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April 02, 2010
2 April I am a lover of stories. I see a man with half his arm missing, pointing the accusatory stub of what remains at the river of Toyotas pushing their way against him through Khoti Sani, Kabul, and I see a story. The man for whom I can honestly use the word “ancient” in deference to the marks on his face and his cane and the bend in his back, even though he may be my age, he too conjures up a story. And the children everywhere, the ones that are homeless selling what they find in the dumpster, wiping windows, reaching empty hands. I was always drawn to the destitute and the innocent. Brought up in comfort, my most affecting childhood memories are the dramas that pierced my imagination. Plenty of times it was a family event such as a drunken aunt or a childish brush against the law. Even though these were very real, I experienced them as I would a book or a film. Oliver Twist was no less real, nor the experience of a death in the family no less imaginary. Never was my instinct more crystallized than when I first experienced To Kill a Mockingbird. The Great Depression, racism, destitute blacks, destitute whites, and there in the center little innocent Scout Finch. (Oh my, slow learner. I just now after all these years realized the significance of naming the family finch!) During my hitchhiking days I had the opportunity to stay up all night with the nameless homeless man in the small square park in the center of a city, once in San Francisco, once in Seattle, another time in New York, asking him questions and nodding my head. I’ll never forget the mother who begged for a few rupees in Madras, India, the child in her arms with no eyes, eyes the mother herself had gouged to elicit more sympathy from people like myself. And once in Vermont, the angry adolescent boy who had been raped by an uncle when he was seven, who pressed a sickle to my neck from behind, who in that moment had to differentiate between his counselor and his pain he could not place. No matter the situation, in my mind’s eye I floated through the experience as I would through a story; the strange simple Boo is not necessarily the one to be feared, might does not always make right, and a child learns more from who we are than what we tell them to do. And then there is the part about discovery, and the not so palatable part about failure. This week was the first run-through of my new schedule. 120 orphans, seven to seventeen. It is impossible for me to teach without creating the chance for a story to happen within the classroom experience. That is to say, allowing for discovery and by definition, the possibility of failure, myself included. In Mehan the girls and I sit in a circle on the floor in the back corner of Doffie Library. (My old room has been retired. It now serves for storage.) Back at my one room schoolhouse I and an advanced group sit around an oval table (something I do very much admire about the Philips Exeter "way"). I scribble on a white board and hand out reading material and stay as animated and engaging as my energy allows, but the story only begins when each child’s personality is invited to shine however it shines. Mastura, shy beneath her brilliant saffron and white scarf, quiet and almost meek in a public setting, but a bull when it comes to shooting her hand up and being first to answer a question correctly. Maria, who this week took a stand when her estranged mother without notice appeared from nowhere at the orphanage and demanded she come home with her for good, to work chores and get married (for a price). “No, I am not going!” she said with the finality of a woman on a mission. So convincing was she, so shocking, her mother threw her hands into the air. You are not my daughter! she said, and slunk away. This is how Maria is in the classroom. Steadfast, even though she is slower than others and makes mistakes, her determination does not allow for even a hint of surrender. She will go to university, and she will be a professional. Then there are my musketeers: Negina, Frishta, Maqbola and Helai. The four could not be any more different from one another, yet together form a core of strength in the class. Sister-orphans whose closeness is of such depth it cannot be sounded, they nevertheless stand independent from one another, sparring their strengths and heeding the limiting effects of their weaknesses. Helai is confident, a general in a little body, the disfiguring marks on her face testament to her battles fought and won; Negina the peacemaker, that particular vein from Nuristan that still believes in magic; Maqbola the moral heart, but never righteous, one who believes in God and Science without a wisp of confliction; and Frishta, Pan if there ever was, mischief maker with a weakness for love’s arrow, my bumblebee who despite her tiny wings manages to not only fly but to claim the entire flower as hers and hers alone. The more I notice and validate who each is, the more she participates in creating the story while appreciating the role her co-stars play. With the boys it is no different, except for this one rather huge elephant in the shop: how to exemplify convincingly the notion that to question the societal power they have for simply being male is not only moral but in their own best interest. I claim no silver bullet in this affair, but maybe there is a clue in the exchange I had with a young guard who walked in on one of my classes. I’d been teaching some of the oldest boys, Ghani, Fati, Farid Gul, Ekram and Fawad about Galileo and the discoveries he made, when the stranger piped in. “Why you come from America?” What he was getting at was, from his point of view, the almost certifiably insane notion I would leave the land of milk and honey to live in dirty, disgusting Kabul. “I tell you what,” he laughed, but I knew he was serious, “You find me an American who will marry me, just to get me there, and she can divorce me after three years.” “Oh, what will you do for me?” I continued the antic. He laughed even harder. “I will walk out of this house and I will find you a good Afghan wife in five, no three minutes!” The boys in my class laughed with him, though a little nervously. They know me very well, and anticipated my penchant to address a would-be antagonist with questions. The guard’s name is Jahish, a fine looking 18 year-old whose English is pretty good. I asked him what he expects he will find in America. Big houses, good cars, relaxation, money. “Every single American I have met here in Kabul is rich!” I asked him what he really wants. He looked at me quizzically. My students moved to the side of the room, sat closer together. “What do you mean what do I want?” Jahish challenged. I pressed him. “I want to see the world,” he said, finally. “I want clean air, clean streets.” “Ah, yes,” I said. I only recently learned how sometimes it is best to let a warrior march straight into his (or her) battle. “This I think you will do, you must do. Let me ask you, if you could pay for a ticket today, would you go?” The boy thought for a moment. “No, not today.” “When would you go if you could?” Jahish leaned back against the cracked cement wall of the room and thought for a longer spell. “I do not know. I do not know what it is like.” “What what is like? “To be able to go.” “So until you know you can go, you do not know when you would go?” I didn’t know what I was getting at, and I was starting to sound superior and spoiled. I felt the need to embrace him. But I didn’t know the way. Luckily, one instinct paid off. What he gleaned from me was not what I was saying, but the Socratic way to test his or my logic. “Are there poor people in America?” he asked. “Yes.” “How poor?” “Very.” “How?” “One or two rooms, five people, no running water, no job.” “How many?” “Many.” “How?” “I don’t know for sure. Millions.” “In the city?” “In the city, in the country.” “No…” “Yes,” I said. “But America is big. Big like the world. There are big houses and good cars and clean streets. And there are lots of trees. And sometimes the television is fun. And there is relaxation. The world has been coming to America for a long time, and America has been coming to the world.” Jahish’s face lit up. “You are America!” he mused. It was the oddest, greatest compliment I’d ever received. “You embarrass me,” I said. “I shame you?” he asked. The word embarrass had been part of the day’s vocabulary lesson. Ekram, the youngest and in many ways sharpest of my students piped in. “Not shame,” he said. “A greater gift than he deserves." I hadn’t quite put it that way, but I liked his definition. The gift of this place, the gift of having a role in the lives, the story of these children and the people who care for and protect them is far more than I deserve. Their bursting love and appreciation, and their trust are silver coins and rough blue pearls and rubied rings of gold. When I go to class I put my laptop in the corner of the corner of the room. The screen-saver is set to engage after only a minute. Here is Masuda the night before I left Mehan last September, playing the metal bowl like a drum. Here is Sadof pretending she is a movie star, the night she pulled the chair out from under me. Here is Dariush’s photo of the bus graveyard, the very place where one day later a soldier threatened to put him in jail for taking “sensitive pictures” for my photography class. Here are the ladies of Mehan greeting me on the verandah, Manila, Farzana, Frishta, Mercel… names I could barely pronounce and that now are forever imprinted in the fiber of my own story. The destitute and the innocent reflect who we are. If we do not listen to their story, we are truly lost. A rare thunderstorm is sweeping over Kabul. I'll post this entry and will enjoy the rumbling and the rain as long as it lasts. For now, in this brief moment, there is no war.
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