By November of 2002, it was becoming evident that the initial unifying effect of the 9/11 attacks was wearing off. The each-otherness of the immediate post 9/11 period had moldered to the point that some nasty whiffs of old school, pre-9/11 paranoia started floating around. The American nation was like a patient coming out of anesthesia after a touch-and-go operation. Along with the clean bill of health came a rapid evaporation of the gratitude and fervent pre-op prayers of thanks, followed by a return to some serious checking over the shoulder.
Who is this mysterious terrorist enemy, anyway? Why can’t we find them? As for our leaders, how much do we need to know that we aren’t being told?
Somebody must be doing a lot of lying. But who is it?
By November of 2002, the internet had fully emerged as a major element of the news media, and now in addition to conventional news reporting and the usual line-up of sources, the Web offered the presence of thousands upon thousands of personal web logs for readers to access from any internet connection. Bloggers offered up everything from off-mainstream news scoops to fringe opinions of the sort that might resonate with significant levels of the population but would never gain public exposure on major commercial media. Still, with few exceptions, those countless bloggers got their information from the same major sources that everyone else does, and so even in the presence of millions of new voices, global opinion continued to masquerade as truth.
The tower of babble rose higher, riding the shout-them-down purveyors of opinions dressed up as truth and of facts draped in guesswork. The tower was held together by uncountable televisions, radios, computer screens, electronic personal communicators of every description, babbling its countless conflicting opinions out to the world and pressing them harder with each passing hour. Every formless voice attempted to answer, in some fashion, the same essential question of what to do about the human condition.
What are we supposed to do?
* * *
Zubaida wished that she hadn’t paid attention to the TV show about birds, because the one they called a “woodpecker” in English was a perfect picture of the way that Rebecca dealt with her. She never expected to have to deal with something like that. Rebecca didn’t yell at her or make threats, or worst of all start to cry, just to get her way. She just kept being very polite and then repeating what she wanted, over and over. It completely took Zubaida off guard the first time she encountered it and she really hadn’t come up with any effective response since then. Now there was an image to go with it—Rebecca was the “woodpecker” and Zubaida was the tree. As far as she knew, there weren’t any such creatures around her homeland. Now she lived with one.
With her father, Zubaida had long since learned that while he loved to shout and throw his arms around, all she had to do was stand there like a tree in a strong wind, and after a while he got tired or distracted and gave up. Sometimes he even walked away, but then came back later and gave in anyway. Her mother was prone expressing her disapproval by lapsing into deep bouts of the silent treatment. It could make an entire room an unpleasant place, although Zubaida had learned how to ignore it fairly well.But this Rebecca person was proving to be a lot more difficult than she expected. Where was all that will power during their two weekends together? Everything was easy, then. Now, if Zubaida was refusing to eat or refusing to come inside when she was called or refusing to turn off the TV that she loved so much and which she drank from in much the same way that a desert traveler drinks from an oasis, here would come Rebecca, asking over and over, not going crazy like her father or turning cold like her mother would do, just asking.
No, she was a smiling American woodpecker who went rat-tat-tat on Zubaida’s head like she was trying to make a hole and wouldn’t stop until Zubaida came to the table, or took her bath, or turned off the TV. How was a tree supposed to fight a woodpecker?
Even though Rebecca was a fancy American woman who should be weak and helpless without her money, she didn’t back away from Zubaida at all when she got big and very loud and began making herself look too strong to stop. Rebecca just somehow made herself get big, too, and she turned into some kind of solid statue that you couldn’t move with a donkey.
Zubaida tried everything she could think of, but as far as she was concerned, Rebecca was managing to get her to do what she wanted her to do far too often.
Peter was just as hard to deal with. She wasn’t even going to call him Dr. Peter anymore, since now he got to tell her what to do whether they were at the hospital or not. As a doctor, he simply had too much authority and power over her for her to be able to stand up to him. Peter wasn’t around as much as Rebecca, so he didn’t try to make her do as much as Rebecca did, but even so, it was easier to feel like she had a choice in the matter when a name didn’t begin with “doctor.”
He didn’t yell like the village men, either, and it was maddening. He just stood there like a tree, refusing to give up and go away, and explaining in simple words and gestures what he wanted from her. When she ignored him, he just kept staying there like a tree trunk and then he would repeat whatever he wanted in new words and gestures, calmly, quietly, over and over until she wanted to scream.
And against the two of them together, forget it. They were like huge mud brick walls, blocking her path, forcing her to turn this way and that until she arrived wherever they were making her go. Only crazy people argue with walls, and when other people see that, they leave they crazy people alone and let them go back to whatever crazy thing that they were doing. But when Zubaida let herself go crazy, screaming with rage and stomping her feet, Peter and Rebecca just kept right on being these silent walls, blocking her from running off on her own, turning her this way and that, taking her to some place that only they knew and understood.
From the beginning, Peter and Rebecca relied on their next door neighbor, Patty Moayer, who could translate for them when they needed to communicate complex thoughts to Zubaida. Patty was raised in Iran, where she worked for years as a nurse, and since immigrating to the U.S. in 1979, she continued to work as a special education school nurse. Her ongoing compassion and desire to help children was a perfect match for the situation. That relationship was another of the happy coincidences that already surrounded the story. Only a few days before, on Halloween, Patty’s two teenaged daughters, Mona and Nina, came by Peter and Rebecca’s house to do a little early trick-or-treating and to introduce themselves to the couple, since the Grossmans had recently moved into the home where the girls’ close friends used to live. Mona and Nina had heard that the new neighbor next door was a handsome young doctor, so Halloween was a good excuse to go over to say hello and get a peek.
They were making a little conversation with Rebecca at the door and hoping that Peter might happen by, when Rebecca asked—half in jest—if they had any friends who spoke Dari and could help by occasionally “babysitting” with a ten year-old visiting Afghan girl who was going to be staying with them.
Both girls grinned. Sure we speak Dari—or Farsi, actually, but the two languages are so close that people who speak either one of them can understand some of the other. So it went with the continuing “divine coincidences” that Mike Smith had already noticed in Zubaida’s story: next door, not one potential baby sitter, but two.
Mona and Nina, along with their mother Patty, were the main language link between them all, and anything that Rebecca and Peter couldn’t communicate to Zubaida with pantomime was translated through them. As for Zubaida, the attention of older teenagers who spoke with her made her feel so important that she kept herself under control when they were around, eager to win their approval. The usual admiration of a young girl for older teenaged girls crossed the culture boundaries without any trouble at all.
Four days after Zubaida moved in, Peter and Rebecca gratefully thanked the girls for their help and gladly promised to continue including them at their house. They had managed to find an experienced nanny who spoke Farsi. After that, the nanny took care of Zubai
da’s moment to moment needs, while Rebecca walked her through the final steps toward getting admitted to a special learning program in a local public school. At the age of ten, this would be the first time that she had ever entered a classroom. Rebecca also completed the arrangements for her to attend classes in reading and writing her own language, knowledge that the Taliban had denied that to her entire generation of girls. Zubaida’s frenetic energy was best controlled by keeping her busy with activities. She appeared to love structured time and a routine of any kind appeared to help her keep from falling into bouts of depression. She was starting to feel the warmth from the fire in Rebecca’s belly.
Rebecca’s work ethic went back to her first jobs as a kid and her personal energy was high, both as a born-in attribute and as a product of her long dedication to healthy living. That energy was now put to work on Zubaida’s behalf in ways that hadn’t been possible, before she came to live with them. Rebecca felt a sense of relief; she was tired of being appalled at the girl’s condition and feeling helpless to do anything about it.
She sent a flurry of phone calls and emails to the state Department and the military to arrange for Mohammed to be taken to the nearest land line for a planned phone call with his daughter. It would be the first direct contact between them since he had left. The Grossmans asked Patty Moayer to listen in on an extension and translate the conversation for them to make sure that Mohammed’s instructions to his daughter didn’t raise her level of conflict even higher.
What Patty heard and translated to them was the excitement and delight between father and daughter at hearing each other’s voices. When Mohammed asked Zubaida to tell him how she was doing, she complained that she didn’t like all the surgery, but that everyone was taking care of her. She complained of missing the family badly and wanting to return home. Mohammed was loving and gentle with her, but he also remained firm that she should drink up every aspect of this experience. When Zubaida told him that Rebecca was enrolling her in public school as well as in private Dari classes, he shouted with joy and urged her to pay sharp attention during every moment of schooling. “Learn everything you can,” he implored. “Soak up everything you can learn and come back here to teach it to your brothers and sisters! This is an opportunity such as no one here can even imagine. You have to do the best you can for everyone here, Zubaida!”
After the satellite contact was broken and the call ended, she was quiet and withdrawn for a long time. They left her to mull things over by herself. Later, when she finally rejoined them, things weren’t instantly better, but Peter and Rebecca agreed that they saw an improvement.
Zubaida began to make eye contact more often, and to hold it for longer period of time. She began to go easy on shooting those dirty looks at them for any passing trivial reason. Most of all, it seemed that being given a firm “mission” directly from her father had restored some feeling of control to her.
Now she wouldn’t be going to school just because Rebecca and Peter thought it was a good idea and she had nothing else to do; she was on a mission for the family who had been so depleted by her injuries. She was going to learn to speak English and to read and write in her native language. With that simple, giant task, she was going to do something that none of the women she had ever known and none of the women that those women had ever known would ever imagine possible.
The power of this order from her father, made on the entire family’s behalf, sank its hook into the fundamental images and sensations of her life, as deeply as they went. This order compelled her to lift her thoughts away from whatever direction that they might stray in, and consistently direct them back to the mission of learning everything she could and of bringing the knowledge back home to share with her clan.
She wasn’t a helpless bundle of flesh, anymore; she was a spy for her family.
She was a student of all things American.
Her father and the rest of her family were going to be expecting a lot from her when she got back to them. More than ever—more than she could possibly have done before the accident, she was going to be a vital personality in the family. She was going to bring them all kinds of American knowledge and information and abilities. Her active and contributing place in the family order would be restored beyond her dreams.
What Peter and Rebecca both noticed at that point was that Zubaida started to become less prone to fits of antagonistic behavior. Her father had given her a way to see herself as someone far more powerful than she could have imagined before all of this happened to her, let alone in the long days since the fire. And as soon as she began to recover her ability to see herself in a form that she recognized—as Zubaida—she also felt less need to force other people to see her.
The result was that the release actually felt like a physical weight being lifted off of her. When it was gone, it seemed to leave her with extra lung space. She was able to draw stronger breath.
* * *
Twenty-eight year old Kerrie Benson was in her fifth year of teaching at the Rosemead Elementary School in the fall of 2002, during “Staff Development Day” when Principal Rose Dunn took her aside in the hallway to give her important news. Dunn had carried out a number of conversations with a local woman named Rebecca Grossman, who had recently gained custody of an Afghan refugee, a girl. The girl was ten, but had never been to school, and was recovering from a series of operations to restore her after massive burn damage. She would not only require special classes in remedial schooling for the rudiments of alphabet and language, but her classroom teacher was going to be expected to “mainstream” the girl in with the rest of the class and find some way to keep her involved with lessons that were years ahead of her education level.
Kerrie Benson, it had been decided, was the best teacher for the task. Her third grade class of eight year-olds was close enough in age, in social terms, for ten year-old Zubaida. Bensen’s careful presentation of lessons and patience with her children had already convinced Principal Dunn that her personal style was suited to the range of challenges that this situation was sure to produce. As for those more advanced lessons that can only be expected for children with a couple of years of schooling under their belts, they would be replaced, for Zubaida, with equal time in a smaller special education class. There the more basic lessons were highly visual and hands-on, clear enough to cross all language barriers.
So in a few days, Kerrie Benson would be getting a new enrollee, and she might want to start preparing herself to receive a ten year-old girl who had never been to school at all, who spoke very little English, and who was only in the area in the first place because she was in the process of enduring a full year of surgeries to restore features that had been obliterated by a fire in her home country of Afghanistan.
It was pointed out to Benson that tremendous behind-the-scenes interest was focused on this girl’s development, and that it was very desirable for this experiment in late-stage basic education to demonstrate positive results.
Benson threw herself into preparation. She, as the main classroom teacher, would handle the task of including Zubaida with the rest of the students during those activities where Zubaida could reasonably be expected to understand and participate. Benson would also coordinate her class time with special education teacher Kendra Kreutzer, who took Zubaida into her special education classroom to work on filling in the pre-third grade schooling that she lacked.
In Benson’s classroom, she presented the regular third grade lessons, she took care that Zubaida’s fundamentals would be constantly reinforced by a number of simple techniques. An old-fashioned alphabet chart was taped to her desk, and she would be provided with a picture book of alphabet letters. To compliment and reinforce those learning tools, Benson also hunted down a set of soft, molded rubber cut-outs of each letter, coated in sand. These would be among Zubaida’s regular daily tools, so that she could not only see and draw each letter the way any other child learns to do it, but she would also have the tactile stimulation of handl
ing each letter in 3-D, as well as trace her fingers over the roughened face of each letter, a process designed to help bury the knowledge of this letter deep into her mind.
Zubaida would be kept within the social structure of the overall class, but would also be provided with constant activities that focused on using “manipulatives,” as Benson called them—items she could touch and feel to reinforce a lesson through a number of senses at the same time. Every lesson would be fed to her through a variety of sensory stimuli, so that lack of common language was never a reason for her to become disconnected from the ongoing lessons.
A key part of Benson’s classroom plan for her newest student was to provide a constant level of challenge that would provide Zubaida with enough moment-to-moment satisfaction to keep the process an engaging one, but would also challenge her enough to prevent boredom from sneaking in. Benson already knew from years of experience that in order to communicate with kids that age in any meaningful way, you have to keep their attention consistently engaged. Any time that Zubaida might spend in being either bored and under challenged or confused and frustrated would only end up as wasted opportunity within the small amount of time that the medical situation allowed them. Those wasted minutes and added up hours would ultimately spoil the tremendous work that lay ahead: playing catch-up to several years of schooling with a student who spoke no English and had no American cultural background.
“But what an opportunity!” Benson later enthused. “And not just for Zubaida, either. Imagine the educational value to a classroom full of American third-graders who have never had contact with a girl from Afghanistan to begin with, let alone one whose appearance supposedly had a somewhat shocking effect, even though she’d already been through several surgeries.”
The trick would lie in how the class was prepared for her arrival. Benson knew that children that age are capable of both casual cruelty and equally strong gentleness and devotion. The devotion usually appeared to be activated when something caused them to empathize instead of judging. She immediately went to her class and began to prepare them, letting them know that there was going to be a late enrolling student joining them in a few days. The student was a girl from a country called “Afghanistan,” and she had never been to school before because in her country, girls are not allowed to go to school. She looked around at all of her girls and let that one sink in.
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