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June 11, 2010
All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players… I am back with my students. I look at the sign Omid made for me on Teacher’s Day, and though it is overstated it nevertheless fills me with purpose and a tablespoon of pride: “The children future to Ian-jan hand”. The fact he neglected to insert the possessive forms for the noun and proper noun lends a dollop of shame to the accolade; I have lapsed in my great responsibility. On Saturday (following the Jirga), Mehan was abuzz upon my arrival. Normalcy and human contact come as a great relief to all. The girls do not much care for days with too much time on their hands. They do not remain idle. I found my classroom had been immaculately cleaned and organized. Each of my groups meets for an hour, three in the morning and three after lunch. Then songs, then drama rehearsal. My first class, all beginners, raced into the room and sat waiting for me to stop shaking hands and get to work. “Exam today, Ian?” This was Manila. She learns quickly. As number one in class she relishes exams, but not to show off. She relishes the experience of knowing. “I'm not sure, Manila. Shall I give you an exam today?” “Yeeessss,” she answered coyly, while the other girls protested. With the beginners I write a simple narrative that contains elements they are familiar with, the building they live in, the garden, the staff, Kabul city. Ian walked to the orphanage on Saturday. Along the way he saw many things, he saw an old man pushing a cart, he saw a donkey pulling a cart, he saw the blue dome of a mosque… We read this over and over. Finally I give the narrative minus key words, which they are to choose from a scrambled list in order to fill in the blanks properly. Ten minutes early the next class is at the door. One of the students bangs with her little fist. Frishta. She calls my name. “Ian, class is over!” A long time ago the children dropped calling me Kawka, the term used to address all adult males. The girls call me Ian, the boys (except for Omid) call me Teacher. “EEEEAAAAN!” Frishta would not relent. Two advanced classes at Mehan are at various stages of learning about Egypt. I discovered that 95% of Egyptians live along the Nile. The children learned about mummies. We all learned the details of the marriage and fate of Cleopatra and Mark Antony. I asked the girls if they could imagine a love so great as one could not live without the other. Most laughed. There were a few surprise hopeless romantics, though. Farida, the pretty, shy but independent Pashtun girl from one of the Pakistan orphanages stood up for timeless love, and of all people Neda, normally so practically minded. We all agreed, though, that Richard Burton made for an ugly Antony, as compared to Elizabeth’s Cleopatra. Drama is making progress, though Parwana, new to the group but a natural performer, has expressed dismay. “Why we have to do this over and over?” We have obtained a real field stretcher on which Prometheus is carried to Mount Olympus where Ideology, Power and Industry chain her to a rock. In the end it is Zeus who must be carried away forever. Maria is Prometheus, Sahar is Zeus. The hilarity involved in teaching Sitiza, Neda, Parwana and Sorab to properly carry a loaded stretcher pretty much deconstructed rehearsal. At the end of the hour we always circle up and together give the actor’s cheer, basically squatting low with hands stretched forward and shaking as we hum, then slowly rise up, getting louder as we go until we leap together into the air with a culminating cheer. On the way back to the office I told Nasir, our driver, all about my day. He is a young man who has three children, loves Iranian pop music and dresses always in western garb. As we crawled through a back street we both noticed a strange tiny compact car approaching. It had been painted into thirds black, red and green. We both yelled at the same instant. “BASHARDOST!” Ramazan Bashardost, the little Hazara man who ran for president last year by driving his little car to every province and appealing to all tribes with is populist message. No bodyguards for him, and he gives most all his salary away to poor people. (He is still a member of Parliament.) He lived for a long time in a tent in a park in the heart of Kabul, but has recently moved his tent to the edge of the city. It is unfathomable that he garnered several hundred thousand votes, (real votes from real people), coming in third behind Karzai and Abdulla Abdulla (who garnered each a plethora of manufactured votes). What is even more amazing is Bashardost received votes from across the ethnic spectrum. For a Hazara man to receive thousands of Pashto votes is akin to something as unattainable as Obama winning Mississippi. Nasir knows how much I love Bashardost. He slammed on the breaks and spun the poor Toyota wagon around. A car chase ensued, and I do mean car chase. Traffic in Kabul is as anarchic as bulls let loose from a ring. Nasir drove up onto the sidewalk, wove into oncoming traffic head-on toward a Mercedes bus. This continued for a few kilometers until Nasir successfully came side-by-side with Ramazan’s car. We rolled down our windows. I stuck my hand out and shook the hand of my first Afghan political hero. Ramazan gestured for us to pull over, whereupon his driver followed us down a narrow side street. We got out and greeted one another. I felt nervous and tongue-tied, more so than even meeting Brian Williams at Andeisha’s award ceremony. Ramazon speaks excellent English, French, and three Afghan languages. Who knows what others. He has three Masters degrees: Law, Diplomacy and Political Science. His Ph.D is also in Law. I told him who I am and what I am doing. I told him I voted for him last August in our mock orphanage election. He told me if he had won he would have saved American taxpayers a whole lot of money. He added that he thinks America is indeed a beautiful country. Our chat lasted only a minute, which is fine because my mind had gone blank. Several men approached. They wanted to shake Ramazon’s hand. I demurely returned to the car but not before Dr. Bashardost stopped me. “Here, let me give you my phone number. Call sometime and I will meet you so we can talk.” I have every intention of doing so. But not for myself. When I get the nerve up I will call him and ask if he would come visit some of my students, answer questions they might have about their country and his views. When I later told this story to my advanced students, they screamed with excitement. Especially Sosan, who comes from the same Hazara tribe as Bashardost. Both have personal and tragic links to the January massacre of 2001. Classes continued through the week in much the same fashion. A few new boys arrived from Pakistan orphanage. Many Afghan refugees around the world are being deported back to Afghanistan, which in turn puts more pressure on Kabul. There are no jobs, no affordable housing. The older children arriving from our Pakistan orphanages universally have a better educational foundation then the kids here. I was able to give Shawkat and Faisal an exam the other boys had prepared for, and without studying they were able to pass. A few of my classes are learning how to write a letter. I have devised a recipe for writing just about every kind, from a diaristic letter to a request for letters of recommendation to an op-ed piece. I call it fishing. Its five sections include the hook, the bait, the cast, the hauling in and the letting go. This is too advanced for most of the kids, but I teach it in stages, leave for a few weeks and then return. I feel it is most vital. Where would the world be without the letters of Virginia Woolf, Kafka, or Van Gogh and his brother Theo, or Jefferson and Adams? How lessened would my life be without my grandmother’s words and my responses to them? Letters are vanishing. I know they and even the system by which they are carried will be gone before I die. But at least I will have done this one thing for their cause. My most advanced class is with Maria, Sitiza, Pashtana (Parwana’s older sister) and my hopeful young star Yasamin. They are not the brightest students I have, and there are others who speak English better, but they have a work ethic and a combined determination of heart. They receive an extra two hours of instruction per week. I push them. Yesterday I gave them Shakespeare. After reading the speech about the seven stages in a man’s life, they looked at me in horror. Yellow highlighters in hand, they proceeded to mark almost every word. What is a pard, and what is this capon lined? Explain, please, a bubble reputation, mewling and puking, and what on earth is a shrunk shank? Then there is pronunciation. I almost lost them. They were distracted and tired. (Jamshid had given them the task of cleaning the offices before class.) I assigned specific lines to the speech. Three of the four girls are in drama, so they took to this strategy easily, but Yasamin struggled to understand. The others teased her, and she turned away to wipe silent tears from her eyes. I consoled her as best I could. I know now how fragile these girls are, but also how extraordinarily tough. I did not turn the episode into a melodrama. Having acknowledged the tears and frustration, as Yasamin herself modeled we eased back into the lesson, undaunted. Usually a time comes when I stop what I am doing, what they are doing, and lead the class in a short reflection. I call it a check-in. I put my pen down and looked at the white board. There were the seven ages ending with the dying man who fades into oblivion, sans everything. “This is a man’s life, yes?” I queried. “What about a woman’s?” “In Afghanistan?” Pashtana asked. “Yes, does an Afghan woman follow these stages?” It was as if the door across the room had been suddenly slammed shut by the wind. Maria did not hesitate to answer. “Two stages. Infant straight to dying old woman.” I raised my eyebrows. “Really?” I asked the other three. They all nodded. “Look,” Maria adjusted in her chair, the teacher now. “Look at these stages, after infant is schoolboy.” She looked at me. "How many girls get to go to school" I could not argue. “Then lover.” Pause. We all shook our heads. “Soldier, justice, retired man. What woman in Afghanistan goes through these?” Sitiza added that many women don’t go from infant to dying old lady. They just die. So often these children arrest me with their frankness. They say things to me I do not know if they ever have said to an adult. Andeisha mentioned just as an aside in passing and completely out of context the other day, “They communicate well with you.” An odd juxtaposition, since usually it is the other way around, a good teacher who communicates well with the students. As I negotiated the impact of Maria’s lesson, I looked each of the girls in the eyes, amazed. They did not flinch. “This is something you are here to change,” I said. “You are here in this class, in this orphanage, in this city to add stages to your lives, maybe even the lives of all Afghan women.” I will not forget the confident smiles that came upon the faces of those young ladies in that moment. I wish I could introduce some of the American students I have known to these four. There are many. Though I remember their voices, their stories, their names have faded. That will not happen here. I will always keep these names at the fore of my mind: Maria, Pashtana, Sitiza, Yasamin. I sit here and my own tears begin to form. The war machine is grinding down. The money is running low, and the rotation of playmakers growing thin. Ten years is about the limit to any war. Soon, when it leaves, the world will say it tried and satisfied with its moral footing it will adjourn. I remember the feeling after the run of a show, especially one for which I was the director. How strange it was after so much effort, writing the script, auditions, rehearsals, revisions of the script, fundraising, advertising, ticket sales, tech and dress and finally the actual performance, and then quite suddenly it is over. The set is torn down in less than an hour. The stage is swept clean. We all go home. Sadness. The question invariably crosses everyone’s mind, was it a success? Did it mean anything at all? Before letting them go I asked the girls to please put down their markers, close their eyes and listen. I took a deep breath, sighed, and began. All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players… I read patiently, I read with my life on my sleeve. I wanted them to hear the poetry, the music in the words. I wanted them to experience Shakespeare not in the abstract. When I finished reading I let them go. It was a half-hour early, but the afternoon had been a bit rough. For homework they are to practice, and eventually memorize each their part in the speech. There are those attached to the notion that life is a linear event, one stage building upon the next until it ends where it ends. There are those attached to the notion we end exactly where we began, and begin again. I cannot adhere to either. Only the spiral of hair on the top of a baby’s head, or the web a spider weaves, or the way in which water eddies within a bend of stone.
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