Prisoners of Hope

by Dayna Curry

  —LETTER TO HEATHER FROM HER FATHER, OCTOBER 7, 2000

  Dayna: After we finished notating our copies of the translated charges, Atif and Bismillah left us. It was evening. As was my custom, I went outside to spend some time praying and worshiping God. I sat in one of the broken chairs near the courtyard gate.

  These times of quiet in God’s presence brought me the strength and peace I needed to endure the strain. As I reflected on my life, I was able to let God heal me of deep hurts and open my eyes to his goodness. Many evenings I thought about a man with whom I had shared some of my life in Kabul. We had decided to part as friends, but I missed him very much. At one time, I had wanted my friend to ask me to leave Afghanistan and date him in America. I had not enjoyed a deep friendship with a man in eleven years.

  From our time together, I learned that I really could remain pure in the company of a man. We laughed, prayed, and reached out to the poor. I cherished our time. I thought my friend was a gift from God, and I did not want our relationship to end. When we parted ways after a couple of months, my heart was broken. Perhaps my friend had only been a gift for a season, I thought. I spent many days and nights crying over the loss and wondered how I would ever get over it.

  During my evening quiet time in prison, too, I would sit in the corner of the courtyard and cry, telling God how much I missed my friend. I would ask God to please come close to me and heal my heart. I would discipline my heart and say, “God, you know I would love to be with this man again, but I trust you. I want your will for my life.” My heart ached, but I kept asking God to touch me.

  On the evening Atif and Bismillah left with our notated copies of the charges, I had not been out in the courtyard long when I heard footsteps. The gate opened. Najib and another man were leading a woman wearing only a head scarf into our building. I could not see her face. Another prisoner, I guessed. Some days earlier, guards had put two young Hazara women, one with a ten-month-old baby, into the spare room on our hallway. The women were arrested for interacting with some strange men—men not related to them—in connection with a carpet purchase, we were told. Perhaps this new woman was brought in for not wearing a burqa.

  Najib took the woman into the building and I went back to talking with God. Some moments later, Diana called me in to help translate. Inside, Najib and an official who had journeyed from Jalalabad were trying to talk to a very frustrated Westerner. Her name was Yvonne Ridley; she was a British journalist. Heather already had been translating for some minutes when I came in.

  “Will you please ask these men where I am and what they’re doing with me?” the woman asked.

  Yvonne explained that she had been transported to our prison from Jalalabad under the pretense that she likely would be flown out of the country from the Kabul airport. If she did not end up flying out, the men told her, then she would be able to stay with some foreigners in a really nice hotel.

  “They have satellite television, access to videos and computers, and all the food they want,” the guards promised.

  Well, she had been lied to.

  “This is the first time I’ve lost it,” Yvonne explained to the six of us. Today, October 4, was day seven of her captivity after being arrested for sneaking into Afghanistan under a burqa without visa or passport. She had come into the country under cover for her newspaper, The Sunday Express, to report on how the Afghan people felt about the coming war. She was forty-three years old.

  “When can she leave?” I asked the men, acting as translator. “When will you fly her out?” Najib and the official did not give a clear answer. “We will be back to talk with her. We will be back tomorrow.” Tomorrow was Friday, the day of prayer, an unlikely day for progress on her case.

  Najib went to retrieve a toshak and blanket for our new inmate, and Yvonne came with us to our room. Tears streamed down her face.

  “They’ve finally broken me,” she despaired. We were her first female company since her arrest.

  Yvonne told us she heard about our plight on the radio in Jalalabad. She said she also heard Mullah Omar was asking President George W. Bush to reconsider bombing the country in return for our handover. She remarked that the offer was a pipe dream for Mullah Omar.

  “I expect America to bomb this week,” Yvonne opined, noting the presence of three thousand journalists in Pakistan positioned to report on an attack. “It’s not a matter of if the U.S. will bomb, but when. You must brace yourselves for it.”

  Yvonne proceeded to enumerate the dreadful details of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. With horror and awe, she described the collapse of the Twin Towers and the sheer desperation of the people who jumped from the upper-story windows to escape fires and massive explosions. Passengers on the airplanes used their cell phones, she said, to call their loved ones and say their last goodbyes before the planes crashed. She talked about the incredible courage of the passengers who took their aircraft down in a Pennsylvania field to prevent the hijackers from using the plane as a missile. She told us of the young man, Todd Beamer, who said to the passengers, “Let’s roll,” before crashing that plane.

  The details overwhelmed us. We were gripped with sorrow. We had known the attack was serious, but now we had images—and they were gruesome. For the first time we could vaguely comprehend the emotional nightmare through which our country was living. Our hearts broke for the grieving families. We were also saddened to hear that some Americans were reacting against foreigners who looked Arab or Central Asian. Fear had taken hold.

  I was awake in my bed for hours that night; my heart physically hurt. We had spent a lot of time praying for the American families who lost loved ones back when we first found out about the tragedy, but now we felt the impact of the events in a profound way. How could we dare to hope the President would hold off bombing for the eight of us when so many had died? Action needed to be taken against Osama bin Laden. Our lives were in God’s hands. If we perished, we perished.

  We gave Yvonne a place to sleep on the floor, making sure she was comfortable, and told her she was welcome to have breakfast with us in the morning at seven o’clock.

  The next morning Diana made the grocery list, adding a carton of cigarettes for Yvonne. Yvonne warmed up some water and took a bucket bath. She was covered in mosquito bites and taking medication. Then she asked to borrow some of my makeup so she could feel a little more human.

  “Eyelash curlers!” she exclaimed, noticing I was holding a pair. “You have eyelash curlers. How wonderful!”

  Officials at the prison in Jalalabad had given Yvonne a little kit of toiletries and a fancy white dress covered in gold sequins and beads. We asked her what she was doing with a wedding dress.

  “I thought it was a bit elaborate for prison wear,” she quipped.

  Najib came to our room that morning with another man. They asked Yvonne for her last name and some other information for prison records. The cook needed to know how much food to prepare, Najib explained.

  Yvonne would not cooperate. “I refuse to talk,” she said. I was translating.

  “I am not going to eat anything until I am out of this place.” Yvonne was on a hunger strike. She had threatened to go on a no-bathing strike, but we begged her to refrain—Heather was already protesting our imprisonment by refusing to wash. One dirty person in our confines was enough.

  I told Najib, “I’m sorry, Yvonne is not eating, so you do not need this information from her.”

  Najib was steaming—I had never seen him so upset. “Well,” he said, “I will be happy if she dies.”

  “Oh, okay.” I waited to translate until he had walked away.

  Heather: Atif came back on Yvonne’s first full day at the prison and told us he was taking our notes to Pakistan to prepare our case. He and Bismillah would return in a week and present our defense to the court.

  I begged him not to go.

  “Please, we have no contact with anyone here. No progress will be made on our case if you leave, and the war cou
ld start. You might not be able to get back into the country.”

  Others pleaded, too. Atif assured us he would be back soon. With tensions escalating, however, I was not so confident.

  Before Atif left, I went out to the courtyard to write a note for him to carry to my family. Yvonne was in the courtyard smoking a cigarette. I cried as I wrote. I was upset that Atif was leaving. We could be totally cut off from the rest of the world if he was unable to return.

  Yvonne and I talked for a while and she told me crying was okay. I truly was comforted. I never felt like I had permission to cry. Yvonne let me be free enough to cry without trying to fix me. I was grateful.

  I asked Yvonne what she would like me to put in my letter so that word of her whereabouts could be communicated to the proper people. I added a brief paragraph about her at the end of the note. When I went back inside the room, Atif was waiting to leave. Najib asked me directly if I had written anything to my family about Yvonne.

  “Yes,” I answered, and he confiscated the letter. I had invested all that time writing to my family and he was taking my letter away. None of us was allowed to include any news of Yvonne in our notes, Najib said. He told me to rewrite my letter. I replied that I could not remember what it said, so Najib gave the letter back and let me copy the part to my parents.

  Dayna: On Saturday, the official from Jalalabad returned to the prison to speak with Yvonne about her ordeal. The conversation proved a less-than-harmonious exchange. Yvonne told us she was going to play it tough. We told her she might end up endangering herself. She did what she had to do to try to get released.

  Najib asked me to translate, but I told him I would rather not. He understood and asked one of his men to take my place.

  “You can judge a civilization by its prisons,” Yvonne announced to the men, “and you people are primitive. This is a revolting prison.” The new translator worked out the phraseology for the official.

  “We have been at war for twenty-five years,” the official replied. “The quality of our prisons is not a priority.”

  Yvonne was unmoved and continued to decry the conditions. Taliban guards gathered at the wooden gate and peered through the slats to glimpse the shouting foreigner.

  Later that afternoon, Afghani and his deputy came by to speak to Yvonne and deliver letters faxed by our parents. Yvonne was no more cordial than before. Afghani, who spoke fluent English, fully understood her. Lest anyone fail to catch the point, Yvonne spit at the men’s shoes.

  Afghani came inside and told us about the spitting. He was almost laughing from the shock. “She is a very hostile lady,” he exclaimed. “She even spit at our shoes!”

  We told Yvonne we did not think our conditions were so bad. “Well,” she answered, “you have introduced a very hygienic regime. This is likely the first time that toilet has seen disinfectant in many years.” She said she was full of admiration for our routine and the way we had organized ourselves. We had minimized the potential for disease and other health crises, she noted.

  Every now and then, Yvonne came into our worship meetings. She told us our singing lit up the place, that our voices made a wonderful, melodic sound—“a heavenly sound,” she said.

  “When you get out of here,” she encouraged us, “you all should go into a recording studio and cut an album by the ‘Kabul Six.’ ” We laughed at the prospect. If we ever were to assemble any songs for a record, we most certainly would not be the ones doing the singing!

  Heather: Late in the afternoon, heavy gunfire erupted while we were out in the courtyard. I went into the women jailers’ room and got under the bed. I did not know what was happening. The shooting and firing went on for more than half an hour. We later were told a U.S. spy drone had flown overhead. The shooting came from antiaircraft guns on the ground.

  I knew the episode meant war was near.

  That evening Afghani and his deputy returned to the courtyard to see how we were faring after the shooting. They came with a satellite phone. Unprompted by any request from us, they told us we could call our parents. Silke was particularly grateful; she had not yet received any letters from her family, since no adequate German translators could be tracked down in Kabul. For the duration of our imprisonment, the Germans experienced difficulty when it came to getting their letters. Kati, Silke, and Ursula had to remain incommunicado for long stretches, and it was very hard on them.

  The phone call made up for the difficult day. We were given unlimited time to talk to our families. I had not spoken to my parents since just before they were evacuated from Kabul, and I was so grateful for the chance to hear their voices again. We caught up on family life, and I told my parents about Yvonne. My dad said he felt confident the United States would not bomb Kabul while we were imprisoned in the city. My mother, on the other hand, told me to make sure I kept my wits about me because I would need them. Both of my parents reassured me that I was handling the pressure just fine. I felt like they understood me and let me deal with the crisis in my own way. I relinquished the phone greatly encouraged.

  Meanwhile, Najib, Afghani, Afghani’s deputy, and some other Taliban were sitting in the courtyard. When a newscast reported that an American drone had been shot down, the group cheered. The deputy punched the air with his fist. “Yes,” he exclaimed. The report about the drone was later declared untrue.

  Before he left, Afghani stated, “I am absolutely confident there will be no bombing by America for the next month. Now, for three months, I cannot tell you. But for one month, I am certain.”

  The following day, October 7, Najib cleaned out the storage room across the hall for Yvonne. He ended up taking her to a room upstairs that afternoon, however, and we did not see her again. We sent her on her way with a Ken Follett suspense novel to help her pass the time.

  That evening I was sitting in the hallway chatting with Maria-jan. One of the two Hazara prisoners had just gone into the bathroom. Suddenly, an incredibly loud explosion rocked the place, and the girl in the bathroom flung open the door. Her face froze in an expression of terror. “Was that a rocket?”

  We lost electricity. The two Afghan prisoners went into the spare room and began to cry.

  Diana knew right away that the United States had kicked off its bombing campaign. I was not sure. Considering what my father had said on the phone, I wondered if perhaps the Northern Alliance was attacking.

  I went into the jailers’ room and got underneath the bed. I hurriedly walled myself in with toshaks, pillows, and blankets. I had already removed the glass panes from the outside window and from two registration windows that opened onto the entranceway.

  I knew that the weight of an explosion could shatter glass into thousands of minuscule slivers. I assumed that if an explosion caused any part of our building to collapse, I would be slightly more protected from debris if I was under the bed. At the very least, the covering provided an element of security. I tried to take all precautions—after all, there was now a war going on.

  Meanwhile, I prayed aggressively, trying to keep my focus on God’s ability to protect us.

  Dayna: I stood at the door to the courtyard gazing at the fireworks show. The Afghan women inside were crying. Silke, Ursula, Kati, and I quietly watched the tracer bullets fly through the air. A red ball would traverse the sky and a red streak would follow it. The whole sky would light up red. The bombing did not seem terribly close, but the antiaircraft guns were loud.

  I heard Heather praying in the jailers’ room: “Thank you, Lord, for protecting us. Thank you, Lord, that you are in control.”

  Heather: I remained underneath the bed for some time. I was holding myself together, but with great effort. Lying under the bed was almost like being in a coffin. I would say to myself, “Okay, remember when you built forts as a little girl. You are in a fort.”

  The whole prison was pitch black. We had a few candles burning in the hall.

  Suddenly I heard Diana’s voice: “Oh my gosh, she has gone into labor! Maria-jan has gone into
labor! There is bombing, no electricity, and we’re in the middle of a blinking prison!”

  I evaluated the desperate situation and I thought to myself, I am much better use to everyone if I just stay under this bed. The best thing I can do is not lose it.

  The others assisted Maria-jan.

  Dayna: Maria-jan was lying down in the hallway next to the bathroom. Her lower back was killing her. Diana was rubbing her back, trying to soothe her. We had given Maria-jan money for the doctor in the past for regular exams. She was having much difficulty with her pregnancy and was frequently in pain. This episode, however, was different from the others.

  I was translating.

  Diana said: “Ask her if her water has broken.”

  I asked her. “Is your water broken?”

  “Yes,” Maria-jan moaned.

  “Ask her how much water has come out. Is it a lot or a little?”

  “How much water has come out? A lot?” I asked her.

  Quite a lot, Maria-jan indicated.

  Diana was exasperated. “No, Lord,” she prayed. “I can’t deliver premature twins. I can’t do this. Please don’t let this happen!”

  Diana said we would have to try to get Maria-jan some help or get her to a hospital. Diana knew premature twins would die if delivered here. Kati went and called for Najib. Minutes later, Najib and Sonan appeared.

  When she saw the men, Maria-jan became defensive. She was embarrassed.

  “Tell the boss there is no problem.”

  I said to Najib: “She has just broken her water. She is going to have a baby.”

  Maria-jan looked at me. “That is shameful to say.” These men were not her relatives. For her to be exposed like this was taboo in her culture.

  “But these are your children,” I said, pleading with her. “You are in pain. You need to go to the hospital.”