by Dayna Curry
Similarly, when the boss wanted to know where our “Jesus” CD came from, I would rather have told him directly from whom we got the film. Instead, we tried to protect our friend by giving answers as far removed from the actual hand-off as we could and, in the process, became entangled in a Q-and-A about an unnamed language teacher who used to work in Pakistan.
I did lie outright on a specific point once and carried a lot of guilt over it. “Did you ever give an injeel [New Testament] to anyone?” an interrogator asked. One family came to mind, but I answered, “No.” I was afraid of drawing another Afghan family into the ordeal. I could imagine the questions: Who are they? Where do they live? Even so, afterward I deeply regretted lying. I wished I had said, “Yes, I’ve given an injeel to one family,” and then just not said to whom.
One day we were up in the boss’s office, and he asked me several questions about my computer: Where did I get it? Was it mine? I wrote out a more forthcoming set of answers than I had for the whole duration of questioning. The computer was mine, it was a gift from my mother, and so on. I handed the paper to him. Then someone translated it.
“I am sick of you lying,” the boss shouted abruptly. “You must start telling us the truth. All these things you have told us are lies!” He ripped up the document, crumpled up the pieces, and threw the wad on the floor. I sat there, dumbfounded, and proceeded to write out the same answer again.
Later, our translator, Karim, told us, “Do not worry. Their seniors instructed them to put pressure on you. Do not get nervous. Do not be afraid.”
Every morning, we woke up nervously wondering whom among our acquaintances the Taliban might bring to our courtyard next. Perhaps a day or so after the other Shelter Germany women arrived, a guard came in with our egg lady, Leena, and her asthmatic mother.
Leena, crying uncontrollably, was nearly hyperventilating. She threw herself on the ground, weeping. Her mother tried to comfort her, but to no avail.
I went over to Leena, hugged her, and tried to get the story out of her. She cried out, “My two little children! Dear God, dear God!” Apparently, she had locked the children up by themselves in her mud room while she went out to sell eggs. She was desperate to get back to them. They were only two and three years old.
Once she calmed down, Leena told me what had happened. On hearing that Heather and I had been arrested, Leena and her mother went to the Masons’ house that day to sell eggs. Of course, by then the Masons had fled the country. When the women arrived at the Masons’ house, a strange man came to the door. Not certain what was going on, Leena and her mother decided to wait on the street for Katherine to return. Within minutes, a group of Taliban pulled up in a truck and grabbed the women, deliberately breaking Leena’s eggs in the process.
I immediately wrote a note to the boss imploring him to release the women. “We only bought our eggs from them,” I wrote. “They have done nothing.” Heather and I both signed the note.
Mariam helped plead the women’s case, too; but, while Leena and her mother were questioned that evening, they were not released until the following morning. Mariam had tears of joy in her eyes when Leena and her mother left the compound. She praised the boss for having given Leena the equivalent of five U.S. dollars to help her get a taxi home. We, too, gave Leena some money for the eggs she lost during the arrest.
One day we learned that the Taliban had captured all of the boys who participated in the street kids project. We heard it from one of the Afghan girls, whose mother had brought her the news on visiting day. This girl’s mother told her that the boys had been taken off the street, beaten, questioned, and accused of being Christians. The news sobered us. We were deeply grieved to learn that these boys had suffered on account of our actions. To our great relief, our Afghan friend told us a couple of weeks later that the boys were back on the street.
The boss finished the bulk of our interrogations after a week and a half, and he came to tell Heather and me about it late at night. We were already in bed. The boss came in smiling and said, “Now you can talk with the other foreign women. Now you can see them.”
We were not terribly excited. We wanted to sleep. Plus, unbeknownst to the boss, we had been talking to our friends with Mariam’s consent during the day while they stayed in our courtyard.
Nonetheless, with his typical joviality the boss urged us to come with him. We followed him to the other women’s room in the office building, where our friends were winding down for bed.
“See, you can talk together,” the boss said, grinning. We all kind of looked at each other. He seemed surprised that we were not particularly emotional, but we stayed together and talked. An hour went by.
At some point I went to the rest room, which was down the hall from our friends’ room. On my way back, I could hear music being played on the floor above me. In seconds I recognized the melody and realized that the Taliban had searched our house in Wazir. They were playing one of my cassettes of Dari worship songs. I would have more for which to answer.
Interrogations became sporadic for the next week and a half. By now, our four Shelter Germany friends were staying in our room off the courtyard. We tried to make light of the questioning sessions. “Who gets to go drink tea with the boss today?” we would ask each other every morning. Going to the boss’s office was not so bad—at least in doing so we got to leave the courtyard.
One day the senior Talib said to me, “The Aamir family said you gave them a radio and that you guided them to Jesus radio programs.”
I said, “Yes, I gave them a radio and told them about the Jesus programs, because that is what I listen to. But they had a choice to listen to whatever they wanted to hear.”
Later that afternoon, our translator, Karim, came to the courtyard to visit us. He looked at us blankly: “You really are guilty. You had those tapes. You guided the family to those radio programs. You really were trying to convert people.”
“No!” we replied. “We just shared with them the things that have helped us—to give them hope.” It was a sad exchange.
The next day, however, Karim was back on our side, and on the interrogations went.
Our days in the reform school prison began at 4:30 A.M. to the sound of the call to prayer going out over the madrassa’s loudspeaker on the other side of our compound. The volume on the loudspeaker was exceedingly high. Audiocassettes of singing and chanting would play for about thirty minutes, and it was difficult to sleep through the sound. Only a handful of the Afghan women would wake up to pray at that early hour.
At 6 A.M. one of the Afghan women would sweep the dirt in the courtyard, and we would awaken again, this time to the sound of the coarse straw broom brushing over the ground. Kati and Silke slept outside, which meant the two of them got swept out of bed every morning. The Afghan women swept twice a day. Sometimes we would sweep for them, and at least once a week we would try to clean all of their dishes at the freestanding water faucet. The women always tried to stop us: “No, do not do that! That is our job,” they would insist. But we would continue to help.
Sometime between 6 and 7 A.M., we would hear a knock on the courtyard gate, and Mariam would enter our room carrying flat bread wrapped in a filthy cloth. She would put the cloth down, then put out the bread, a teakettle, and a few glasses. Heather slept through breakfast on some days; her toshak was positioned against the back wall some distance from the door.
Right after breakfast, we would hear another knock on the rickety wooden gate, and the young women’s teacher would come into the yard. The Afghan women would follow the teacher into their large room by the concrete slab and go through their lessons until 11 or 11:30. The women learned by chanting. Sometimes they would come outside and break up into small groups to chant or practice memorization drills. All of the women would come out into the courtyard at around ten o’clock for a break, at which time the teacher and some of her favored pupils would drink tea.
While the Afghan women were in class, we foreign women would take our sh
owers—or bucket baths. We would carry pink plastic buckets up the staircase in the corner of the courtyard into a kind of foyer area for the bathroom. A dank, dirty concrete room, the foyer contained only a small faucet from which cold water sometimes trickled. If there was no water, then we would go back down to the courtyard and fill our buckets at the freestanding faucet.
The Afghan women typically took their baths in the foyer, and at almost any time of day, you would walk in on women bathing in this room.
Across the foyer was a wooden door that hung off-kilter on its hinges and opened onto a room furnished with a filthy bathtub and a squatty potty—really a hole in the floor surrounded by concrete with places for your feet. The Afghan women tried to keep the bathtub full at all times by stuffing the drain with paper. Floating on top of the dirty water were plastic jugs and cups. The women manually flushed the toilet with water from the tub and washed themselves in lieu of using toilet paper.
I took my bath in this second room. The floor was nasty from the toilet water, and like the Afghan women, I wore plastic sandals when I bathed. The bathroom had no working light—only a tangle of wires where a fixture used to hang—which meant you had to keep the door cracked in order to see. Once while taking my bath I touched the live wires and shocked myself.
“Ohhh!” I cried, and Mariam came running to help. Happily, the incident resulted in some improvement for the Afghan women. Two or three days later, the prison arranged to have the whole light fixture repaired.
Several weeks into our stay, we discovered that we could order items from the bazaar by giving a list and money to Mariam. I usually made the list at noon. One of the first things we ordered was a heating coil to warm our bathwater. We also ordered toilet paper, which unfortunately tended to clog the squatty potty.
We regularly ordered cucumbers, tomatoes, and cheese to supplement our prison diet. At mealtime, Mariam usually would bring in a few bowls of vegetables cooked in grease—okra, eggplant, or pumpkin, for example. Sometimes she brought only rice with a few raisins sprinkled on top, or beans without rice. We would cheer when she brought rice and beans, our favorite meal, which we got every two days if we were lucky. Potatoes elicited cheers, too, but we had potatoes only four or five times. The meat we were given on rare occasions consisted of mostly fat and gristle and usually was served in a greasy broth that tasted like oil. Bread, the Afghan staple, came with every meal.
If we declined to eat a particular prison meal in favor of our hodgepodge of food items from the bazaar, then we would give our portion of hot food to the Afghan women. We offered any extra salad to the poorest girls—those without family to give them money—as the women with family usually were gifted with fruits and vegetables when their relatives visited on Tuesdays.
One day we ordered fly swatters from the bazaar. We could not sit in our room for more than a few seconds without flies landing all over us. At night we noticed that hundreds of flies took to resting on the blue plastic clothesline strung across our room. Once we bought the swatters, fly killing became a sport—we considered it a way of simultaneously passing the time and entertaining ourselves.
I would tear off a couple squares of toilet paper to use as burial cloth for the flies and would wrap up the paper only after retrieving fifty deceased insects. My goal was to kill 150 flies each day. Every now and then Kati, Silke, or Diana would take up the other fly swatter and join in the battle. We would count aloud as the flies dropped dead: “Twenty-three! Twenty-four …” Our shenanigans really did help to clear the room of flies, at least for a time. Once we put the swatters to use playing badminton out in the yard with a crumpled-up piece of paper.
I used the mornings to pray and worship God while the Afghan women were in their room with the teacher. During this time, some of us foreign women would sit on the toshaks lining the sidewalk outside of our room. You also could take a toshak and move down the sidewalk toward the bathroom, but then you would have to acclimate yourself to the smell. If you stayed too near our room, those inside could hear you singing. I usually took a metal chair to a corner of the courtyard or grabbed a dusty burlap sheet and sat near the tree.
Finding a place to sit quietly did not always come easily, as there were several curious little girls staying in the courtyard with us—the daughters of Mariam and a couple of the Afghan women prisoners. Mariam’s two small girls were particularly playful. They would wander up and turn the pages of my Bible or touch my hair. One of the little girls approached me one morning and started making faces in the reflection of my sunglasses. She pulled out the corners of her mouth and stuck out her tongue right up next to my lenses.
Commotion was the norm in our courtyard at other times of day. Often the Afghan women would fight with one another or sit alone and cry loudly. At least twice each day, one of the Afghan women would break down and wail. Usually, if one started, then others would begin to cry, too. Dramatic sessions of moaning and crying would break out and go on for long stretches of time. When the crying would start, we foreign women would remark, “Who do you think that is?” and “I wonder what is wrong.” Some of the girls cried more often than others.
I noticed one sweet pattern. Whenever Heather cried, our young friend Nafisa—who had run away from her abusive husband in Herat—would also cry. Once Nafisa threw herself down on the concrete near the women’s room, covered herself up with her chawdur, and bawled for an extended time. After a while, I walked over to her and asked her what was the matter. Nafisa said, “When Heather cries, it makes me think of my father.” She knew how badly Heather missed her parents.
The only real way to have privacy in the courtyard was to do as Nafisa did and cover your head with your chawdur. I did this a lot in the mornings and was able to enjoy my quiet time this way with fewer interruptions. I would sing to the Lord and read scripture. Much of the time I would sit still and listen. What was God saying to my heart? I love you. Trust me. Do not worry. Rest. You will get out of prison safely.
These simple things brought me such comfort. I felt secure. The words I love you penetrated my heart. They were not just words. One moment I would feel alone. Then I would sense the love of God and realize I was not alone. God really was right there. The simplicity and power of God’s presence calmed me. I felt very close to him. Once while praying I had an image in my mind of God, my father, holding me while I clasped my arms around his neck. The picture reassured me that God would not let me go. He would always be with me to comfort me. I did not need to fear.
Every day I would write down what I thought the Lord was saying. In doing so I developed discipline. For years I struggled to keep a regular record of the things God was speaking to my heart, but I could never do it. I prayed for help and still could not seem to make the time. In prison, God answered my prayer. Despite the distractions in the courtyard, I had all the time in the world to spend in prayer, and an entirely different kind of intimacy with God opened up for me. My heart’s constant cry to know him better was met with the most beautiful response. God wanted me to know I could trust him and that he had good plans for my life.
After the September 11 attacks on America, and then again after the United States started bombing Kabul, I had to regroup. I asked myself, “What if I die?” God brought to mind something I heard said at a conference shortly before I returned to Kabul in March. At the conference, someone asked Jackie Pullinger, who lived for decades with the poor in Hong Kong: “How did you really make it serving the poor for so many years? What is the secret of sticking it out for the long haul?” She answered something like this: “You have to resolve in your heart that God is good. No matter what happens, you must know in your heart that he is good.”
I determined that I would believe in God’s goodness. In prison I said, “Okay, Lord. I believe you are good. I trust that if I die right now in this situation, then it must be the best thing for me. If I die, I will be with you. If dying will cause many people to call upon Jesus, then dying would be an honor.”
Of
course, I did not want to die. I wanted the chance to get married. I did not believe I was going to die based on what the Lord seemed to be saying to me; but I accepted death as a possibility, and I did not fear it. I trusted the Lord with my life. I meditated on this verse from the Psalms: “All the ways of the Lord are loving and faithful” (Psalm 25:10a, NIV).
Once I was asked, “Dayna, do you really think we are going to get out of here?”
I responded, “I am going to believe it to the end. If it doesn’t happen, then I just missed God; I didn’t hear him. But until then, I am going to believe for our freedom.”
Looking at the practical pieces of the puzzle, I could not imagine the Taliban killing us. Our translator, Karim, told us about a decree Mullah Omar had issued in June, declaring that a foreigner charged with inviting Afghans to accept another religion would receive three to ten days in prison and expulsion from the country.
In our case, the Taliban had no evidence that we were trying to coax the Aamir family to change their religion, only that we had shown a film and presented literature. Of course, I realized that the Taliban might not appreciate the difference. Still, I tried to explain my point of view during questioning.
In one session, the senior Talib with the large nose looked at me and said firmly, “Just admit that you were preaching and all of this will be over.”
I replied, “I understand why you think we were preaching, but I cannot admit to something I was not doing. To me, preaching would be telling someone they needed to change their religion. I was sharing what I believe, just sharing about Jesus and how he changed my life.”
Except for Karim, I was alone during this exchange. On a few occasions, due to physical exhaustion from the pressure, Heather requested to remain behind. I did not mind. During these sessions, the interrogators would ask questions pertaining only to me.