well as to reinforce the understanding that the more they strengthen themselves, the more they can help. Another reason for all this philosophy is to get them thinking about how to judge events as well as individual actions, how not to be swept up into propagandistic black and white discourse too easily. Notions of revolution come quickly in this part of the world. From Zahir Shaw to Daud and the Saur revolution to the Soviet puppets, then the Jahadis to Taliban to the present decade drawing closer to more rebellion, it is hard to conceive there is anything else in the world besides revolution. Now with the uprising in Egypt, its relative non-violent overthrow of a dynasty, and various other more bloody revolutions going on in North Africa and the Middle East, it seems a good time to really investigate people power, its successes and failures, the factors that lead up to it and the potential fallout.

The class has begun reading Animal Farm. Major has given his famous speech and then passed away. The Animals have taken the farm. Napoleon is “handling” the milk stores, and so we have our foiler on the inside. Simultaneously we are viewing a documentary stage by stage, discussing it along the way as it walks us through the French Revolution. When Internet is up the girls will do progress reports on the happenings in Egypt and Libya and compare the two. The first quiz went fairly well. Ten students ranged from 85% to 100%, four failed. I have to give those four some extra support because their English skills are not even with the other ten. This is a difficult class, no doubt about it. It is not a language class, per se. I have them do some assignments in work groups to facilitate supporting one another rather than just competing. They have extremely full schedules, with football or karate three days a week, school in the mornings, and for some a medical class as well. Some teach literacy to staff, some do chores for AFCECO, and then there is running their hostel. (We don’t call the older girls’ and boys’ homes orphanages.) I monitor their temperaments, and they tell me how they feel most of the time. They are excited, energetic, ambitious, and otherwise up for the challenges set before them. Days have many hours here, they don’t get filled with filler, and somehow everything is connected to everything else, rather than a compartmentalized, fragmented and solitary experience. This has to do, I think, with the home-school atmosphere, the six or so adults who support them every day who are simply a part of their family, not officials or teachers, and of course they have one another every step of the way, in each environment.

I wondered about our experiment, how Sahar, Manizha and Pashtana would do returning to the orphanage, school and the very different life here where they are not the center of the universe. I worried a little, would they become morose, jaded, defeated, or conversely over confident, superior, or would they simply be confused and frozen in time? Nothing of the kind. They are thriving, enthusiastic, and even more determined than ever. Even though Pashtana and Sahar know they are not competing for a spot to go to America, they are 100% engaged with Leadership Workshop and both aced their first quiz. Manizha, though thrust into a kind of nether land not knowing her immediate future, faced it all bravely. Now she is doing vital work for AFCECO, and filling those shoes like a full member of staff. She is also going to attend Kardan Institute, beginning in May. She will study law. On top of everything she spends time with me almost every day reading a book together. All three are competing fearlessly and with great determination in football. What has come is maturity, but more than anything a level of confidence based more on personal experience than on faith.

I have not begun my language classes yet, but I believe we will be fully up and running at the “Pink House” by May 1^st. I miss all my students terribly and cannot wait to begin. I will be teaching exclusively in the new center. No more the mobile education bus, like a house calling doctor travelling with his computer, his cittern, his books and markers and extension cord. Every year is new, and a part of me is nostalgic as I venture forth just as I was nostalgic for living inside Mehan, for the open floor, no seats or desks, only the brand new three foot white board, just the teacher, the marker and the student. Now I am nostalgic for visiting each orphanage and setting up class, for seeing all the staff twice or three times a week, seeing how each orphanage garden grows. But with the new school I can be more thorough, more efficient, and my classes more effective. Here, there really is no time wasted.

I think of time a lot. This more than anything may be the key issue as to why the West frequently bungles its efforts in the East. The things we want to do quickly might do well to be approached gradually, patiently, persistently and the things that need and can be done immediately we foul up with delays, obstacles, scrambled priorities or plain disinterest. If we look at certain successful efforts in Afghanistan, we see that investment in people was immediately implemented, in basements, in courtyards, secretly or under cover of some other activity. Why wait? Let’s get a teacher in a room with students, no matter if they are all cross-legged on the floor with a scrap piece of paper and a blunt pencil. Eventually will come the chair, the table, the computer, the projector, the building, the grounds, the bus. By the time those other things are in place there will be teachers to utilize them. Right now we have at least five of the orphans teaching literacy to the widows who help keep the orphanages afloat. The shared value, the reciprocity is extraordinary. This could never happen if AFCECO waited around to build a school first. And as we have seen from recent news events, for a variety of reasons building schools does not necessarily translate into education being carried through. This is not some unique concept in history, we only need look at the American story, specifically the rights of certain minorities to gain access to education. I’m an amateur about history, but I can’t imagine building a hundred schools for slaves in the south in 1866 would have guaranteed their full enrollment.

Slaves were legally denied the foundation of European education–the knowledge to read and write. Nonetheless, thousands of slaves acquired those skills, usually through voluntary or unintentional help from their young masters and mistresses as they were learning their lessons. (Urban slaves like Frederick Douglass sometimes bribed their white playmates or coworkers to teach them.) Literate slaves then tried to pass on their knowledge to others.

This is not to say building schools is a pointless or frivolous objective. I merely wish to illuminate a different concept of time frames and priorities and expectations, what can be done prudently and steadfastly, what can be done immediately and getting on with both simultaneously. Perhaps this is why I begin by discussing the dance between destiny and self-determination. Certainly there must be the sacrificial attempt to break walls down, rather than wait for them to erode. Hence we come to great acts of protest, defiance and even revolution. Looking closely at any of a wide variety of such acts through history seems worthwhile. I wonder sometimes if revolution is more the result of destiny than self-determination, or perhaps though it is spawned from one, it is then consumed by the other.

Soon I myself will be utterly consumed with teaching five or six classes a day six days a week and you won’t have to muddle through my opinions. I will have only to report about the children and the gifts they bring to every interaction.

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15 April

The second session of Leadership Workshop begins tomorrow. We are moving our classes into a new facility near to the orphanages in Khoshal Khan Meena. The house is beautiful, its grounds full of grape arbors, fruit trees and roses and sabza (grass). Here we will have all my language courses, fine art, ballet, music, computer and drama. We will host all our presentations, movie nights and conferences there. As you walk in you see a large library / resource room where students will work when they are not in class. The school is ready to be filled with students. Desks, conference tables, shelves, everything is in place. Jamshid and I brought the first two items to adorn the library. He brought a five-foot poster of Charlie Chaplin’s famous letter to his daughter, translated into Persian, and I brought my spinning globe.

Leadership Workshop will have all the same girls as last year with a few changes. Maria is back, and we will be minus Manizha (she’s off to college to study law, as well as working in the office for AFCECO) and plus Zainab. The 14 students are: Yasamin, Shagofa, Zainab, Sosan, Hala, Sediqa, Neda, Lida, Mursal, Maria, Sitiza, Farida, Pashtana, and Sahar. I was a little worried when I first engaged with them upon my return. It was a kind of jolt for them to hear and speak English after three months hiatus. I am pleased to say they are recovering most of what they learned. Neda came to me wanting to confess something, and I deciphered through her code she was unsure about her ability to take the course. I believe she wanted to know I want her in class. I gave her a knuckle nookie on the top of her head, then spun her around, shook her gently and then asked her if she felt better. Neda was among my very first students exactly two years ago. She has always been a part of every activity I’ve offered. She asks me more questions than all the others combined. This I have come to adore about her. After dealing with Neda’s lack of confidence the girl I sponsor (along with my father and sister) Farida asked if I’d remembered to bring a photo she wanted of last year’s class on graduation day. There they are holding their certificates. I watched as Farida shared the photo with the other girls. They huddled around it and seemed to be transfixed by the visible proof of where they had been while contemplating where they are now.

We have struggled for some weeks to come up with a name, something flexible enough to still be meaningful as the program evolves. We landed upon calling it the New School, owing its appellation to the renowned program in New York City with its mission statement that in many ways mirrors our own. Everything about our approach to raising and educating orphan children of Afghanistan is new. We ascribe to the notion that to lift this country out of its thirty-year morass of war, poverty, extreme fundamentalist doctrines and enflamed tribal differences will require a new generation of Afghans who are empowered through a worldly education to make real and lasting change in their world. The fact that our students are orphans, underprivileged, and even victims speaks to the innovation of not only “saving” children, but transforming a national tragedy into a national strength. The fact that these children represent all of Afghanistan from every racial and linguistic corner speaks to the role diversity plays in the philosophy of “new”. The New School lays a foundation to dramatically augment the unsubstantial public program, and in ensuing years evolve into a fully accredited primary and secondary school program. It does not seek to be exclusive, but rather inclusive, to interact with the greater Afghan society from Kabul to Herat to Jalalabad, from remote Nuristani villages to farms in Farah Province. Finally, the New School is dedicated to enrollment equal part girls to boys, with the understanding that the future of Afghanistan inherently depends upon the liberation of its girls and women from the chains of oppression and illiteracy.

My unofficial name for the school is The Pink House. This may or may not stand the test of time, as we are only leased from one year to the next. But I like the honesty of it. Can’t be a more honest color. It is what it is, right there out in the open. There is a nice restaurant in Savannah, Georgia by that name, but that’s the only place I’ve seen it before. We are all thoroughly thankful to USAID and their partner the Asia Foundation for making this possible.

I’ve decided to begin this year’s Leadership Workshop with a curriculum focused on the power of the word. There once was a strong tradition in education here to combine didactic learning with the practical, experiential and philosophical. This is what I intend to do. Our first subject will be “Propaganda”, and our first reading will be Karzai’s acceptance speech at his second inauguration. We will discuss how Taliban uses propaganda, NATO, bin Laden, and various individual leaders in the region, from Petraeus to Ahkmadinejad and everyone in between. We will look at propaganda of World War II, and the power also of images. We are going to read Orwell’s Animal Farm. I believe I first read it when I was 18, and it led to a journey into a great cannon of books illustrating the paradoxical nature of human endeavors to better ourselves. As I did last year, every third class I will invite a guest lecturer to spend an hour or two on a subject of their choice. These mostly should be Afghans who are leaders in their greater community.

This spring I will have 71 language students, boys and girls, plus drama for a group of younger children. There are three volunteers scheduled to teach for a few months this quarter. They will work with the younger children of Sitara I and Sitara II as well as the youngest girls at Mehan. We have a Fine Arts instructor already moving ahead with his classes. Ballet is already happening too. Soon we will install the computers and get all our programs up and running. This project also includes the orphanages in Jalalabad and Herat, outfitting them with gyms and computer labs.

It is Juma, a storm outside, the river full, the streets empty and once again there’s a song playing in my room. It is that piano dancing with a cello, rising and falling together, like the outside strands of a double helix that never touch. This song, Spiegel im Spiegel (mirror in the mirror) naturally conjures up a sentimental reflection upon life, particularly the sun going down, but I get more strength from it then sadness. The composer, Arvo Pärt is Estonian, who lived under Soviet rule and fled with his family in 1980. Another orphan.

The reason I get strength from this music is because I believe that the time of deepest loss, of hardest realization, of biggest transition is the most exciting time of all. Failure is a time when change can actually occur. This is what I believe Coelho meant in his philosophical novel The Alchemist by a personal calling. It is not a goal but a process by which our fate (what we are borne to) and our will are working in concert with one another to create something new, much like Pärt’s meditative tune. I speak of these things often because I believe there is today a great erasure of failure from our nomenclature. Just listen to any of various testimonies before Congress by experts and witnesses and perpetrators on a slew of subjects from Enron to Wall Street to oil platforms to hurricane relief to Afghanstan. You would imagine, listening to every last shred of testimony there was a complete absence of failure. Even when talking about actual failure it gets re-cast as something else. By proxy, with a great phobia of admitting failure comes the distrust of imagination, and a tendency to dig deeper holes more impossible to climb out of. As the big “election” starts winding up its gears for 2012, there will be a lot of accusations of failure, but no admission and I fear little imagination as to the course to take in Afghanistan. This makes me doubly lucky to have fallen in with these Afghans who, as the line goes in the film Shawshank Redemption, are “…getting on with the business of living.”

The Pink House

First class in the New School

Two of AFCECO born children, Marwa and Damoon in lawn at the Pink House

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What do we mean when we say the word orphan?

UNICEF estimates that worldwide there are 210,000,000 orphans. What is more sobering is that according to government and private listings, 90% of children deemed as orphans actually have one or both parents living. It is impossible to confirm or deny these numbers, just as it would be perilous to account for the number of people killed in war. At the very least, these numbers suggest that the problem of being an orphan goes far beyond our traditional Oliver pickpocketting his way through the streets of 19^th Century London. Though we can debate the meaning of the word, create new classifications or dispute causes and responsibilities, we can say with a fair amount of certainty that after China, India, the U.S. and Indonesia the fifth most populace nation in the world has no name, is without boundaries, and sings no anthem. Its citizenry, though, is easily recognized. We see them everywhere, mostly in city streets when we are stuck in traffic or waiting for a light to turn green. They approach our driver’s side window with an outstretched hand, palm facing the sky, a ludicrous assemblage of rags for clothes. He might offer to wipe your windshield, or blow a wisp of healing incense into your car, or she may have a baby in her arms, its eyes plucked out. If they could vote, if they had purchasing power, if they had arms they would have a seat at every table. Instead for the most part they are pitied and then forgotten, put into holding tanks, or outright ignored. But don’t underestimate them; they are indeed very powerful, more powerful than military and wealth. They are the abandoned, vulnerable and homeless children of the world, and if we are not careful, without warning they will take our future away.

Not all orphans are unfortunate. Thousands are raised in progressive orphanages in much the same way as a family would. In fact taken as a whole a sizeable amount of orphans are better raised than children of a healthy nuclear family. There are those children who were luckily abandoned, plucked from the trajectory of a stunted life and given new horizons. Going by the broader understanding of orphans as I’ve defined above, look at some of the famous orphans in history and our understanding is further hued: Alexander Hamilton, Ingrid Bergman, Bessie Smith, Aristotle, J.S. Bach, Leo Tolstoy, Herbert Hoover, Nelson Mandela, Steve Jobs, Louis Armstrong, Marylin Monroe, John Lennon, Ella Fitzgerald, William Wordsworth and John Keats were all in our broadened sense of the word, orphans. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama grew up in the orphan’s shadow. Moses himself was an orphan.

Once we begin to debate the condition of orphandom, we soon find ourselves wrestling among philosophers and ethereal and often volatile notions of human existence. Who raises a child? Who is responsible for a child’s welfare? Do we own our children? Does it take a village to raise a child? Can two people of the same gender raise a child? Should everyone have the right to have children? Should poverty stricken people be discouraged from having six, nine, twelve children? Should prisoners be allowed to have and keep children? People with defective chromosomes, diseases? What human rights do children have? Does a child have the right not to be born into misery? Is every life sacred? If so, then who provides for the orphan? If we are not careful, no matter what our beliefs we may find ourselves slipping down the slope of social engineering or even fascism, but equally we can find ourselves placing children at the mercy of negligence and cruelty. This is why for the most part we wish the problem of orphans away, it touches upon too many divergent beliefs, and fingers are pointed in every direction.

So instead of choosing sides and making pronouncements and accusations, instead or narrowing the field in an attempt to understand it, I take a step back. Now I find myself wondering if orphans even exist, or rather if perhaps we are all, by virtue of being born, embarking upon the orphan’s journey. What is an American, after all? From the outcast pilgrims to enslaved West Africans to famine burdened Irish to persecuted Jews to poverty stricken Mexicans to war weary Afghans to political refugees from China and every other displaced citizenry in the world, who in America can claim not to be in a manner of speaking orphaned? Even Native Americans are orphans in their own land, sequestered on reservations or outcasts among the conquering culture.

From here the field broadens even more. There are 43.3 million refugees in the world. Are they not in some fashion orphans? What about victims of racism, those who live with prejudice, minorities, handicapped, gays, elderly, or those who isolate themselves from others, living at the end of their cul de sac or behind the walls of their compound, their gated community, their church or island bungalow or forest retreat. And now you see the path is cleared for the rest of us, sinners and wayfarers, divorced and rejected, excommunicated and fired, those facing death and those searching for their own meaning in life. Who is immunized from the plight of the orphan? Who is not driven by the desire always to know what cannot be known, to reclaim what can never be found?

I have lived with orphans. Real ones in Afghanistan, the ancient crossroads or “heart” of Asia, home to bloodlines from Macedonia to Shanghai, from Moscow to New Delhi. I lived in a Kabul orphanage with seventy girls whose ages ranged between 5 and 16, a veritable melting pot, Pashtun and Hazara, Tajik and Uzbek, Nuristani and Kuchi and Kabuli. Their stories are wide and varied. They are often full of heartache but also a prevailing determination. I cooked with them, cleaned laundry with them, watched television with them. I taught them English, drama, photography, but also how to spit watermelon seeds, how to have a proper water fight on a blazing hot summer day. There were boys, too, in another orphanage just down the road. For two years I was a part of their family. Now I am back again and sometimes I wonder if I will ever leave. As my relationship with them deepens, so too does my awareness of their strength of character. What it takes to be who they are I can never know, but something alchemic is occurring. If you have ever known an orphan you might know what I mean. Ask the child about home and it seems never to be a place she has been, nor even where she is, but rather where she is going, a constantly changing definition. It may not even be an actual place; it could be an idea. Home for the orphan is, though he may not articulate it, the world. The result of spending a lengthy amount of time with an orphan results in a transference that occurs without our even knowing it, but sure enough you yourself begin to feel like an orphan, and the orphan, skipping away to the next horizon has somehow found the will to go on.

In this frame of mind I think about all the orphans I have known. From Snake Alley in Manila to a Zen garden in Kyoto to a subway in San Francisco, from a cabin on an island in Alaska to a lonesome stretch of highway in Oregon to a tar factory in New England, and from the top of a pyramid in Egypt to an underground strip joint in St. Petersburg to a Parwarishga full of children who are victims of war in Afghanistan I have encountered orphans of every fiber, every culture, every age. Some I have known for only one evening, others I knew for many years, before they disappeared, before they moved into some other future, before they left for home. Their stories are not all so easy to tell, there is pain, a lot of it, and there is embarrassment and shame. There are orphans who lost their way; some became even dangerous. Others were angels who seemed to be half in this world, half in the next. All of them reflect upon me, and I carry them at the end of a stick like an ever-growing bindle full of sorrow and love as I wander toward my own twilight years, every step one step closer to accepting that perhaps I too am one of them.

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A brisk and cold breeze from the east washes away the clouds and their rain from the previous four days, and the mountains to the northwest stand clean, cloaked in winter white as sentries to a new year in Kabul, Afghanistan. It is Jumma, the streets are empty. Kabul River is running, albeit brown and strewn with litter. Everything is different, and everything is the same.

I have sought adventure all my life. When I was a boy it was deep in the forest, most often alone, pretending I was Daniel Boone or a soldier on reconnaissance. Later it was testing mortality, jumping from bridges into shallow rivers, driving fast, seeking new ways to feel. This brought me to the brink of complete disaster before I was even 18 years old, either through drugs or crime or alcohol. I lowered two friends into their graves, I stood behind bars shivering for the shame I had bestowed upon my ever-loving parents. I never broke a bone, not a stitch sewn, not a disease until much later, after such visceral smacks against life and society subsided.

How many disasters I averted unknowingly I can’t say. There are plenty enough I know about. I wonder how it was the young athletic woman following my lead and not I who, after climbing to the top of a great pyramid of Giza fell to her death. I think of the pickup truck full of armed and angry separatists in Mexico who gave up their search for me under the moonlight by the side of the road, the drunk who picked me up hitching rides in northern California who for some reason changed his mind, turned around on the dead end road he’d at first thought would be a good place to use the gun under his seat, or the approaching humpback whale that decided at the last second to dip beneath my skiff, sparing me the inhospitable Alaska waters. There are other places, St. Petersburg, Russia where the white night left me helpless in an alley with three thugs who scattered at the arrival of a menacing dog, or three quarters of the way up a Colorado cliff I could no longer climb, nor descend. I’ve fallen off the back of a moving van and by happenstance became aware of my tuberculosis in time to treat it. Here I begin my third year in Afghanistan, and all I have to bemoan is the periodic stomachache.

I don’t believe in knocking on wood, so I won’t start here. I mention these things because if you who read this and perhaps all my entries since April of 2009 are going to continue on this journey you should know more about who this character is that you are trusting at some level to tell you the truth. Of all the people who showered me with good tidings, tears of appreciation, and accolades as I made my way around the country giving talks this winter only one person landed upon the truth. It came at the very end of the journey. A librarian who had worked with one of the girls hugged me before saying goodbye and whispered one sentence into my ear. “You’re a lucky man,” she said.

The girls and I are home, now. We have been quickly absorbed into the collective life of the orphanage. Yet there are so many images so close to the surface. There was the time I found the three of them asleep together in one twin sized bed. I’ll never forget their faces upon our reunion inside the dreaded Dubai airport, nor their cheering for the Lion King fifth row center, or their depth of humility accepting a spontaneous and unprompted standing ovation by 450 middle school children whose mothers and fathers had been deployed to Afghanistan. There were pillow fights in hotel rooms, vicious rounds of card games, and times we held onto one another for strength and unity and celebration, a knotted circle of one singular hug, the four of us just before leaving Afghanistan at dusk in mid December, or at the feet of the Statue of Liberty, or one last time less than a week ago in Kabul airport, so thrilled to be back yet reveling in this long and life changing dream that was America, a dream none of us would ever be able to fully describe.

And yet I cannot safely say who it was more affected these past three and a half months, the girls or the thousands of people they touched, in homes, families, universities, churches, retirement communities, radio stations, middle and high schools, boardrooms, offices, newspapers, and even restaurants. It is, I think, a tossup. On a pure material level they raised almost $17,000 and recruited over 30 new sponsors of children and re-energized dozens of existing sponsors. On an emotional level there are an enormous number of hearts out there that have been deepened and empowered. People at MIT, Yale, UC Berkeley, CIIS, Stanford, West Point, Maryland, SUNY Albany and St. John’s universities have been touched. People at Google and Goldman Sachs have been touched. Most of all, three host families and all their relatives and friends have been profoundly joined in a great expansion of love and understanding and hope. They all carry the gift of these children’s spirits into the great American landscape and those spirits radiate in every corner, from New England to Colorado to Washington State to Washington D.C. to Florida, California, Louisiana, Maryland, New Mexico and New York. As for the girls, their enrichment is written in their eyes and upon their voices. They have already begun to share this enrichment with the other orphans, and have been greeted with openness and joy. The American experience belongs to all. We four are back to school, back to our routine. We are once again a part of the great big family that is AFCECO. Though we are no longer the center of the universe, though there will be some time of difficult transition, I can speak for the girls in saying we feel a greater sense of purpose when we find ourselves crammed into a mini van, off to soccer practice with twenty other less fortunate girls who radiate that same love, trust and humility toward us as Pashtana, Manizha and Sahar radiated for the Americans they met.

I come away from this winter’s experience with a great love and respect for human beings, exponentially more so than for their institutions. I leave you with four photos: the girls holding hands just before lifting off from Kabul; on the beach the first day in America; giving a presentation in D.C.; and on the ferry to Liberty Island. I also leave you with the poem the girls and their classmates learned on the first day of Leadership Workshop back in September 2010, before anyone knew what was to be their fate.

Each day in life is training, training for myself. Though failure is possible, living each moment, equal to anyone, ready for everything, I am alive, I am this moment, my future is here and now.

Thank you, for myself and for the three sitaras, all of you who gave so freely and unconditionally to the cause of believing in love and the human spirit.

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Imagine if you had never slept in a room by yourself, not in your entire life. The implication of this is one of many unexpected discoveries I have made since returning to the U.S. with “the girls” (as we all seem to have decided upon for reference). Placing them with their respective host families the first thing we noticed is the light on in the bedroom all night. The girls are, after all, orphans. They sleep in rooms full of bunk beds. They can sleep through noise and light with twenty other girls, but silence and alone? They already have experienced a multitude of phenomena that are hard to imagine encountering for the first time at the age of 16 let alone coming from the orphanages in Kabul. Flying on a plane, dipping a hand into the ocean, watching a big screen movie, sledding, a chocolate factory, pizza restaurant, a freeway and even a hot tub. How many more amazing experiences will they have in their three-month tour of America? Though as their teacher I am eager for them to grow, to learn and improve their English skills, I keep circling around to the notion of what the girls teach us about ourselves, about the world, and about humanity in general.

My heart is full and my heart aches. I feel neither American nor Afghan. For sixteen days I will be only responsible from a distance as the host families take the helm. Then I begin a speaking and fundraising tour. Each time I will “borrow” one or two of the girls to be a part of my presentation. I am already dying to see them again. I am happy while caring for the children, teaching them, and speaking to the world about their lives and how they have changed me and opened my eyes to so many things. I have never known such love. Instead for now I must sit still at a table, for the first time in a very long time, without responsibility, without children around me, safe from the potential dangers of Kabul. I am wondering what it is that awaits me as I proceed. I begin to worry about practical things we all must worry about. Will my health stay with me, what do I do to make money for my future, as what savings I have dwindles how will I care for myself in five years, in ten? I do not relish this stillness, and yet I know I must engage with it, embrace it and use this time to fill my mind and body with sustenance for the year to come. When we return to Kabul I must hit the ground with my wheels turning. There will be a new leadership class, and I have a dramatist coming to assist me in training my young actors, and songs to learn and plans in the making to develop our own school. And then of course there are all the older boys and girls I must teach. I want them to experience continuity, I know how each of them learns, and they know how I teach.

I am not being still…

I am afraid. I may have been afraid for many months but would not allow myself to feel it. Afraid for myself, but mostly for the children. The world is so fragile, will there be support? Will their blessed orphanage one day be shut down, will their families pull them away, will money run out or some warlord destroy us? So many bad things can happen, and yet AFCECO grows. I share with you these ramblings of insecurity because I have from the beginning, from the very first entry in April of 2009 stood by one rule: I must try to be as honest and open as any human can. The map of my journey with the orphans of AFCECO and their beloved leaders is spontaneously composed from week to week, at times minute to minute. There are no board meetings, power point presentations, guidelines or outlines. No test runs. When something needs to be done, it is done. So it is the western part of my nature, to plan ahead, to organize my future in a way so as to reduce the possibility of failure that has been weeded out of me. But the moment I stepped foot on my homeland that nature bled back into me, filling me not with understanding but confusion. This is what we call culture shock.

Or is this what it feels like to suddenly be in a room alone?

Of course I am not alone. The house if full. Beautiful, heartening friends and family stand beside me every step of the way. And there is my Afghan family, as big as the sun and as luminescent as the moon. When they name their orphanages after celestial bodies like Spogmay and Sitara they know of what they speak.

Sometimes when I close my eyes an image comes back to me, the night of Marwa’s 3^rd birthday party at Mehan orphanage. We’d all stayed up too late. Almost midnight, which was dangerous given the neighbors and conservative temperaments. But the joy of that evening could not be diminished. Music, even the Beatles, dancing and candles and confetti and more dancing. When the time came I was given one of the children’s rooms to sleep in. Flowers were left on my pillow. It was hot; a dozen or so of the girls escorted me up the stairs. They brought me water, a fan, and stood in the doorway to say goodnight. I felt like a character in Midsummer Night’s Dream, and that the Faerie Spirits of the forest were ushering me toward my dreams. I slept on an orphan’s bunk that night, and I believe now looking back it was then a final tumbler tumbled and my heart changed forever.

I’d like to leave you with the words of our three emissaries, Pashtana, Sahar and Manizha. I’d asked them to work on speeches they would give to Americans in gatherings large and small. I only instructed them to tell a story about their lives, which does not come naturally to them. Talking about your self in this way comes without very much merit where they come from. They understand, now, why people here want to know such things. I helped them with their grammar, their sentences and some vocabulary only so far as to enable what they clearly wanted to express. These are their speeches. As you read them I invite you to resist the impulse to think only in terms of what you and I can do to help them; that they are somehow deprived and need what we as Americans think all children need to be happy and full. Certainly they need sponsors, funds for educational programs, and we rely on all of you from month to month. But you must trust also that they do know how to help themselves. They have survived in ways we cannot imagine. I wish to remind you that thus far on a macro level the help Afghanistan has received from the west has somehow resulted in a possible tragedy of epic proportions. When asked by some guests about American involvement in their country, the girls unanimously answered. “America can help Afghanistan, but cannot make it.” There is, to me, a great and imperative lesson in this.

These next few weeks I will try to be still, try to collect what I’ve learned and share what seems reasonable to share. To begin, I introduce you to the girls of Mehan, and what they wish you to know about themselves.

PASHTANA:

My name is Pashtana. I come from Afghanistan. I live in a very special orphanage. I came to this orphanage with my small sister when I was nine years old. Before I came to the orphanage I lived in a refugee camp in Pakistan. Before the refugee camp, when I was a small child I lived in a small farming village close to Jalalabad. That is where my kind father was killed by Taliban. He was a teacher who believed in education for girls. My mother had to marry with my uncle because she could not take care of all her children, two girls and two boys. Life was very difficult for her. My younger brother had a problem with his mind. He always beat my mother and he tore our cloths. He didn’t do any work. My mother had to share my uncle because he had another wife and children. He was a mason and was very poor.  One day he decided we must all leave for Pakistan to live in the refugee camp. All this time I would ask my mother about my real father, and she said to me your father is dead. I always cried. Because of all these things my mother was very sad. Then she began to go to literacy class. This made her happy. One day she announced about a new kind of orphanage. That is when she brought me to AFCECO.

SAHAR:

My name is Sahar. I come to you from Afghanistan. I live in a special orphanage. Before, I lived in a small village in Kunduz  province, but there were no school in Kunduz and girls never studied school. Taliban very strong in Kunduz.

My one brother was in Pakistan studying. He collected money for my family. We were very poor, there was no electricity, no pluming, we lived in a very small, very ugly house made of mud. In winter all the water came into the house. My father had many children-   8 boys and 2 girls. My father was blind, he could not work, so with such a big family life was difficult .

When my brother came home I saw his books and notebooks. I was 11 years old. I wanted to do what my brother was doing. I asked my brother to bring me with him to school but my father and mother said no. They said that school is not good for girls. I did not give up, over and over I said please, please I must go to school. I was very sad and life was very dark for me.

One day my brother came again. He finished his school. He said he saw an orphanage in Kabul. He told my mother and father he would bring me to the orphanage. He said there I would get a good education. Because he was the one person in my family making money he could decide what is best for me. But my mother was very sick and she said Sahar must work at home, I said no I must go. My father finally agreed with my brother and my new life began.

When I came to the orphanage I knew nothing. At school other children made fun of a 12 year old girl who could not read or write. I studied hard in the orphanage. Now I am in 10^th grade. I take a special course in medicine. I play football and I played Zeus and Mother Courage in drama.

MANIZHA:

My name is Manizha.  I come to you from Afghanistan.  I was born in Takhar, a place in North East Afghanistan. Today Taliban control Takhar. When I was very young Taliban killed my older brother. Soon after this my family moved to Pakistan. We lived in refugee camp. When I was 9 years old my father brought me to the orphanage, because my family was very poor and had to go back to Afghanistan. He put me in the orphanage because he wanted me to be safe from Taliban and for me to go to school

3 years I was in the orphanage. I always cried and I wanted my mother. So my father said ok and brought me back to Takhar. When I came back my mother was pregnant. After 5 months my small brother was born. But because there was no doctor, no hospital, my mother died giving birth. This was the start of my dark days. I saw my mother and I thought she was sleeping. I said mother……. but she would not answer. My aunt would not speak to me. I cried and my small brother also cried. Maybe he wanted his mother. My grandmother took my small brother and for 5 months I was responsible for my home. Then my father married again. My stepmother did not like me and my sisters and brothers. She always fought with my father. We were always tired and unhappy at home. After 4 years my father brought my sister and brother to the orphanage, then finally me and other sister.

PASHTANA:

Now everyone is happy. The AFCECO orphanage is a place where girls are taught to be equal to boys, where education is very important. This is special because in Afghanistan woman are not able to be Responsible for herself. She must depend on man. She is a slave to her husband and his family. Life for most afghan woman is without hope.

SAHAR:

The orphanage gives me education, experience, hope, courage, and even a football team. I have many sisters and brothers, they come from every province in Afghanistan, they are from every tribe. We learn that we are family, that Pashtun and Uzbak, Tajik and Hazera and Nuristani can live together in peace.

MANIZHA:

AFCECO is my first home. They give me my new life. I won’t forget this gift. I want to do with my life good things for the poor children of my country. When I finish school first of all I will work to give children new dreams. I come here to learn about the world, so I can bring the world to my home, not by war, but by love.

Manizha, Sahar, me and Pashtana singing Ahmad Zair song, "Hastadooram" on Christmas eve

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