Now all her concentration is on establishing roots in America.
33
SAKINA’S MIRACLE: FROM REFUGEE CAMP TO AMERICAN SUBURB
SAKINA GHULAM USUALLY KEPT to her home in an isolated mountain village in Afghanistan. It was too dangerous to venture outside: She feared her burqa might accidentally slip and expose her face for a few seconds—even if it was just her nose or a strand of hair.
Terrible punishment was in store for her or any other woman caught not obeying the Taliban’s draconian orders for women to cover themselves in public from head to toe. Since the Taliban had taken control of Afghanistan, women’s lives had been targeted by a fundamentalist government that kept women virtual prisoners in their own homes. Despite worldwide criticism, the Taliban imposed a harsh interpretation of the Quran’s edict for women to be modest, even forbidding male doctors to see women and girls as patients. Sakina says women weren’t allowed to give birth with a male doctor present, and some resorted to delivering their babies in backyards.
The women and small girls in her village were all illiterate. Above all, they lived in fear. The Taliban had its spies who helped maintain rigid control over the sparsely populated country. “Their followers were everywhere,” Sakina says. And the Taliban had been known to impose swift justice on “bad” women. A “light” punishment was the public cutting of a woman’s hair to humiliate her for a slipped burqa. An alleged adulteress risked being shot to death. By the time the United States had invaded Afghanistan, many women were terrified to venture outside their home.
Sakina’s family was able to eke out a living until the Taliban rounded up her husband and oldest son. They were taken without explanation, and Sakima was beside herself. Even in a best-case scenario—that they remained alive—they would no doubt be tortured. And there was no way of knowing when they would get out of jail.
At home, she and her remaining three sons faced desperate circumstances. She had no way to support them. Food and water were already scarce.
Desperate people do desperate things and one night Sakina summoned the courage to abandon their home and escape with her three sons. In the dark of the night they crept out of their house. For five days and nights, they climbed through the mountains, trudging on treacherous unmarked terrain, not daring to use any roads.
And then their first miracle came.
Somehow, an Afghan man driving a farm tractor spotted them. Rather than turn them in, he took pity on them. He motioned for them to get on the tractor and he gave them a ride to the nearby border. They made it safely to an area just inside Pakistan, where the United Nations and charities from around the world were caring for refugees.
Sakina still talks about their second miracle in awed whispers. The family came upon what they thought were United Nations workers. Sakina was eager to feed her sons, and she had been told she had to sign papers with an X to obtain rations. Sure enough, the workers asked her questions; she patiently answered them and they held out papers to sign. She carefully wrote her X.
Only this wasn’t an application for food. It was for U.S. refugee relief—and by sheer luck Sakina was signing to start the paperwork for her and her sons to come to America under a federal emergency program to help refugees. This, despite the hundreds of thousands languishing in refugee camps in Asia and Africa for years. A worldwide waiting list of refugees hoping to come to the United States grows longer by the day, applications being held up by extra screening of newcomers after 9/11.
Yet Sakina’s extraordinary luck held. Two years ago, she and her sons were whisked from their sorrowful past to a new life in suburban Phoenix, where they moved into one smallish apartment. Later Sakina found a better one in middle-class Glendale, where they are close to the Arizona Refugee Community Center that provides them with English classes and other social programs. They felt at home in Glendale: It turned out to be a Muslim refugee enclave. In some Glendale neighborhoods it is common to see women wearing hijabs as they walk or drive cars.
Life was not easy at first. Sakina’s health in Arizona started out weak. She could not walk for great lengths or even climb stairs. She also had to come to terms with the trauma of her past life. She signed up for Catholic Charities’ counseling for victims or relatives of those who have been tortured or experienced war.
The only problem was logistical. The therapy sessions were held on the second floor of a building without an elevator. That didn’t deter Sakina, who, if she couldn’t walk up the stairs, she crawled.
Sakina and her sons started adjusting and soon were thriving in their new life in America. For the first time they had something most Americans take for granted: running water. There was a dazzling array of groceries at supermarkets, and the United States government had provided food stamps. The family’s health improved simply from eating regularly. Other amenities they enjoyed for the first time included electric lights, heating, air conditioning, and indoor toilets.
Best of all, Sakina says, there is peace in her new home, and opportunity. She and her children, she says, live in a quiet area and no longer fear being picked up by the Taliban. Americans are kind, she adds. Through a translator, she reports, “They have been helping people. They help us go to school—this is important for my children.” And Sakina considers education crucial.
Consider her persistence: Despite being forty-something, she began assiduously attending classes at the Arizona Refugee Community Center, not missing a session. She labored over learning the Roman alphabet and writing in cursive.
Today, Sakina is proud to have graduated from her first reading class and has moved on to studying more advanced English. She is no longer illiterate and now signs her name with a flourish.
Sakina herself is amazed at her resilience: For a middle-aged woman, learning how to read and write as well as navigate a new and complicated country, with a different language and culture, cannot help but be daunting.
Sakina is equally proud of her sons’ educational accomplishments. They are all doing well in school. They also help Sakina by explaining American rules and customs.
Today, Sakina especially cherishes her family’s new freedom. The burqa is now a thing of her past.
“We couldn’t walk,” she says of the bulky garment that hobbled her movement. “We couldn’t see. We couldn’t talk.” Now she can go into stores at ease, or even take an evening stroll.
Not that she has abandoned Islamic dictates for modesty. She wears long-sleeved blouses and long skirts or pants to cover her legs, as well as a filmy chiffon scarf that she drapes around her head and neck—what she calls a chador.
According to Sakina, she likes the chador, wants to keep her Islamic faith. During Ramadan she is eager to get home to prepare the evening meal that breaks the daylong fast.
She has recently gotten good news. Her Taliban-jailed husband and son are alive; they both escaped to Iran. She spoke to her father, who assured her that the two are safe. When Sakina had fled to Pakistan, her husband headed toward the Iranian border and managed to slip across. Now they are trying to make it back to Afghanistan so they too can get help from American agencies to reunite them with their family.
Sakina hopes that eventually they will be together again. When that happens, her husband and son can start over in the United States, as she and the three other boys have. They deserve, she feels, what she and the other children now enjoy.
“We have freedom,” she says simply.
34
SHAIMA: RECOVERING FROM HER HUSBAND’S MURDER
SHAIMA SHIFFATI WAS EAGER to go to work in the United States after escaping Afghanistan where her husband was murdered. She and her four children had languished in a refugee camp where there seemed no hope.
As soon as they were flown into Phoenix, she signed up for whatever available job there was. It turned out to be in a candy factory, which was fine with her.
But it was not to be. When she arrived in the U.S., she was suffering from a host of physical problems, including headaches
and body aches. These are symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, made worse when Shaima probably took on more than she could endure at a time when she was starting over in a new country. She was still grieving for her late husband while trying to care for her four children and adapt to a foreign land, language, and culture.
She became so sick she had to quit the factory and it is only now, about two years later, that she is feeling better. Shaima says she had a nervous breakdown. But what came to a head in the United States began when she became ill in Afghanistan. She remembers she was neatening up her house near Kabul when, in disbelief, she watched as men from the village carried her husband’s body into the house. He had been shot to death at their small store in town. She collapsed at the shock.
It was too much to bear, she now says, almost five years later. She struggled during the months ahead to rise above the grief and depression that engulfed her, realizing that she had to regain her equilibrium: She had four children to raise. And yet she was exhausted by the never-ending violence and the grief it brings.
“It was thirty years of war,” she says through an interpreter. “They destroyed everything.” And she never found out why her husband was murdered.
After her husband died, she suffered from relentless fear. She felt virtually confined to her home under the Taliban’s edict that required women to be covered while in public. She had trouble collecting her thoughts, even thinking in a rational way, and she endured nightmares and physical tremors. “I was afraid to live in Afghanistan without my husband,” she says. And it wasn’t just the fear of a bullet. How was she going to support her family? As a woman she could not operate their former shop: The Taliban forbade women touching men not their husbands or relatives. So how could she be a shopkeeper? How could she even see in the store wearing a head-to-toe burqa that had only slits for her eyes?
Plus, she says, “I had heart problems after my husband died.”
In desperation, she decided to abandon the family’s house. She would join other Afghanis going to Pakistan. One of her husband’s friends gave her money and helped her cross the border with her two sons and two daughters. Her children found work making Persian-style carpets, doing the tedious hand-threading of intricate patterns that such rugs are known for. It was very hard work, but for two years, like thousands of other Afghan refugees, they eked out an existence in Pakistan.
Then President Clinton entered her life. “He wanted to save widows in Afghanistan,” she says. Shaima went to the refugee resettlement program and signed up.
Today, she loves the Arizona weather, especially in the winter. She likes that she can see mountains in her new home, much like the mountains she grew up near in Afghanistan.
She is within walking distance of the refugee center where she goes to school to learn how to read and write. Her son has saved enough money to buy a car. He takes her grocery shopping. Otherwise, she likes to walk in the neighborhood. It is so safe.
Shaima and her children are filled with hope. Her children go to school and study hard. They know how important it is to learn.
“Education for the kids,” Shaima declares. “That’s the most important thing to me. They have opportunity here. In Afghanistan, they had no future.”
35
SALMA’S JOURNEY
MOST AMERICANS PRIDE THEMSELVES on their tolerance. They remain insulated from the religious strife that has engulfed other parts of the world. Indeed, they are unaware of ongoing clashes between religious groups that have sometimes endured for centuries. Muslim minorities have been particularly persecuted. In India, Hindu mobs have routinely attacked and killed Muslims, especially after the predominantly Muslim country of Pakistan was carved out of India in the 1940s. Human rights organizations have detailed this anti-Muslim violence for decades. But few Americans know of the ongoing tension. Except for an occasional story in The New York Times or on National Public Radio, the violence remains unreported in the United States.
As a teenager, Salma lived through the terror of some Hindus attacking her Muslim neighborhood in India in December 1992. Her family’s Imam and his assistant were hacked to pieces a few blocks from their home. The horrified congregation discovered the strewn body parts as they arrived for Friday prayers. Around India, Hindu mobs went into a violent frenzy after militant Hindus rioted and destroyed the sixteenth-century Babri mosque. Hindu extremists had bitterly hated the historic mosque, believing centuries-old allegations that a Hindu temple had been destroyed to make room for the mosque.
Even Salma’s father, a prosperous and well-regarded business owner, was terrified amid the sudden violence. The Muslims had lived in peace for decades in their Hindu-dominant city. Salma’s family had felt comfortable with their Hindu neighbors. They have even invited them for holiday banquets and family dinners. Their Hindu neighbors liked to partake of chicken and lamb dishes at Muslim festivals. Salma remembers how her early friends were Hindus—and how no one thought anything of that.
But the sudden rampage ended those harmonious times, violence indiscriminately targeting Muslims while police did nothing. For the first time, Salma says, her family felt isolated, like outsiders in their own homeland.
Salma still remembers that bitter taste of betrayal. After the rioting, she could go nowhere. Her father forbade her even to visit her next-door neighbors. It was too dangerous, he decided. As a young Muslim woman, she was especially vulnerable wearing her Islamic hijab on the streets. So, day after day, she had to stay at home. Then came the murders—all over town. “In the name of religion, they were killing people,” she said.
It was a heartbreaking time: One of the killers of Salma’s Imam had been a close friend of Salma’s brother. “He literally was brought up in my house,” she says. “He was like a brother to us.” His involvement was incomprehensible to the family. “How could he?” Salma still asks in wonder. Although the murderers’ identities were known, the police arrested no one.
Today she is grateful for her new life: in a peaceful palm-shaded Florida suburb where neighbors are friendly. Her children play with others down the street; she exchanges cakes with neighbors. She is welcomed into her sons’ elementary school to do volunteer work. She marvels how open-minded and friendly Americans are.
Salma counts her blessings: She married an Indian telecommunications executive, and they were able to emigrate first to London, then to the United States. She is relieved that their two sons will grow up in peace.
However, Salma’s memories remain painful and vivid. A year ago, when Salma returned to India with her two small sons to see her family, she encountered hostilities at the Bombay airport. She was held up at immigration because the checker couldn’t believe that, as a Muslim woman wearing a hijab and long gown, she carried an Indian passport. Salma was asked if she was “sure” that she was born in India. To prove that she was, she told the authorities, “I can speak seventeen Indian languages.” Later, as she and her sons were in line, an Indian official sneered at her, muttering “We should kick all of you out of the country.” When, after their return flight, they landed in London and Salma retrieved her luggage, she discovered that their cloth bags had been slashed open, her clothing hanging out and her jewelry gone. Salma was in tears. She claims that the airline promised her reimbursement for the lost items but none was ever made.
Since she relocated to the United States, she is still amazed at how well Americans get along. It delights her that she and her family can live in a community where neighbors welcome them. Nor is there the degree of illiteracy or ignorance that spawns wholesale violence, she adds. However, she was once accosted by a man in a pickup truck while visiting Atlanta. He apparently did not like her wearing her hijab. When he yelled and gave her the finger, she simply laughed him off. Salma cites this as an example of how safe she feels in America. She could not have guaranteed the same would have happened in India.
After 9/11, however, Salma went into a depression.
“I was literally in tears. I hoped
Muslims were not involved.” She was scared that there would be outbreaks of anti-Muslim violence, as there had been in India. But except for scattered reports of individuals attacking people they thought were Muslims, people were safe. It comforted Salma that President Bush attended mosque to show his solidarity with Muslims, as did other U.S. leaders. Salma marvels at the maturity of the American people during those times when everyone was stunned—and enraged—over 9/11.
When Salma and her husband moved to a new Florida neighborhood, where the schools are among the best in the area, Salma was at first apprehensive about wearing her hijab in public. But she was rewarded with indifference; she still marvels how most people don’t single her out. If they do, it’s because they are curious, she says, about her faith.
To celebrate her new neighborhood, Salma baked cakes for her neighbors. “This was my way of saying hello.” She was touched to receive thank-you notes, and one neighbor returned the gesture and made Salma and her family a peach cobbler. “Now we all know each other—Christians, Jews, and Muslims.”
She also wanted to educate her neighbors about Ramadan—but in a fun way. So she made cakes and her sons wrote notes about their faith. Then they delivered them. Salma has been gratified by how touched people have been by her culinary gifts.
Just like any other American mother, she volunteers at her sons’ school. She was a weekly tutor at her younger son’s kindergarten class. The children loved her for her sense of fun and mimicry. They felt they could ask her what was that thing she was wearing on her head. Salma playfully told them, “It makes me look prettier and it’s for my religion.” The children then asked if they could wear it, and Salma plopped her silken scarf on each child who giggled.
At the school’s open house, Salma was stunned at how the children came running to her to introduce her to their families. “They hugged and kissed me,” she says. The parents were surprised too, but only one woman refused to shake Salma’s hand. Salma shrugs it off. The woman was probably a snob, she thinks. Salma is not interested in blame. The people where she lives are too nice and she’s too busy to fret over slights. Still, she has noticed that some parents hold their children close to them when she passes by in her hijab. She stays serene, though. And she still keeps busy volunteering at the school. Teachers love her. They wish other parents were as diligent and caring.
The Face Behind the Veil Page 20