by Dayna Curry
KABUL CITY: The capital city Kabul, devastated by twenty-two years of war, is a constant reminder to its people of the hardships and suffering they have endured. Mud houses built on the side of the mountain, often without electricity and running water, provide shelter for the city’s poorest of the poor.
LANDSCAPE: The rugged landscape of the Kabul road near the oasis village of Sirowbi is breathtaking. This is one of the few places on the road between Peshawar and Kabul where a traveler can see lush vegetation as the river winds against the backdrop of the Hindu Kush mountains.
STARVING CHILD: A four-year-old girl dying of severe malnutrition and amoebic dysentery in an Afghan refugee hospital in Pakistan. Sweltering heat reaching 115 degrees, lack of air-conditioning, and poor sanitary conditions made recovery a slow and difficult process. Heather’s encounter with this little girl in 1998 was one of the motivating factors in her decision to return to help the Afghan people.
OUR HOUSE: Our home, situated in a heavily populated expatriate and Taliban neighborhood, became a benevolence center for dozens of widows and children who came daily.
DAYNA WITH STREET CHILDREN: Dayna with a group of children whom she befriended and consistently helped. The child standing in the back is actually a girl dressed in boy’s clothing—not an uncommon practice in Afghanistan.
HEATHER WITH CHILDREN: Heather with a pair of street children during a visit to their home.
REFUGEE CHILDREN: Refugee children flock to the side of foreigners who come to bring aid. For these precious children, foreign aid is often their only means of survival in the harsh, unrelenting conditions of the refugee camps.
GROUP OF YOUNG AFGHAN GIRLS: This group of beautiful young Afghan girls maintain their joy despite the Taliban law prohibiting girls from attending school or working.
TWO GIRLS: A pair of Afghan girls. Their piercing eyes and beautiful smiles reflect the strength and vigor of the Afghan spirit.
SMILING BOYS: These smiling Afghan street boys grab onto a passing car loaded with foreigners, hoping to get some money while their picture is taken.
KIDS IN A TRUCK: A handful of children from the nomadic Kuchi tribe piled into a cargo truck driving from Kabul to Peshawar through the Khyber Pass.
STREET BOYS AT THE SHELTER FOR KIDS PROJECT: Many of the street boys gathered daily at the project, Shelter for Kids, where they were provided a warm meal, an opportunity to learn various job skills, and a safe area in which to play.
WOMEN IN BURKAS: Under the Taliban regime, Afghan women were forced to wear the head-to-toe coverings, hiding them from the view of men. The small mesh piece over the eyes impaired vision and hindered the ability to carry out daily activities. Only young girls and elderly women were exempt from this law.
PATIENT ON THE FLOOR: Lack of financial and medical resources and poor sanitary conditions left this patient on the floor of an overcrowded hospital in Kabul. Medical care in Afghanistan is among the worst in the world.
BURN VICTIM: People such as this one, suffering from severe third-degree burns, are not an uncommon sight in Afghanistan’s hospitals. Often young women set themselves on fire in order to escape a life of poverty, rejection, and abuse.
PRISON #1: Our prison, located at the headquarters of the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. Our room, approximately 10 × 20 feet, connected with a larger compound housing thirty female Afghan prisoners. We lived here for six weeks until just after September 11. The elephant drawing is the remains of an elaborate mural of animals drawn on our wall by Silke, a German artist and fellow prisoner. The Taliban painted over all the other animals when we left.
REUNION WITH OUR PARENTS: After we landed in the C-130 aircraft at the military base in Islamabad, Pakistan, the long-awaited moment finally arrived. With tremendous joy we hugged our parents, Nancy Cassell and John Mercer, and celebrated our freedom from Taliban captivity.
DAYNA AND HEATHER ON THE PHONE WITH THE PRESIDENT: The evening of our rescue, November 14, 2001, we received a phone call from the President of the United States, George W. Bush. We were incredibly honored and excited to talk with him.
IN THE OVAL OFFICE: We receive a tour of the Oval Office from President Bush.
DAYNA AND HEATHER WITH FRIENDS: Thanks to the generosity of our church in Waco and their contacts, we were able to renew ourselves during a five-day trip to the Virgin Islands with two of our friends one month after our release from captivity.
The next day Mariam allowed me to give out my clothing to the women who did not have extended family. Nafisa got one of the outfits. Shalah picked out a Kuchi dress, even though she did have family. Dayna gave Mariam a bottle of shampoo for everyone to use. Mariam used the shampoo often, but we never saw the bottle in the hands of the Afghan women.
eleven
THE WORLD OUTSIDE
Dayna: Our first contact with the rest of the world came in the form of a package courtesy of our embassies in Islamabad, Pakistan. The package’s arrival was heralded by the boss’s late-night knock on the courtyard gate. We came to recognize the knocks of pertinent parties. The boss knocked firmly, whereas Karim had a much softer knock than anyone else. Usually the man who brought our food at mealtime knocked as if an army were about to storm the courtyard.
The night of August 18, the boss and some of his sidekicks came into our room carrying a box and a black plastic backpack. The boss was grinning ear-to-ear. He put the parcels on the floor and proceeded to unpack the items one at a time, almost as if he were the giver and not merely the bearer of the gifts. He took out chips, cookies, shampoos, conditioners, deodorant, brushes, lotions, razors, soap, scented shower gels, medicine, jam, and cheeses.
Then he said, “Well, Mr. Georg and Mr. Peter do not need these.” Out came a stash of feminine supplies. The boss relished the joke. He could not quit smiling.
Mariam told us afterward that when he first sorted through the package, the boss had seemed somewhat mystified by feminine packets. “The men do not need these,” Mariam said by way of explanation. The boss blushed.
In fact, we noticed something humorous about the products a few days later. One brand was called Always, and the other Trust.
“Wow, a message from God!” we joked. But the coincidence was neat, especially since no note had accompanied our package. We decided “Always Trust” would do for a clandestine communication.
As we sorted through the gifts, Heather noticed packages of M&M’s and Oreos included in the parcels. Those treats were her favorites, and when the boss unpacked them, she knew her dad had been involved in assembling the package. She was greatly encouraged.
Before the boss left, he told us: “Do not give any of these things out to the other women.” He did not want the Afghans spoiled by Western luxuries, he said. We did not obey fully. The next day we passed out bowls of M&M’s as a lunchtime dessert so our Afghan friends could try them.
Silke spent hours making a card for each embassy to thank our government officials for the parcels. On the cards, we were depicted in our small room opening all of the gifts. Sadly, none of the cards was delivered. First Karim came to the courtyard and told us that tea had been spilt on the card for the German embassy. So Silke patiently produced a fourth card. Then some men came to our room and asked us to write down and sign a list of the items we had received.
“The Taliban are doing this so they do not have to send the cards,” Heather remarked. She was right. Our signatures, not the beautiful cards, were all our embassies received as evidence that the gifts had been delivered.
About a week after the embassy package came, a couple of the Afghan girls approached me in the bathroom. “Can we have some soap?” they whispered.
I went back to the room, got them a Dove bar, and carried it inconspicuously back up the bathroom stairs. As I started down the stairs, I took a wrong step and fell hard, smacking my side against the edge of the cement staircase so loudly that everyone heard it.
“Aaaagh!” I cried. The fall knocked the
wind out of me. All I could do was lie on the sidewalk and continue to groan. I could hardly breathe.
Diana, who was an orthopedic nurse, came running over to see about me. She prayed aloud, asking Jesus to touch me, and I began to relax. Seconds later, Heather was at my side holding my hand. We had not spoken since the day before due to some strain between us, and I was grateful she was near.
“It is so good to see you, Heather,” I said.
Mariam called in the prison compound’s doctor-in-residence, but Diana told him she had everything under control. Helpful as he was, the doctor made a few outdated suggestions, and Diana wanted to keep hold of the reins when it came to our health. She put me on observation every half hour for the next several hours and was concerned about possible damage to my spleen.
Later that evening, the doctor came again to check on me and found me not well. I could not move, breathe, cough, or laugh without a great deal of pain, and my asthma had started acting up. Diana thought I might have suffered a fracture, but she could not tell without an X ray.
Interestingly, the boss gave permission right away to have me checked out. He proceeded to round up a cadre of right-hand men to take Diana and me to the hospital and then back to my house in Wazir to retrieve my asthma inhaler. The next day we understood why the boss had been so amenable: Representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross arrived at the compound to examine us.
My trip to the hospital commenced, as usual, after curfew in the late hours of the night. We left around 11 P.M. Our party included Diana and me, Mariam, the doctor, the boss, and several armed guards. Our vehicle formed a caravan with the requisite black pickups—one in front of us and one behind. The boss was driving us.
We drove through the city past Wazir to a Soviet-era monstrosity of a building reported to be the best hospital in Kabul. The boss pulled up right next to the front door, almost as if he were making sure to avert any attempt we might make at an escape. The hospital was all but deserted. We passed a couple of doctors and empty beds in an emergency room area and boarded an ancient elevator equipped for an elevator man. We got off several floors up and found the doctor we needed. He knew some English. There were no patients on the floor, as far as we could tell.
Diana shuffled the men out of the room so I could remove some clothing in preparation for the X ray. The doctor came back with a lead covering and took a frontal X ray, which came out showing I was fine. Diana suggested a lateral X ray, and the boss became irritated. When the doctor from our prison compound supported Diana’s request, the boss relented. The second X ray did not take very well, but the boss insisted we had no time to do another. Diana pressed. The boss rebuffed her and told the hospital doctor not to listen to her. Meanwhile, the hospital doctor prescribed some pain medicine. The boss offered to pay for it, but we already had medicine back at the compound.
Next our group headed to Wazir. When we got to my house, the boss pulled out a big box of keys belonging, I assumed, to all the houses the Taliban had seized. I recognized my key chain, and we broke the seal on the front door to get in. I could not see into the living room because the doors to the different rooms were locked, but I could see that the foyer and hall were dirty. In a bucket in the downstairs bathroom lay a dead mouse, already smelling.
I opened the door to my bedroom and confronted a disaster. Clothing and papers and knickknacks were all over the floor. I dug through my drawers to find my inhaler and, for the other foreign women, some socks. Nights at the prison had become cooler. I secretly took some more makeup, as my supply at the prison had nearly run out. Then I grabbed my pillow—the pillows at the compound were hard as rocks—and a green fleece blanket, since the prison blankets were rank. The kitchen was locked, and as there was no hope of identifying the kitchen key among the dozens of others in the key box, Diana and I had to forgo retrieving food items.
I asked the boss if I could take another Bible since we were short one in the prison, but he said no. I would not be permitted for reasons having to do with the Taliban’s inventory records on the house. Then I asked the boss about playing cards, explaining that the cards would help us pass time at the prison. The other women had begged me to bring some back.
The boss and his men looked at one another. “Yes, you can take that.”
I grabbed four decks, which we wore to pieces in the following months. Back at the courtyard, our friend Shalah told me that any Afghan caught playing cards would be slapped with a three-month prison sentence.
The following day a Talib with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs named Abdul Gaffoor Afghani—we called him, simply, Afghani—came to the courtyard and told us in flawless English that representatives from ICRC had arrived at the compound to see us. We told Afghani we were not going anywhere without permission from our boss.
“I have been lied to several times,” Diana quipped. Afghani left to see what he could do.
“I have had a victory,” Afghani said when he returned. “I have gotten permission for you and the two foreign men to meet together.” We were overjoyed.
A woman and two men from ICRC were waiting for us in the boss’s office. The woman was an administrator; one of the men was a doctor; and the other man was the leader of the delegation. Another foreigner accompanied the group as a translator.
We sat down on the boss’s familiar couches, and then Peter and Georg walked in. We had not seen the men at all since before the arrest more than three weeks earlier. The only word we had gotten from Georg at that point was a note encouraging Diana to quit fasting. As we suspected, the boss had made him write it.
Georg approached each of us and shook our hands. He looked very bad. His face was pale and drawn. Yet even in his apparent state of ill health, Georg was the perfect diplomat and leader, graciously thanking the ICRC guests for coming.
The ICRC delegation was very interested in our overall treatment, living conditions, health, and diet. After asking us some questions, the doctor explained that he wanted to examine Peter and Georg first and then examine us in our room. The boss—via Afghani’s translation—replied, “No.” A male doctor would not be permitted either to examine women or to enter an area of the compound where Afghan women resided.
The head of the delegation seemed somewhat irritated but maintained his composure. Apparently, the delegation originally had been granted permission to bring a male doctor in to examine both men and women. Yet to comply with the boss’s strictures, the ICRC leader radioed a highly qualified female Italian nurse to join us.
When the man pronounced her name, we recognized it immediately. He had contacted the Italian nurse from the ICRC hospital where Heather volunteered before we were taken. This was the nurse who had been helping us try to find a home for Lida, the girl with cerebral palsy. When the nurse arrived, we greeted her but pretended to have no acquaintance with her. She did the same. Simply seeing her comforted us.
Throughout the meeting, Heather seemed to be very tired. She held my hand and did not look very well. In a free moment, the male doctor asked some of the others if Heather was okay.
When we had finished answering questions, the Italian nurse and the female administrator accompanied us back to our room for our examination. After we sat down, the administrator handed me a note. It was from my mother. She wrote, “I’ll be there as soon as they tell me to come.” I was surprised. My parents’ loving commitment deeply touched me.
In our meeting, we told the administrator we needed new blankets and complained about the dreadful bathroom conditions and infestation of flies in our room. The woman gave us some ICRC forms for letter writing and assured us that the Taliban would pick up our letters the following day for mailing. From that point on, she said, ICRC staff would come to visit us on a regular basis.
At the Italian nurse’s suggestion, I followed her back to the office building so the male doctor could examine me. I was suffering a lot of pain from my accident the day before, and the boss granted the doctor permission to see me. Squeezing m
y side—a painful experience on my end—the doctor determined that I was badly bruised. I had not broken anything, he said, but my side would hurt for several weeks. In fact, it was six weeks before I could lie down without the support of extra pillows. For two weeks I took pain medicine every day.
After the doctor finished, he and the Italian woman asked me several questions about Heather’s state of mind. I explained that she was struggling emotionally. The doctor and nurse sent me back to the courtyard to offer Heather the opportunity for counseling during subsequent ICRC visits, and Heather agreed. She thought speaking candidly with someone on the outside about the pressures of our situation would benefit her. But the doctors never returned. The Taliban would not permit them. The closest we got to seeing anyone from ICRC again occurred when the boss allowed a shipment of ICRC blankets to be delivered to our courtyard. There were enough for all of the Afghan women, too.
Heather: When Georg and Peter came into the ICRC meeting in the boss’s office, I experienced some relief. Georg was our leader. His presence—and Peter’s—provided me reassurance. I was delighted to see them. When Georg came to me and shook my hand, he held it for what seemed a long time. He could tell I was having a rough time. Our eyes filled with tears. I was just so happy to see him.
I listened intently as the various ICRC representatives explained the reason for their visit along with their hopes for future interactions. They were amazingly diplomatic.
On the following day, August 27, Karim visited our compound and told us our parents and diplomats were in Kabul. He had mentioned more than a week earlier that the diplomats arrived in town, but we never saw them. Instead we got the care package, which at least confirmed a rumor that our parents were in Pakistan. Once I saw the M&M’s and Oreos, I knew my father was close by.