by Dayna Curry
In the meantime, we prepared to make renovations on the place. Silke was first on the chore list to have bathroom duty. She courageously entered the bathroom armed with our new toilet brush and some bleach and went to work.
In these first days staying at the night prison, we complained to Najib about the guard sleeping in the hallway. We were offended at having to sleep in such close proximity to a man and share a bathroom with him. The arrangement totally violated the mores of Afghan culture. We were accustomed to women jailers, but in this prison we could hear the guard clearing his throat at night. We would have to pass by him going back and forth to the bathroom.
We also went without a lock for a couple of nights and tried to block our door with heavy bags. Georg arranged for the prison overseer to get us a key. After that, we were able to lock the door from the inside.
On one occasion a high-level intelligence official and his sidekick visited us in our room carrying a video camera. Already dressed for bed, we were astounded that the man wanted to film us. I stood talking to the men at the door, trying to be polite in the face of an enormous cultural breach; but the others were saying, “Tell him to leave!” and “What does he want with us?” The man did not understand English, so I explained that we were tired and wanted to go to bed. One of the guards explained that this was a man of high office. I tried to show the official respect but told him we did not want to be filmed. Finally, we got him to leave.
Georg complained intensely to Najib the following morning. Najib protected the man with a ludicrous excuse. “That was not a video camera,” he insisted. “Those were binoculars.” We stood our ground and argued that the man in fact did have a video camera. Najib would not budge.
Heather: Najib and Sonan came to the office building that first morning and announced that they were taking us back to the intelligence prison to meet with Atif for a couple of hours. We left our things in the room and got in the van.
Atif did not show up at the intelligence prison until 2:30. He was very upset. Apparently, the chief justice was busy with other priorities. Atif had gone to the court building, even to the judge’s home, trying to make himself available to answer any questions the judge might have about our case. Everyone told Atif that, yes, the chief justice was in town, but no one seemed to be able to schedule a meeting for our lawyer.
Further, Sonan had exchanged heated words with Atif, who promptly complained to the court about having difficulty accessing his clients. When Atif returned to Sonan with a note from the court granting permission for our meeting, Sonan allowed Atif only ten minutes.
“They are treating me like a prisoner,” Atif exclaimed. “I am not a prisoner, and I will not accept this treatment.”
He told us he would try once again to see the judge. If the judge would not see him, then he would leave the next day for Pakistan.
“This case is a mess,” Atif said. “I do not know how long it will take to get things resolved.”
Though disheartened, I was not surprised by the obstacles Atif faced. Once again it became clear that our only source of hope was God.
Before Atif left, he asked us to go ahead and give him our letters for his return trip to Pakistan. We handed him quite a large stack. Among other things, the letters contained directions to our new prison. We were anxious that the U.S. military learn where we were being kept. I tucked a little map inside one letter just so my parents would be clear.
Najib noticed our exchange with Atif and took the letters. “These will have to be translated and approved,” he remarked. This was unexpected. Najib had never checked our letters before. In fact, that day he had come into our room encouraging us to write letters in our usual fashion for the lawyer’s trip home. I thought of the map and informed Bismillah that he needed to try to retrieve it from the stack of letters.
That night Najib kept us at the intelligence prison. All of our things were back at the office prison, making the evening less than comfortable. I wrote Atif and Bismillah a letter:
Without your correspondence and time to talk we live in a vacuum [without] anyone to communicate with. We are left knowing nothing about our case or the events surrounding us that so terribly affect us. As for you, just one day of such madness is a nightmare, imagine please how for us week after week of such uncertainty and frustration must be.
The next morning, Atif and Bismillah came to the prison with a satellite phone. We had been granted permission to call our families, Atif said. He was not able to make contact with the judge, however, and wanted to leave town soon so he could cross the border before the blackout and the bombing began.
Dayna and I called our parents in Pakistan. We also attempted to call our pastor back in Waco, and Dayna tried to call her father in Nashville. But we could not get through to America.
“We will have to try something else,” I told my parents, referring to the court case. “This will not work.” They caught my drift and reassured me that they were doing all they could to secure our release.
“Things are being done on your behalf,” my father said. “This should all be over very shortly. You do not have to worry.”
“I believe you,” I said. “You know more than I do.”
As the eight of us were making phone calls, an Afghan prisoner was working to finish translating our letters. He had been translating for Najib and Sonan into the evening on the previous day. We later learned that this translator had gone to heroic lengths to help us. Georg told us the man intentionally skipped portions in our letters that referred to the office prison’s location; he skipped over complaints about our conditions and our case; he covered for portions describing the beatings being doled out to Afghan men. He translated the English and the German letters despite the fact that he did not speak German. What kind of commentary did he come up with to substitute for the pages and pages of German text? We all knew the cruelty Sonan was capable of inflicting. This translator had risked his life for us. We were awed.
By the time all of us finished with the phone, it was after two o’clock. Atif was anxious to leave. Najib handed Atif our pile of letters. Atif and Bismillah said goodbye and departed.
We never saw the two men again.
Shortly after Atif and Bismillah left the compound, Najib and Sonan showed up at our door with Georg and Peter. I was resting in the jailers’ room when I heard the men’s voices. The men were talking about our letters. I knew immediately what was wrong. My map describing our location never made it out of the compound with the lawyer.
Sonan called a meeting in our room. Georg, Diana, and I were the last to enter. I whispered to Georg: “That’s my letter they are holding.”
“Whatever you do, do not tell them you wrote it,” Georg urged.
“We found this letter,” Sonan said once we all were seated. “There is an address clearly telling the location of the other prison.” He and Najib looked at Dayna and me.
“Which one of you wrote it?”
There was no way to get out of it. All the men had to do was ask each of us for a writing sample. “I wrote it,” I confessed.
“You did a very bad thing,” Najib said sternly. “It makes things very dangerous for you and very dangerous for us. Why did you do it?”
“My parents are very concerned about me with the bombs dropping,” I explained. “I wanted to tell my parents where we were so they would not be afraid, so someone would know not to bomb our location.”
I repented over and over. “I am so sorry if I have done something wrong. I will not do it again.”
Georg interjected, enumerating all of the things Shelter Germany had done to help the Afghan people through relief and development. No one was trying to be deceptive, he insisted.
To our great relief the apology and explanation seemed to diffuse the men’s anger, and they let us go.
Dayna: Once Atif and Bismillah left the country, we spent our days at the intelligence prison and random nights at the office prison. Najib would give us very little notice to get rea
dy on the evenings we were being moved. We tried to salvage some routine and kept up with our worship meetings.
I enjoyed riding in the van to some extent: The Kabul bazaar areas were up and running; men were out riding their bicycles. You might never know the country was engaged in a war. Still, all of the shifting and moving between prisons exhausted us. Some grew concerned that passersby could see us through the van windows.
We caught wind of a rumor that our case had been passed to Mullah Omar for a ruling. Perhaps we might be pardoned. Someone told Georg that the chief justice was going to issue a decision. We heard another rumor that Atif was coming back to town. At any time, Kabul could fall and the Taliban flee. We needed to be prepared.
We began to think about contingency plans for our departure. At one point, we talked of going with Najib and his brother to their village should the Taliban retreat. Another prisoner whom Georg knew talked of letting us stay at a house in the city. Many ideas were discussed.
We talked about modes of exit—would we drive, would we fly? Driving, we figured, would prove extraordinarily dangerous. Silke believed strongly that we would be flown out. We talked about a helicopter rescue, but that scenario seemed too risky. We did not want any of the Afghan guards to be killed in a rescue attempt; nor could we imagine climbing up a rope into a helicopter—in such a position we would be open targets for marksmen. We women cast our lots for a rescue by handsome men.
However we left the country, we knew we would have to go out as inconspicuously as possible. At the end of October, we asked Najib to buy burqas for us, the women. He made a trip to the bazaar, then came to our room and helped us try on the burqas. He checked to see whether the length was right, whether they fit our heads properly. My burqa was too short, he concluded and offered to take them back to the bazaar to get me something longer.
The others wore their burqas once while we were riding in the van en route to our night prison. I was still waiting on Najib to buy me one that fit properly. Soon afterward Najib decided he wanted to hold on to the burqas for us. He seemed nervous that we might be planning an escape. “When you need them, I will give them to you,” he said. That was the last we saw of the burqas.
One evening I wrote a joke song called “We Wanna Go Home.” The song fit our mood and perfectly echoed our sentiments. We were tired of living in prison. We wanted out. I taught the song to the other women, and they immediately caught on. We got rowdy as we sang.
We wanna go home. We wanna go home;
Lord, we’re tired of this place, and we wanna go home.
Lord, we thank you for all that you’ve done for us,
For all of your faithfulness and love.
Yes, we’ve enjoyed your presence and your companionship:
But we wanna go home. We wanna go home.
One of the lines, in tribute to Diana, went: “Lord, you’ve taken good, good care of us, and we don’t mean to complain. But now we’re ready to leave this blinking place. Yes, we wanna go home. We wanna go home.”
Ursula always wanted to sing the song. For a while, we sang it every day. We sang it so obnoxiously loudly one night at the intelligence prison that when we heard a knock on the door we thought we had upset Najib and the men upstairs. We immediately quieted down.
To our surprise, a guard was bringing in an Afghan prisoner. When she took off her burqa we recognized her. Her name was Sila. We knew Sila from the reform school prison. We were not clear about her crime. The Taliban suspected Sila of working for the Northern Alliance, but she seemed less than lucid. Sila reported that most of the women at the reform school had been released. She told us that on the day we left the prison the women cried for hours.
My thirtieth birthday fell on November 4. My mother had told me during our last satellite phone call that my father’s extended family was planning a big birthday party for me; they intended to raise money to buy blankets for the Afghan people. Our party was a less ambitious affair, but for us, we were living large. Heather suggested scrambled eggs for breakfast. We ordered ingredients for Ursula to make her special pasta and tomato cream sauce. Diana knew a recipe for no-bake black forest cheesecake. She figured we could cut our water bottles in half lengthwise for the cake tins. Heather spent some hours pitting canned cherries for a garnish.
The birthday consisted of breakfast and a morning worship time with the ladies; lunch and prayer with the men; and tea and cake with Sila, Sweeta-jan, and her eleven-year-old son. Silke made me a card depicting some of our little delights—playing cards, the heating coil, a teapot, a mouse, a burqa. She situated pictures of me in different exercise positions—doing my leg lifts, sit-ups, and push-ups—between the words “Happy Birthday” and “Dayna.” The muscles in my legs appeared to be quavering during the exercises.
During our morning worship time, my friends prayed for me and spoke words of encouragement over my life. Kati, Silke, and Heather sang me a song they had written just for me. As we all sang one particular worship song, “Jesus, All for Jesus,” I began to cry. Tears streamed down my face when I got to the line “All of my ambitions, hopes and plans, I surrender these into your hands.” I sang the line with true feeling. I had no idea what was ahead for me. My plans to serve in Afghanistan for the next few years were now destroyed. I was turning thirty. I prayed God soon would answer the hope in my heart for companionship, but I was surrendering that hope to him. My life was in his hands.
In the evening, Heather organized game night. We played Two Truths and a Lie and a handmade version of Twenty-Five Words or Less. We laughed for hours. Everyone loosened up. Heather and the other women truly enjoyed one another.
All of us sensed we would be leaving soon. A few days after my birthday while I was writing in my jounal, I thought God told me, “You will be leaving very soon.” Then I thought I heard him say we would get out before Thanksgiving. I did not know whether God truly was speaking to my heart, but I felt he wanted me to share these words with the group during our worship meeting. Diana confirmed that she was hearing something similar from God.
I read in Psalm 50: “He who sacrifices thank offerings honors me, and prepares the way of salvation.” Inspired by this passage, we believed we were supposed to spend an entire worship meeting singing songs of thanksgiving, believing that God would prepare a way of salvation or escape for us as we did. We sang every “thank you” song we could remember. We wanted to go out of prison singing. “We’ll go out singing your praises” was a line in a song I wrote.
Days later, we learned that the Northern Alliance had taken Mazar-e-Sharif.
“This may be the way we’re going to get out,” we said soberly.
The images given by the radio announcer were fantastical. Men on horseback entered Mazar-e-Sharif while Taliban fled in their trucks and tanks. We imagined that the Northern Alliance eventually would overtake Kabul and let us go free—we dreamed of dancing in the streets of Kabul with all of the freed citizens. But we were concerned that if the Northern Alliance came in, fighting might break out in the middle of the city. That scenario would be very dangerous—both for us and for the people of Kabul.
“Lord, let the Taliban flee without a fight,” we prayed. “Let them flee without a fight.”
part four
AAAZAAD!
eighteen
KABUL GEREFT
[T]here was lots of gunfire and shooting, several bombs dropped very close by. One dropped and plastic in window almost exploded. Very loud, building shook. Heard, beginning around 9:00, many men in the hall, opening and closing …
—HEATHER’S LAST KABUL JOURNAL ENTRY, NOVEMBER 12, 2002
Heather & Dayna: In the days following the Northern Alliance’s capture of Mazar-e-Sharif, the demeanor of the Taliban running the intelligence prison changed. Najib and the Taliban guards seemed distracted. Najib spoke curtly. He no longer asked us how we were or what we were doing. He gave us less information about the war.
Georg brought us news from the radio. We heard reports that t
he United States and Pakistan were urging the Northern Alliance not to take Kabul. Many of us believed the troops would take Kabul anyway. “They are not going to miss an opportunity to take the capital city,” we said.
On November 12, we learned that a video had been broadcast in which Osama bin Laden was said to have expressed foreknowledge of the September 11 attacks.
The same afternoon, Najib told us we would be spending the evening at the office prison. We had just stayed at the office prison the previous night. Though Najib did not move us according to a set schedule, we usually did not stay at the office prison on consecutive nights.
“We will be ready after dinner,” we told Najib.
We sat down to an early dinner, anticipating our move. Ursula spent the day tending to a large pot of cauliflower vegetable soup; it was nearly five o’clock when she served us. Normally at mealtime, we would send portions of whatever we were having to Georg and Peter via a prison guard. On this evening, as we had only one pot for the soup, we decided to finish our meal and then send the entire pot over to the men.
Halfway through dinner, Najib entered the room. “You must leave immediately,” he demanded.
We spoke in English among ourselves: “We are not going to let them push us around and make us rush. We will eat our meal in peace.”
We told Najib we were not ready. “We are going to finish our food.”
“You have to leave now,” he insisted. “Take the food with you. The men can eat at the other prison.”
Najib’s tone was harsh and urgent. Fear flashed over his face. Realizing we had no other option, we consented.
Heather: We packed up the pot. I did not want to leave the dishes on the floor for the mice to pillage, so I picked up the metal bowls and spoons and set them outside by the water pump. I went back for the glasses.