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April 15, 2011
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 novelThe 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."
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