The world most certainly loves me . . .
Overwhelmed with chores, refugee children often miss school.
Photo Credit (both): UNHCR / M. Collins
JOHN GREEN
REASONS
REASONS AISHA HUSSAIN IS UNLIKELY TO BEFRIEND ME: A LIST BY MICAH FELDMAN
1. When you look into the huge round eyes of Aisha Hussain, as I do several times a day, you get the sense that she does not want or need a male companion. You get the sense that she is maybe a little bit like a twelve-year-old version of Gloria Steinem, who once said that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. The eyes of Aisha Hussain say, you know, “Everything I will ever need to be happy is already here, swimming inside my eye sockets.” It’s very impressive.
2. Aisha Hussain is not aware that I exist. It could be argued that this is advantageous, since certainly none of the girls who do know I exist are particularly fond of me, but still.
3. My mom thinks there is a reasonably high chance that Aisha Hussain is fictional, or at least that she is a cobbledtogether phenomenon.
4. In the unlikely event that Aisha Hussain were ever to be a fish in need of a bicycle, I would be a poor candidate.
THINGS AISHA HUSSAIN MIGHT ADMIRE IN A GUY: A LIST BY MICAH FELDMAN
1. Physical strength: One time in fourth grade my teacher Mr. Farnsworth, who was not technically what you would consider a very nice man, was trying to explain to us the difference between conditional tenses in English, and he pointed out that the sentence “Micah Feldman can do a pull-up” is always untrue, whereas the sentence “Micah Feldman could do a pull-up” might be true, depending on whether the sentence ended with “if he ate his Wheaties.” (I do eat my Wheaties, by the way. If Aisha Hussain is looking for a Wheaties eater, I am her man.)
2. Economic status: Living, as she does, in the disputed region of Kashmir, on an income of less that one dollar a day, presumably Aisha Hussain would be impressed with a young man who could deliver a solid wage. On this front, I have at least a chance: The reason I know Aisha Hussain in the first place is that Mom is sponsoring her. Mom sends sixty dollars a month to For The Children, and then For The Children gets food for Aisha Hussain. Also other stuff, like this month she got some shoes. She’d never had shoes before. She was pretty psyched about it, according to her letter. (Aisha sends us a letter each month, but it’s typewritten, and Mom thinks that Aisha Hussain doesn’t actually write the letters, and that in fact she probably can’t write due to the poor female education in the disputed region of Kashmir.) Anyway, I have economic status insofar as my mom has sixty spare dollars to send to Kashmir every month, but I do not have particularly good economic prospects personally. For instance, it would cost about $3,460 to get to Aisha’s village, and my current net worth is $337.43, money made from a fledgling lawn-care business.
3. Badness: Lately, I have been watching a number of Bollywood films, which are like regular movies except a) they are not in English and b) there is quite a bit more dancing. And if I have learned one thing from Bollywood movies, it is that people who live on the Indian subcontinent want their boys to be at least Slightly Bad, which is a lot like girls in America, and unfortunately, I am really bad at being bad. Like, I can break rules and stuff—I can sneak out my window and go outside after curfew—but doing it makes me feel very nervous, and so when I am being bad, I can never look suitably nonchalant about it. Also, I cannot dance, which is another requirement of romantic leads, at least according to these Bollywood movies I have been watching. I mean, I guess technically I can dance in the sense that my body is able to move, but when I move my body while music is playing, anyone watching inevitably says, “Wow, you really cannot dance,” which generally stops me dead in my tracks.
THINGS MY MOTHER CITED WHEN CONFRONTING ME ABOUT MY FASCINATION WITH AISHA HUSSAIN: A LIST BY MICAH FELDMAN
1. My desire to get the mail. Every day I come home from school and I get off the bus and I get the mail and bring it inside to Mom. As she pointed out, I only started doing this after Aisha Hussain entered our lives, almost as if I only check the mail to see if one of Aisha’s typewritten notes has arrived.
2. The whole Bollywood movie fascination.
3. My insistence when participating in my school’s Model United Nations club that I represent either India or Pakistan, and my obsessive submission of resolutions involving the disputed region of Kashmir.
4. The fact that the only picture of Aisha we have ever received—a picture which Mom intentionally threw away because such pictures are only attempts to tug on your heartstrings and which I, she correctly guessed, rescued from the trash—is pinned to the corkboard in my bedroom over my desk, which Mom discovered even though the picture in question is almost entirely hidden by an honor roll certificate from Glenridge Middle School.
5. A review of my Web browsing history, which by the way was a complete invasion of my privacy, turned up extensive research into the subject of how to fly to the disputed region of Kashmir.
6. Decreased interest in real-world social interactions, including a total lack of Visits From Friends.
RESPONSES TO MY MOTHER’S CONFRONTATION, WHICH HAPPENED ON THE WHITE COUCH OF OUR LIVING ROOM, WITH MOM AND I STARTING OUT ON OPPOSITE SIDES OF THE COUCH BUT THEN THROUGHOUT HER CONFRONTATION AND MY RESPONSE SHE KEPT SCOOTING TOWARD ME AND EVENTUALLY ASKED ME IF I NEEDED A CUDDLE, WHICH, LIKE, NO, I MEAN, I AM TWELVE YEARS OLD, MOM, I DO NOT NEED CUDDLES FROM MOTHERS: A LIST BY MICAH FELDMAN
1. To be fair, I never had friends. It’s not fair to blame my friendlessness on a thirteen-year-old girl who lives 11,451 miles away from me.
2. Anyone who has ever watched an entire Bollywood movie has found the experience utterly and totally delightful, including you, Mom.
3. I cannot be held responsible for the fact that Aisha Hussain has truly arresting eyes, and it’s important when sitting at my desk doing my homework occasionally to be reminded that there are people for whom going to school is not an unbearable burden but instead an exciting opportunity.
4. The future of the disputed region of Kashmir is an important geopolitical issue not only to people who sponsor Aisha Hussain through For The Children but also to any informed citizen of the world, given that both India and Pakistan are nuclear powers and everything.
5. All that said, in the interest of full disclosure it should probably be noted that I have been sending Aisha Hussain money.
SOME QUESTIONS MY MOTHER HAD RE AISHA AND THE MONEY: A LIST BY MICAH FELDMAN
1. What?
2. How much?
3. How?
4. Are you crazy?
5. Have you been taking your medication?
6. Do you think this girl cares about you or knows who you are or wants anything other than your money? Or do you even think that she’s real? Don’t you realize that your money is probably being intercepted along the way and never even gets to her, if she’s even real, which she probably isn’t, because these organizations “sponsor” tens of thousands of kids and only pick the attractive ones to put on the postcards because then you’ll send more money? Don’t you understand it’s just advertising, Micah? She’s not real.
SOME ANSWERS: A LIST BY MICAH FELDMAN
1. I have been sending her money.
2. So far about $337. Mowing money.
3. I put it in an envelope and I mailed it to her village with her name on it. I did it at school. Mrs. Yeovil at the front office, she has this machine that will figure out how much it costs to mail anything anywhere.
4. I am not crazy, but I have issues with socialization, as you are well aware, that have been extensively documented.
5. Yes.
6. I don’t know if she cares about me. I don’t know if she’ll ever get the money. But she is real, Mom. She has a picture. You can’t make up a picture.
SOME EXAMPLES OF PHOTOGRAPHS NOT ACTUALLY BEING PARTICULARLY PHOTOGRAPHIC: A LIST BY MY MOTHER
1. You’ve seen those airbrushed celebrities o
n magazine covers, Micah. Are not those pictures made up?
2. Did you know in fact that the staging of photographs is as old as photography itself? When Mathew Brady took pictures of Civil War dead in the 1860s, he would drag their bodies around to give them the most dramatic possible death poses.
3. In fact, if you really think about it, all photographs are doctored because there is always a choice about what goes in the shot and what doesn’t. Even if that girl is real, they probably washed her and put her in front of the ideally impoverished background, Micah.
4. The job of that photograph is to make you like that girl so you send the charity sixty dollars a month. I send them sixty dollars not because of that girl but because they’re a reputable organization known for spending money efficiently to address poverty and disease in the developing world, Micah, you understand that? That’s why I tossed the photograph the moment it arrived and why I’ve taken the liberty of removing it from your corkboard. You cannot be swayed by a photograph. You don’t choose charities based on the quality of their photography, Micah. Don’t you think your $337 would have been better spent saving lives through the purchase of mosquito nets for—Micah? Are you crying?
REASONS I WAS CRYING: A LIST BY MICAH FELDMAN
1. It was the only picture I had of Aisha and the only image I would probably ever see of her. Even if she received the $337, and even if she was grateful and wrote me back, she probably couldn’t include a picture because she probably didn’t have a camera, given that she recently received her first-ever pair of shoes and whatnot. I thought about including a camera in the envelope with the $337, but a) it would have been much more expensive to mail, according to Mrs. Yeovil at the front office, and b) I guess it’s probably a little creepy to receive $337 and a camera from a stranger, like far creepier than just receiving $337.
2. Why can’t you just be allowed to believe that someone is real if you want to and not be told by your mom that you are an idiot and wasted your life savings? I wish it could be like it was when I was littler, when I was allowed to just believe things and no one would get mad at me.
3. I want Aisha Hussain to exist. I want her to be real and to be pretty and round-eyed, and I want whatever our cultural differences may be to be surmountable, and I want us to be friends. I don’t want photographs to be nonphotographic. I don’t want the kind of mother who points out things like that, instead of just letting me like Aisha Hussain from the magnificently safe distance of 11,451 miles.
WHAT I WISHED FOR THAT NIGHT: A LIST BY MICAH FELDMAN
1. I cannot tell you or else it won’t come true.
And then I was not twelve anymore. I was thirteen, and it was the summer between seventh and eighth grade, and I had a bunch of friends on the Internet whom I played this game with, and it was a pretty good summer, but I still thought of her every night, thought about how it was not night for her when it was night for me but how we still looked up at the same sky at the same time, how every night I would see the stars that she had seen a few hours earlier, the very same stars, and one afternoon Mom came in and stood between me and the TV screen and I said, “Mom, I’m on a mission,” and she held up an envelope with quite a lot of stamps.
I opened it carefully, the way Mom opens presents when she wants to save the wrapping paper.
The note inside was written in the Urdu language. I recognized it even though I couldn’t read it.
It said:Dear Mr. Micah Feldman,
Thank you for your letter. You mention that you sent money, but I must tell you, if you were being serious, it did not arrive. The mail is not a good way to send money here; is it a good way in America? But anyway, your letter did arrive, and it made me very happy. It is very funny to us that you work at grass cutting. Do you push the machine yourself? Is it dangerous? Here the best way to make money is handicrafts. Some kids work as bus cleaners or at fuel stations, but at our home that is not allowed. But I do have a job: I make drawings. I have enclosed one in this note. Perhaps in your reply, you could send me some of the grass you have cut. If you wish to reply, that is.
I hope you will write again anyway. It is very nice to hear from you.
Yours,
Aisha
The drawing was a self-portrait—more beautiful by far than any photograph could have been.
*The author is deeply indebted to Iram Qureshi and Anwar Iqbal for their Urdu translation.
Classrooms are open to sandstorms and deteriorate from seasonal rain.
Photo Credit (both): UNHCR / H. Caux
ANN M. MARTIN
THE LOST ART OF LETTER WRITING
September 14
Dear Jenny,
Hi. My name is Alice Kendall and I’m writing to you because my teacher is weird. Mr. Jessop has only been my teacher for a week and a half and already he’s told my class that 1) computers are turning teenagers into couch potatoes who lack social graces, 2) thanks to e-mail, letter writing is becoming a lost art, and 3) Velcro is the reason children can’t tie their shoes. I didn’t know the Velcro thing was a problem, but whatever. Anyway, getting back to letter writing, that’s why I’m writing to you now. Apparently, my teacher knows your teacher, and Mr. Jessop decided that my classmates and I should practice the art of letter writing—on you and your classmates. (Sorry about that.)
So . . . I don’t know. Did your teacher tell you the same thing? That it would be all tragic if you didn’t know how to write real letters? There were tears in Mr. Jessop’s eyes when he said that letter writing is becoming a lost art. Well, okay, I’m exaggerating, but he did have to stop and clear his throat in the middle of the sentence, like, “Blah, blah, blah, and because everyone communicates via e-mail these days, letter writing is becoming,” ahem, AHEM, “a lost art.”
After that, Mr. Jessop passed around a hat and I drew your name out of it. Jennifer Harris. You are now officially my pen pal. Which means that you should know a few things about me. I’m in eighth grade. I go to Wentworth Academy in Newtown, Connecticut, but I live in Burton, which is about fifteen miles from Newtown. The people in my family are my mom and my dad, my sister Missy, who’s ten, and my brother Justin, who’s seven. And a bunch of animals.
This is what I know so far about you: You’re in eighth grade too, and you go to Lincoln Middle School in Castleton, Ohio, which is a pretty big city. Your school doesn’t have a lot of funding and is short on supplies and books and computers, and also needs repairs. I’m really sorry about that. Maybe our class could organize a drive to collect stuff for your class.
I just reread what I’ve written and I really hope Mr. Jessop isn’t going to look at our letters before he sends them to your teacher. I don’t want him to see what I said about him. Oh, well. It’s too late to change anything now. He’s about to collect our papers. Unlike with e-mail, I can’t go back and delete stuff. If letter writing is an art, so far its decline doesn’t seem like much of a loss. I’m going to seal this up before Mr. Jessop gets his hands on it.
Hastily,
Alice Kendall
September 21
Dear Alice,
First of all, my name is Jennifer, not Jenny. And second of all, my school doesn’t need any help. We’re doing fine. But I guess it was nice of you to offer.
Yes, our teachers know each other, but mine didn’t say anything about the lost art of letter writing. Maybe that’s because hardly anybody in my class has a computer at home, and the ones at school are from, like, the 1900s, so there’s no danger of losing the art of letter writing here in Castleton. All my teacher said was that we were getting pen pals for the semester. My teacher’s name is Ms. Dennis, by the way, and I was lucky to wind up in her class. A lot of kids don’t like her. They think she’s strict. But I think she’s fair. (I don’t like teachers who let their students get away with stuff.)
So here are some things about me: I live with my father, my grandparents (Dad’s parents), my sister Ava (she’s 15), and my cousins who are twins but not identical. They’re 16 and the
ir names are Pat and Chris. I’ll leave it up to you to figure out if they’re boys or girls or one of each. Ha, ha.
You said you live with a lot of animals. I assume you mean pets. We don’t have any pets because they’re too expensive. That’s also why we don’t have a computer. If my dad got a job we might adopt a cat, but that doesn’t look too promising. I mean, the possibility of his finding a job doesn’t look too promising. Right now my grandmother is the only one who earns any money. Oh, and also Chris delivers papers in the a.m. before school. And in case you’re thinking I just gave you a clue, remember that boys aren’t the only ones who can have paper routes.
My dad is an inventor but he hasn’t invented anything good in ages, which is why we had to move in with my grandparents. What do your parents do?
Also, is Wentworth Academy a private school? It must be, with a name like that and a teacher who’s concerned about the lost art of letter writing. I’ve never known anyone who went to a private school.
Well, Ms. Dennis just gave us five more minutes to finish our letters, so I’d better stop here. I hope you can read my handwriting okay. Chris says it’s stupid to dot my i’s with flowers, but I think the flowers say something about my cheerful personality. Ha, ha.
Sincerely,
Jennifer Harris
P.S. The kids at my school may not be rich, but don’t read too much into that.
September 30
Dear Jennifer,
If you’re going to be picky, then please call me Allie. That’s my nickname, although I don’t get all huffy if people call me Alice. Also, I do go to a private school, but talk about assumptions—you shouldn’t read too much into the subject of Wentworth Academy. I’ll get back to assumptions and my school later, though.
What You Wish For Page 10