It's Afghanistan. Who Cares About Afghanistan?

Mike and his wife were foreign workers for nearly 30 years in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  I spent Wednesday morning at their apartment in Fremont this past week, sipping tea, and listening to their stories.  They arrived in Afghanistan in the 1970's before the Soviet invasion in '79.  Afghanistan now is hardly recognizable to what it was in the 1970s.  Today, it's in ruins, but then it was a beautiful place.

The Soviets invaded in 1979.  Mike and his family left Afghanistan and moved to live and work in Pakistan.  They then moved back to Afghanistan in the 1990s to continue their work, just in time for the Taliban regime.  Mike said that at first, everyone in Afghanistan was happy about the Taliban because their regime made everyone feel so safe.  After the Russians left, Afghanistan was in chaos with one civil war after the next.  The Taliban brought order, and this initially made people feel safe again.  If you were caught stealing something, you lost your hand.  So people never worried about having things stolen anymore.  However, soon the regime became more militant and oppressive. 

When I asked Mike what the Afghani people are like, he recounted one particular event when he and an Afghan friend were standing alone in a very remote part of Afghanistan.  They had walked a long way away from the village.  There were no people.  No transportation.  Mike stood frozen as his friend held a gun to his shoulder and said, "If the Taliban catch you, this is what they will do."  They stared at one another for what must have felt like a lifetime.  His friend then lowered his gun and said, "But you....you are with me.  And I will never let this happen to you.  I will protect you with my life."

Mike described the people of Afghanistan as generous, deeply hospitable, and willing to sacrifice their own well-being before allowing a guest or friend to be placed in harm's way.  This is a thing of great honor and in the East the honor-shame culture is deeply entrenched in every layer of society.  He remembered a time when they were walking over a section of land, and his Afghan host made him stand aside while he carefully walked ahead testing the area for land mines.

My friend Matt asked Mike what his most memorable or meaningful experience was while in Afghanistan, and Mike said that it was the heart to heart connections he made with the people there.  He said that many sensational and dangerous things happened during the time of the Taliban.  But when he looks back it was the relationships that stand out to him most.   He saw God move in incredible ways.  He said this made his stay in Afghanistan worthwhile, and he said it was, indeed, a worthwhile endeavor, though not without sacrifice.

Who are these people, the Afghans, that would warrant such a statement?  I listen to people's comments in the states and feel that they are, for the most part, a mysterious people to many of us.  An almost blank slate.  They seem beyond our radar of concern or interest.  That is, unless we're talking about 9/11 or terrorism. Then they became synonymous with things like the Taliban and Islamic oppression, particularly against women and children.  But I don't hear much beyond that. 

If you've seen the film The Kite Runner, the underlying indictment is that the world stood by and watched as Afghanistan descended into ruin.  Just as Amir could not muster the courage to save his friend Hasaan from a horrific incident of sexual abuse, the world stood by and watched while the land of Afghanistan was raped, first with the Soviet invasion in 1979, followed by endless internal civil wars, which set the scene for the Taliban's regime until the events surrounding 9/11.  Maybe even now some are reading this and thinking, "It's Afghanistan.  Who cares about Afghanistan?"

Mark Twain once said that travel is fatal to prejudice and narrow-mindedness.  I spent the past week in Fremont, California among the Afghani community, which numbers 30,000 in Fremont and up to 60,000 in the greater Bay Area.  I heard such incredible stories of perseverance, loss, and a longing for hope and for change.  The more I came to know them, the more I cared.  Fredrich Buechner once said that compassion is the fatal capacity to stand in someone else's shoes.  Serving people, noticing and listening to them is perhaps the best medicine to false assumptions, small thinking, and selfish ambitions, and in my case both travel and compassion combined have been fatal to my own tendencies toward despair.

"There is a way to be good again," a friend said to Amir in The Kite Runner.  Just as Amir had to face his own propensity to betray and abandon his closest friend, he found the capacity to make things right once again.  The Kite Runner has this rare ability to make me both abhor the main character Amir and yet cheer him on throughout the story.  It is a powerful story of hope and grace.  And I thought about this film almost constantly while I was in Fremont.

Faheem was an Afghan man we met this last week.  He was a highly distinguished diplomat for Afghanistan in the 1970's.  He attended Princess Di's wedding in England.  By invitation.  He has met the Queen of England on three separate occasions.  He was very important.  He said  he was once walking in the streets of London, and a lady recognized him and asked if she could shake his hand because he had, after all, touched the Queen.  When the Soviets invaded, Faheem fled Afghanistan.  Like many refugees, they cannot immigrate directly from Afghanistan to the U.S.  He lived in another country, and then moved to the U.S. to join his family.  He got a job selling hot dogs at a hot dog stand in California.  He did this for 10 years.  He then opened a business in Oakland, an endeavor that cost him upwards of $50,000.  He was soon robbed and shot during a burglary.  After this event, his fear became so great, he sold his business for a whopping $4,000.  His sons now own successful Afghani restaurants (one of which I ate at last week), and his daughter owns an Afghani shop in Fremont. 

I met another Afghani gentlemen at the Little Kabul Market at the beginning of the week.  He shared his story with us as well.  He had been educated in America long ago and had returned to Afghanistan before the Soviet invasion to write educational curriculum for the universities.  He said that when the Soviets invaded, "Everything happened so fast.  Within three days 70 employees at the university were killed.  They all disappeared so fast."  He recounted what it was like to flee Afghanistan in those days.  He rode and then walked to Pakistan.  "At night we couldn't even light our cigarettes because the planes overhead were watching.  If they saw even a flicker of light, we would be dead.  And it was very cold.  Very cold."  Some of his family members were killed during this time.  But he made it to Pakistan and then immigrated to the U.S.  He was so proud to tell me of his family who lived in the states now, and he beamed as he spoke of his children who have graduated from college here in the U.S.

Standing next to this gentleman was a much younger looking Afghan.  I'm guessing he was in his 20's.   He just arrived in the states ten months ago.  He's been learning English so that he can return to Afghanistan and be a translator for U.S. soldiers and foreign workers.  "They pay very good.  That's why I will do this," he said.  "You should go to Afghanistan, you know.  Go to my city.  It is very safe there.  The American soldiers....they are right next to my house.  They make us all feel very safe.  So, you see, you should go," he said with a very large smile that communicated such a love for his country.

On another afternoon I met a lady at the Afghani Coalition who came to the U.S. as a widow.  She learned English, and has just gotten her driver's license, and now she is looking for a job.  She seemed so shy and reserved, but I could tell that she was so proud of her accomplishment as she told me this story.  And I congratulated her and basically gushed over all her hard work.

In the words of my friend Danielle, "We're hearing all these incredible stories of loss and tragedy, but basically, it's all the same story."  As I met people and listened to their stories, I saw in them the same things I loved about living in Asia when I was in college.  Easterners generally have this mysterious detachment from linear time.  For Westerners that's incredibly frustrating.  We live to get things done and to move from one event to the next.  We're always in a hurry to be somewhere or to experience something.  But people from the East are rarely in a hurry.  People and community are more important to them than schedules and events.  Now, this is frustrating when you show up in Fremont to say, teach an ESL class, and no one arrives on time.  Check that.  No one even arrives.  For a true Westerner, the day and the week is now a complete failure and the event a waste of time.  However, my time in China taught me many things, one of which is the ability to modify expectations and to re-examine the root of my goals.  

My goal in teaching ESL this last week was, quite selfishly, to connect with the Afghanis and learn about them.  So, my contact in Fremont helped us improvise so that we could do what we came to do, which was connect with the Afghan community.  So instead of waiting for them to come to our class (which happened to fall on their Afghani New Year which is why no one came initially), we went to them, on their turf, and spent the afternoons conversing in the market places and the mosque, visiting the Afghan coalition, joining other on-going ESL classes to help the students practice their English, and we all drank tea with them until our eyeballs turned brown.  And I loved every single minute.  A true westerner may have labeled the week a failure, and I suppose that's true if the goal was to teach an English class.  But I like to think of myself as a western-eastern hybrid.  I'm perfectly content to spend a "failed" afternoon sipping tea for hours listening to someone's stories and being invited into someone else's world.  God teaches me great things about others and about myself.  And this sets my heart on fire.  And when I walk away, things look different.  I'm different.  And that's never a waste of time.

Me and my friends in Fremont

I'll have to blog about our visit to the mosque and the Sikh temple later as well as the meaning of my name in Farsi.  So stay tuned...