by Dayna Curry
The mother asked another one of her daughters to make us tea.
“Don’t go to the trouble,” we urged, but it was hopeless. You cannot stop Afghans from serving their guests tea.
In a typical tea service, Afghans first would ask us if we wanted black or green tea. Usually they would serve the tea in a metal teapot—or a decorative thermos if they had some money—on an aluminum tray with a small bowl of candies. The cheapest Afghan candies were hard, pastel-colored nuggets in the shape of lima beans. Sometimes Afghans would serve chewy toffee candies wrapped in paper along with the hard candies. Candy was usually served since sugar was too expensive for most families. You were supposed to put the candy in your mouth as you drank the tea to make it sweet. If the family was very poor, you would drink tea in clear glasses without handles. This particular family served our tea in teacups with handles, but offered no sugar.
The mother wept and showed us pictures of her deceased daughter and the daughter’s husband. We learned that in fact the girl’s husband was not the reason she took her life. She loved her husband. The husband’s parents were the problem. Every day the parents told her she was worthless—nothing but a poor girl who would never amount to anything. To this young girl, setting herself on fire seemed the only way to get out of her straits. The mother shared with us that now her other daughter—the one who made us tea—was threatening to kill herself too.
Heather: The girl, only about fifteen years old, looked like her sister who had died. She was beautiful, with olive skin, a spotless complexion, and piercing eyes. She squatted down at the end of the room, and I began to talk to her.
With tears running down my cheeks, I looked her in the eye and told her that my sister, too, had died.
“I still miss her very much,” I said to the young girl. “I understand how it hurts. But Jesus helped me. He comforted me when no one else could help.”
I turned to Dayna and asked, “How do you say ‘special’?”
Dayna gave me the word, and I continued: “Jesus loves you. You are a special person and your life is important. God has a plan for your life. Do not take your life. God loves you.”
I asked her to remember the qualities she loved about her sister and offered to be available anytime to talk. I welcomed her to visit me Friday afternoons at the hospital whenever she wanted, and she ended up coming the next week.
Heather & Dayna: As our conversation progressed, we learned that the mother suffered regular abuse at the hands of her husband. She pulled back her small chawdur and showed us bruises and scrapes on her forehead by her temple; her ear looked disfigured. We were saddened and felt helpless to do anything. We asked the women if they had ever listened to any of the radio programs about Jesus. They told us their radio was old and that they had no money for batteries. We encouraged them to listen to the programs if they ever had the opportunity. “You will find hope,” we said.
Before we left we offered to pray. The mother and the aunt accepted, and we took turns praying for God’s peace and provision in the home. We prayed that God’s love and comfort would fill the women’s hearts. The women kissed us as we stepped back into the foul-smelling alley to walk down to our taxi.
Our next stop was a nearby bazaar, where we picked up food items for the beggar clan from the Shamali Valley and for Leena’s new roommate. When we arrived at the beggar clan’s compound, we ducked through a rotten wood gate and entered a courtyard. Some women came out of one of the mud houses, kissed us, and invited us in.
“No, no,” we said obligingly. “We have to go to Noorzia’s house in the adjoining courtyard.” Noorzia was the smiling beggar girl with freckles and cracked skin.
There were water wells and small, withering gardens in each of the mud courtyards, and the houses themselves looked pitiful. There were no doors on the entrances, no glass in the windows. The walls and floors were filthy, and only rags and pieces of plastic covered the floors.
Dayna: When we walked into Noorzia’s house, Heather looked at me and said, “This is the poorest home I’ve visited yet.”
Heather & Dayna: Noorzia’s mother—an attractive, light-skinned woman in her early thirties—greeted us with a nursing baby at her breast. Other mothers in the compound were nursing new babies, too. All of the mothers and children who were home joined us for conversation.
“We can’t stay long,” we explained. Noorzia and the gang were out begging but came in some minutes later. All of the kids looked as if they had not bathed in days, and many had sores on their faces from fly bites.
We handed out the food supplies, and the kids asked us to sing them a song. We sang a song we called “God Made the World.” The kids loved the song—it included hand motions and got them laughing and smiling.
“Who made the world?” the song went. “Who made the flowers? Who made the fish? God made the world, God made the flowers, God made the fish.”
Dayna: Before we left, Noorzia’s mother asked if we possibly could buy them a pump for their well. She showed me her hands—they looked callused and red—and explained that pulling the bucket up from the well was terribly difficult. Some weeks after this visit I learned that the family’s well had gone completely dry, so I used benevolence money to hire a man to dig the well deeper and install a pump.
Heather & Dayna: From Noorzia’s house, we traveled to the house where Leena had moved. The older woman who beat Leena’s children had thrown Leena out of the other compound; Leena’s new lodgings were some distance from town. We drove for thirty minutes, passing neighborhoods of mud houses, fields of crops, several small bazaars, and a few Taliban check posts. The mud house where Leena lived was tucked back off the main road.
When we entered the house, we found Leena’s roommate there with her two children, Leena’s ailing mother, and Leena’s two children. Leena was out for the afternoon. We took down the roommate’s personal information so that we could make sure her house was surveyed to qualify her for a widow card. She told us she had to beat her seven-year-old son every day to get him to go out and beg. Women with sons were not allowed to beg door-to-door.
“He does not understand that we will have nothing to eat if he does not go,” the roommate said tearfully.
We gave her the food items and soap we had purchased at the bazaar. We also laid out some outfits that we had hired our friend Tamana to sew—clothing for the women and children both.
Before we left, we offered to pray. First we sang a song in English: “Holy Spirit come, we have need of Thee. For you are the one who sets the thirsty free.” Then we prayed in Dari, particularly for Leena’s sick mother, whose asthma was so severe you could hear her gasping for air with almost every breath.
Heather: I offered to get Leena’s mother some more asthma medicine and took her prescription with me as we left.
Heather & Dayna: It was nearly dark by the time we got home. We were exhausted but deeply fulfilled. To unwind we ate popcorn and watched a movie, Remember the Titans, albeit a pirated DVD version from Pakistan.
six
LIFE INTERRUPTED
Heather: In the weeks before our arrest on August 3, Marghalai and Soofia, the two cousins we encountered every day on the street, pressed us to visit their home in Sherpur. “My mother wants to see you,” Marghalai would insist. “When are you coming to our house? You said you would come to our house. How come you haven’t come to our house?”
We already had visited the family’s compound a handful of times over the spring and summer. My initial trip to the ICRC hospital to see Marghalai’s mother opened a door for Dayna and me to meet the girls’ extended family. In addition, the girls’ grandmother, a large, dark-complexioned woman, worked at the hospital every other Friday washing linens and clothing, and I would visit with her there. On occasion the grandmother washed Lida’s clothing, as Lida had no relatives to care for her.
The first time Dayna and I went to the Aamirs’ compound, we wanted to look in on Marghalai’s mother, who was recovering from her surgery
. Since a taxi turning through the narrow mud streets in poor neighborhoods usually attracted attention, we decided to walk the ten minutes to the family’s house. Khalid made us a plate of boulanee, fried pastry with potato filling, and we carried it to Marghalai and Soofia’s neighborhood on foot.
Walking proved to be a mistake. As soon as we entered Sherpur, an entourage of close to a dozen kids surrounded us, jeering as they walked. Some were shouting, “Khaarijee!” We often heard people yelling out “Foreigner!” as we walked through Kabul, but these boys seemed especially cruel. Two of the boys gestured with their hands as if to shoot at us and made accompanying rifle noises. Closer to the house, one boy made a motion across his neck implying he wanted to slit our throats. “We want to kill you,” he cried.
As we continued on, we noticed we would have to walk past a Taliban check post to get to the Aamirs’ gate. There we were, two foreigners, obviously going to visit an Afghan home and fending off a crowd of rude, noisy kids, and a Taliban guard was watching the whole procession.
“Maybe we should just ask the Talib for permission to bring the family some food,” I suggested to Dayna. At least by asking the guard for his consent, we would dispel any suspicion on his part.
Dayna agreed, and we approached the check post, a tiny shack with a white flag and a small lookout window; the post was situated near some grocery stands.
“Sir,” Dayna said, “we would like permission to bring an Afghan family this plate of food. The family is poor and we want to help. Would it be okay?”
Amazingly, the Talib agreed. We walked the rest of the way up the street to the Aamirs’ gate with the guard’s official sanction. But we never traveled on foot to the home again.
When we arrived at the gate, we entered the courtyard and greeted and kissed the women. They invited us inside to drink tea with them. Perhaps twenty people lived in the family’s compound of mud houses, and it was difficult to determine how all of the people were related. The grandmother had several sons, some of whom had either died or disappeared; and in the men’s absence, she presided over their wives and children. Two of the wives were the mothers of Marghalai and Soofia.
We sipped tea and talked with the family. Typical conversation in an Afghan home would begin with small talk and then circle around to a somber discussion about the family’s needs—life is hard, we do not have any food, our husbands and sons cannot find work, and our children are not going to school. We listened to the Aamir women as they told their desperate, all-too-common story.
Then Dayna and I taught the children the Dari song we called “God Made the World” and showed them how to perform the hand motions. This song became a favorite of the Aamir children, and they often sang it to themselves and with their friends.
Just before we left, the grandmother brought in a small girl with a large sore on the inside of her mouth. Her cheek was swollen and infected. We offered to pray for her in the name of Jesus, and the family gladly received our prayer.
On our next visit some weeks later, the grandmother told us that the child’s cheek had healed soon after we prayed. Now she asked if we would pray for her, too.
“Would you pray for my back?” the grandmother requested.
Other family members with ailments would ask us to pray each time we visited. Soofia’s mother, a striking, blue-eyed woman, usually experienced shooting pain in her back and legs due to a sciatic nerve problem. She would grab our hands, place them on the area of pain, and have us pray for her that way.
The kids always asked Dayna and me to sing the “God Made the World” song. “Sing the song with us!” the kids would plead.
Occasionally, we would read stories to the children, including some about the life of Jesus. I also told animal stories and read Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, which I had translated in my language class. After each story the kids would pipe up: “Read us another one!” They were hungry for entertainment.
One of the older Aamir boys, Aly, could read a little bit. The stories in a book Dayna brought to the house were written in English, phonetic Dari, and Dari script, and the Dari was simple enough for Aly to understand. After one of our visits, Aly asked Dayna, “Can I have this book?”
Dayna told him no, explaining that she used the book to develop her own language skills. But she promised to go into town and make him a copy.
On various visits, the Aamirs asked us questions about our faith. They were particularly interested in the practices of prayer and fasting.
“Do Christians fast?” the grandmother asked one day when Dayna kindly refused some candies being offered.
“Yes,” we said.
The grandmother explained to us that Muslims fasted during the month of Ramadan, denying themselves food and drink between sunup and sundown. We shared that we had no set method for fasting, but that we did so whenever and in whatever manner we believed God desired.
“If we have a problem, we might pray and fast from food in order to seek an answer from God,” we offered. “Or sometimes we fast as a way of telling God that we need and love him more than food.”
One day as the family continued to ask questions about our faith, another foreign friend and I explained that we could show them a film about the life of Jesus if they were interested. That way they would better understand our responses to their questions. They said they wanted to see the film.
A few days later, my friend and I went back to the house—again without Dayna—and showed the film using a laptop computer with a CD-ROM drive. Some of the mothers and children were there to see the film, but at times we had difficulty following the story line because the younger kids were misbehaving. One of the mothers kept getting up and leaving because her baby was crying and throwing fits.
Two of the older girls wept as they watched the scenes of Jesus being beaten and crucified. They covered their faces, peeping through the cracks in their fingers every few seconds, while the mothers dabbed tears from their eyes and cheeks. During the resurrection scene, the family at first seemed confused about what was happening; but once they realized that the Jesus character had come back to life, they all smiled and rejoiced out of relief.
When the film ended, we talked with the family as they shared their thoughts and, as usual, prayed with them before leaving the house.
One day at dusk Marghalai and Soofia came to our door in Wazir and told Dayna and me that one of the mothers in the family needed to see us right away. There had been an emergency, the girls insisted.
It was getting dark, making the prospect of visiting an Afghan home somewhat dangerous; women, whether Afghan or foreign, normally did not traverse the streets of Kabul after dark. While we often traveled to evening meetings by taxi, in this case we would have to venture into an unlit Afghan neighborhood and walk down an alley to get to the house. The prospect made us uneasy. Nevertheless, the girls urged us, claiming the family desperately needed our assistance, so we decided to go.
When we arrived, we found there was no emergency at all. The Aamir family only wanted to visit with us. They missed us, they said. We were disconcerted by the lie but encouraged by the family’s motivation of friendship.
On that visit we met another member of the Aamir clan—a young man who had just come home from living abroad. This young man knew that we were followers of Jesus. He explained that he had heard about Jesus while living in another Muslim country. The young man had seen the film about Jesus a number of times and recounted several of the scenes for us with enthusiasm. Before we left, the family told us they wanted to see the film again.
A week or two later, Dayna and I brought the film with us to the compound. This time we met another male relative who looked to be in his thirties; he was older than the man who had been living abroad. This older relative made small talk with us for a moment and then asked a surprisingly direct question: “What will being a Christian do for me?”
We were taken aback. No one ever had asked us about following Jesus in such a brazen manner before. We
answered as best we could, telling the man that following Jesus was an issue of the heart, not something a person did to get things. If anything, we said, he would get a relationship with Jesus, eternal life, spiritual blessings. Yet though we answered the man in earnest, we noticed that his tone was strange, perhaps cold.
As it turned out, we did not show the Aamirs the film that day; not everyone who wanted to see it was at home, the family told us. Meanwhile, the children were milling around with little to do, so Dayna took out her children’s storybook.
“Would you like to hear a story?” we asked.
“Yes!” the children exclaimed.
We read a couple of stories from the book—one about Jesus calming the sea during a storm. As we were reading, the older male relative we had just met came into the room and listened. After we finished, he asked Dayna if he could have her book. She told him no, but assured him she would make him a copy since she was already planning to make one for Aly.
Afterward Dayna gave the grandmother a radio from the bazaar, since the family did not have one. If they were interested in learning more about Jesus, Dayna explained, they could listen to some of the radio programs about him.
Before we left, the family told us they wanted us to come back and show the film as soon as they were finished rebuilding one of the single-room mud houses adjoining their courtyard. Then we could show the film in a nice new room, they said. Then the whole family would be available to watch.
Dayna: After meeting the older male relative at the Aamirs’ house, I decided to go downtown the next day and make copies of my children’s storybook for both him and Aly. Kabul had dozens of little copy stores.
Though the family members had asked me for the book, I was slightly nervous about copying a book that contained stories about the life of Jesus. Even so, since all of the stories were written in English and Dari, I did not believe the book would attract unnecessary attention. I had used the book for language learning.