by Dayna Curry
We didn’t ever feel quite safe pushing through the crowds of people in the Kabul bazaar areas. Once when Heather and I were purchasing some meters of material at Mandaee, a crowd of about thirty men gathered around to watch us try our hand at bargaining for a better price. One of the men made a comment, and the whole crowd erupted in laughter. We had not been able to catch the man’s remark, but it obviously wasn’t good. We bought the cloth and got into our taxi as quickly as we could.
One day a foreign girlfriend and I ventured into a burqa shop in one of the larger bazaars. I wanted to buy a burqa and proceeded to try on several. I was having some difficulty finding a burqa long enough to suit my height and wide enough at the top to fit over my Western head. The fashion show went on for some minutes before I realized a crowd of Afghan men and curious Taliban had assembled at the door of the shop to watch! The sight of a foreigner donning a burqa was entertainment, indeed. Luckily, the shopkeeper ushered me into a small room where I could continue away from the gaze of the strange male spectators.
On another occasion, I accompanied one of my foreign guy friends to the Khair Khana bazaar, one of the largest in the city. I helped my friend select some souvenirs. He wanted a turban and some colorful skullcaps. Before we knew it, a crowd of at least thirty people—mostly men and boys, but also a few women—had gathered around us and proceeded to follow us from shop to shop while we made our purchases. As we finally got into a taxi to leave, some of the teenage boys in the mob started spitting at us and yelling out, “Khaarijee!” One boy spit into our taxi window, hitting my friend on the leg. Another boy threw an apple core into the car. The poor taxi driver tried to reprimand the boys: “You are very bad!” he kept saying. As he drove off, he apologized to us and excused the boys as undisciplined and uneducated.
Heather & Dayna: The Taliban’s attitude toward foreigners and things non-Islamic seemed to become increasingly hostile over the spring and summer. A few weeks before we arrived in late March, the Taliban caused an international uproar when it destroyed two thousand-year-old Buddhist statues in the cliffs of the Hindu Kush Mountains near Bamiyan. The move shamed some of our Afghan acquaintances, who felt the Taliban had defiled their national identity.
In May, the Taliban released a flurry of edicts affecting foreigners and religious minorities: Hindu women were ordered to wear burqas; non-Muslims were told to wear tags identifying themselves; foreign women were forbidden to drive and were told to wear burqas, too. None of the edicts was enforced, to our knowledge, but they mirrored the tension we could detect in the streets.
Heather: We tried to stay clear of Taliban on the street. They were men who enjoyed their power. You would see Toyota pickups full of Taliban flying through intersections. One day I was walking down our street in Wazir with one of my Shelter Germany coworkers, when some Taliban in a white Toyota Corolla station wagon nearly ran me off the road. I jumped onto the curb and turned my head to stare at them. When I did, a Talib stood up out of the window and spit on me. He yelled something and glared at me with utter hatred. Then the vehicle sped away.
Other foreign women we knew had similar experiences. One evening a Talib in a pickup truck spit in Dayna’s face as she was walking down the street with our night chowkidar.
Civilian men also were aggressive on occasion—they were not above spitting, as poor Dayna also discovered. But there were worse things than being spat on. One night, Dayna and I were walking to an all-night prayer meeting at the Shelter Germany guesthouse compound around the corner from our house. We intended to pray for the thousands of Afghans pouring into the refugee camp in the western city of Herat because of the drought. Many of the refugees were digging holes in the ground to get some relief from the heat, and the camp lacked enough water to meet the people’s needs. The refugees were so desperate, they did not even have money to afford burial cloth for the sixty to a hundred people dying daily. Shelter Germany was in the process of opening an office at the camp to conduct a joint aid project with another organization, and the Shelter Germany Afghan employees wept when they saw the suffering of the people.
Dayna and I had organized the all-night prayer meeting for the Herat refugees, and when we set out for the meeting it was just before 10 P.M., Kabul’s curfew. We knew we were pushing the limit on safety, but we had only a few short blocks to travel. As we started walking, the stray dogs that congregated near our gate started chasing us and biting at our heels. The dogs snapped at the air and also tried to bite our bags. We picked up our pace. Why were these dogs being so aggressive?
When we went to turn the corner at the grocery stand half a block away, we noticed a strange man standing in the middle of the intersection. He yelled out: “Where are you going?” We looked the other way and kept walking. Before we could realize what was happening, the man ran after us, grabbed hold of my arm, and pinned me against the wall of a residential compound. Dayna, who was standing in the street, started to scream forcefully: “Stop!” What would this man do to us? Did he have a weapon? I, too, began to scream at the top of my lungs. “Help us! Stop!” Once we both started screaming, the man let go and walked away.
Heather & Dayna: Despite mounting hostility toward foreigners on the streets, our woes under the Taliban were nothing compared to those of the Afghans. We were guests in the land and afforded most every privilege. You could see the difference the moment you crossed the border with Pakistan and entered the country: Whereas foreigners usually were waved through the Taliban checkpoints, Afghans waited in their vehicles for hours while border guards searched for tapes, videos, and other such contraband.
It was difficult to keep up with all of the laws governing Afghans’ daily lives, and even more difficult to know when the laws might be enforced. Much about the Taliban’s exercise of power seemed arbitrary, making the government’s rule more menacing for the average Afghan.
If a man was walking in a neighborhood during prayer, a Talib might beat him severely with a stick and reprimand him for failing to pray. This happened to one of our foreign friend’s chowkidars.
We knew a chowkidar at another aid organization’s building who had gotten his head shaved by the Taliban for wearing his hair too long—the beard was to be long, but the hair kept short. For a while, the Taliban set up armed roadblocks in order to inspect the length of men’s hair.
Women might get beaten for wearing nail polish, or for not wearing panty hose or socks with their shoes. Women could be punished for working outside the home. If a woman was traveling in a taxi unescorted by a husband or male relative, the religious police might beat the taxi driver for agreeing to drive her.
Shops had to close down for prayer time or the owners would be whipped, fined, and even put out of business. Merchants would push us out of their shops at the appointed hour out of fear the Vice and Virtue police would see they were still open. Barbers would throw people out onto the street mid-haircut at prayer time out of fear of being beaten. The customers then would wait perhaps twenty minutes for their haircuts to resume.
The Taliban were particularly brutal to Hazaras, recognizable by their Asian features. Taliban often called Hazaras dogs or donkeys and treated them with fierce disrespect. One day some Taliban pelted the son of a Hazara woman we knew with rocks, cutting his eye. People lived under a cloud of fear.
All through the spring and summer of 2001, our community prayed deeply for Afghanistan. The nation was suffering a severe drought, famine, war between the Taliban and Northern Alliance opposition, and an enduring wave of drug addiction fueled by the vast poppy-growing industry. People were dying—both physically and emotionally—or they were fleeing to already overwhelmed refugee camps in neighboring countries. Few children attended school. No women were being trained as physicians. What would happen to the next generation? We asked ourselves: Could a country be more desolate than this one?
It was early summer when we began to pray with fresh confidence that Afghanistan would experience a new day, and we sensed that a change for the
nation was on the horizon. The reason for our optimism was inexplicable, and just exactly what might take place remained unclear. We did not know whether a change of government was in store, or perhaps just a power shift in the favor of moderates within the Taliban. We knew the Afghans couldn’t take any more war. How could the land be devastated any further? The land was rubble, and it was soaked with the blood of generations. Restore, build up, and prosper the land—this was our prayer.
five
PEOPLE WE KNEW
Heather: Before I could begin work on any of Shelter Germany’s aid projects, I was required to complete a six-month course in Dari at the language school in Shar-e-Nao. I had reached only the halfway mark when we got arrested—I literally reached the halfway mark the day before the Taliban took us—so my season as a humanitarian aid worker in Kabul never officially got off the ground. I did build relationships with Afghans, though, and most of these friendships came out of my contact with the Wazir street kids and the women who came to our gate for help.
Marghalai and Soofia, two preteen cousins, presided over the gang of thirty-plus Wazir street kids. Marghalai, the older of the two, was the ringleader. A beautiful, slim girl, Marghalai was feisty and would do whatever it took to get what she wanted. She pushed the shoeshine boys around at times and mothered the younger children. We often saw her walking down the street with a child in her arms. Soofia—a gentler, taller girl—followed Marghalai’s lead.
We met Marghalai and Soofia within days of our arrival in Kabul. Our house was not yet finished, so Dayna and I stayed in separate houses in Wazir with some coworkers. Walking back to our respective houses from our morning prayer meeting one day, Marghalai struck up a conversation with Dayna. I barely knew a word of Dari at that point, so Dayna translated as the conversation progressed.
“Do you pray?” Marghalai asked Dayna.
“Yes,” Dayna replied. “I pray every day.”
“Are you a Muslim?”
“No, I am a follower of Jesus.”
“You can become a Muslim if you just say these words,” Marghalai offered, repeating the Muslim confession.
Dayna looked at her apologetically: “Oh, I do not want to become a Muslim.”
“Why?” asked Marghalai. All of the street kids were listening at this point.
“Because Jesus changed my life and made me clean. And now I can go to heaven and be with him when I die.”
Marghalai looked surprised. “How do you know you will go to heaven?” More Afghans walked up, so Dayna politely steered the conversation in a different direction.
Since we wanted to encourage the street kids to work for money rather than beg, we asked Marghalai and Soofia to come to our new house when we moved in later that week and help us clean it up. Our relationship with the girls took off after that. We saw them multiple times a day, and they were always at our gate when we handed out fruit at lunchtime. For weeks they would ask us almost daily, “Can we come and work again?”
Not long after we got settled into our house, Marghalai approached me with news of her mother: “My mother is very sick. She is in the hospital.”
What a great opportunity to show this family we care about them, I thought. Early that evening, I went to visit Marghalai’s mother with my coworker Diana, a petite Arab Australian woman of fifty. We traveled to the ICRC hospital situated on the poor side of town among several bombed-out buildings. Marghalai and her sidekick, Soofia, came with us in our taxi.
Marghalai’s mother was lying in bed with bandages around her abdominal section and an IV in her arm. Her surgery had been routine, we understood. We visited awhile, making the most of our paltry language skills. Diana, who was also a nurse, had studied Pashtu in Pakistan for years but did not speak much Dari. We fumbled our way through the conversation, because we loved to relate with the Afghans. I longed to know the Afghan people and determined to get by as best I could on my meager vocabulary, learning the language as I went along.
Before Diana and I prepared to leave the hospital, we offered to pray for Marghalai’s mother in the name of Jesus, and she agreed. Since I did not know enough Dari even to form a coherent prayer, I prayed in English.
As soon as I finished, something like a small-scale riot erupted—everyone around us wanted prayer. The relatives of patients entreated: “Will you please pray for my daughter?” “Will you please come pray for my sister? She’s over here.” “Please, can you come this way and pray for my relative?” Several people lined up, and we ended up walking around the hospital laying our hands on sick people—some seriously ill—and praying for them in English in the name of Jesus.
We walked into the burn unit that evening and met some women who had set themselves on fire with gasoline. A couple of the women were only in their late teens. One had been married off to a Talib and hated her life so much that she thought setting herself on fire was her only way out. Another young woman, only nineteen, wanted to take her life to escape the shame of poverty. For some of these women, the act was just a cry for help—a painful, dangerous cry; many women ended up dying in the hospital of complications.
When Diana and I left the hospital, a line of people followed us outside. “Please, wait,” they called out. “You haven’t prayed for my relative yet. Will you please come back and pray?”
“We have to go now,” we apologized. “But we will pray for you as we go on our way.”
Not long after that experience, I sought permission from the hospital to volunteer on Fridays. Dayna and I attended an international church service on Friday mornings, but we had the afternoons off. “I have no medical skills,” I explained to the person in charge, “but I can sit with patients. I will give people baths, help the nurses, bring food—whatever needs to be done.”
Since the patients’ extended families did much of the nursing for their sick relatives, I asked if there were any patients without family who needed someone to look after them. I was introduced to a fourteen-year-old girl with cerebral palsy named Lida whose family had abandoned her on the street. She was severely malnourished and about the size of a seven-year-old.
Lida and I developed a sweet friendship. She couldn’t manage a walker without someone’s assistance, and she couldn’t talk. She couldn’t do anything for herself. She could only make sounds and clap her hands, which she would do each time I arrived at her bedside. Clapping meant she was happy.
I would bring Lida food and clothing and give her baths. Sometimes I would get to the hospital and find her covered in feces and flies. The flies in Kabul were biting flies, and many Afghans would break out in terrible, scarring sores, a condition called leishmaniasis. Aid agencies set up special clinics just to treat these bites.
I sang songs to Lida, prayed for her, and read her some children’s stories I had translated in my language class. Sometimes I took her on short walks in the courtyard. We would sit on a cement bench by the courtyard wall, and Afghan women would gather in a horseshoe around us. I tried to communicate with the women as best I could.
One day I attempted to tell a story. I drew a picture of a frog and asked some of the women to tell me the Dari word. “What is this?” I asked. They told me, and I proceeded with my tale of the wide-mouthed frog. I must have looked ridiculous as I stumbled through the narrative, embellishing it with different animated faces and gestures. Meanwhile, all of the women sat around laughing at the foreigner making a fool of herself.
One Friday I went to Lida’s bed and found she had been moved. In the bed next to her old bed I encountered a sad sight—a young Kuchi girl of perhaps eleven with a bloody stub of an arm and a bandaged foot. Her face was marked with scratches and bloody scabs. I found out later that the foot had been blown off while the girl was picking up a rock on the mountainside outside the city. She had come face-to-face with a land mine.
The little girl moaned and cried while her mother stroked her hair and tried to feed her. My heart hurt to see such a beautiful girl so disfigured by an instrument of terror. Her life
would never be the same. I ended up going back to see her several days later. By that time she had been moved to the children’s ward and looked better, but she still suffered a tremendous amount of pain.
After Lida’s family had abandoned her, she in essence lived at the ICRC hospital. During the week, she did not receive the kind of care she needed—no one was available to help her learn how to use a spoon or even bathe her regularly. She was so frail, she couldn’t move herself in the bed, and often she would remain in the same position for as long as a whole day. Eventually, Dayna and I paid someone to nurse her. But after a while, the hospital needed to release Lida to a family; she could not live in the hospital forever.
Over the summer, Dayna and I began looking for an Afghan family who would care for Lida. At a government-run orphanage, we conducted a series of interviews with potential adoptive families, but our efforts were cut short when the religious police arrested us. We had been communicating with an Italian nurse at the hospital during the interview process and desperately hoped she had taken up Lida’s cause.
Our arrest derailed several projects we had set in motion over the summer. Dayna and I used our own personal money to pay Afghan women for things like embroidery and washing, but we shared a pool of benevolence money with our Waco friends for larger endeavors like helping families start businesses.
Close to the time of our arrest, we had started a business for the family of one of the Wazir street kids. Shafique, ten years old, was a gentle boy, unlike most of the street kids. He rarely asked for anything and expressed gratitude for what we gave him. He seemed to wear a permanent smile. Shafique dressed in the same green pants and tunic every day and carried a burlap sack around the streets of Wazir collecting wood and paper for his mother’s cooking fire. We often let him inside our gate to collect wood chips from a large pile of debris the construction workers left in our carport area.