by Fawzia Koofi
I came back from the hospital still pregnant. My eldest sister was still there with Hamid. She was overjoyed I hadn’t aborted the child, but she was so disgusted I’d even considered it she could barely look at me. Hamid just held me in his arms and whispered that it was going to be okay. I wasn’t sure he was right. I had no idea how it was going to be okay. But I also knew now that it wasn’t my unborn child’s fault we were where we were. My duty was to her as a mother.
My youngest daughter Shuhra knows the whole story. My sister told her when she was about six. Sometimes she uses it to tease me. If I’m telling her off or asking her to tidy her room, she places her hands on her hips and looks at me squarely with a mischievous glint in her eye. “Mother, you wanted to kill me, remember?”
Of course she knows full well that I am then wracked with guilt and she gets away without cleaning her room.
The pregnancy continued but it was hard. I was breastfeeding Shaharzad, which tired me, and I was standing in the classroom teaching from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m. The Taliban were also encroaching. They took control of Kisham, the border town of Badakhshan. We were terrified they would get as far as Faizabad. If they did so Hamid and I decided we would try and flee to the mountains and make our way back to my father’s village in Koof district.
At one point Taliban fighters were only 15 miles away. I stood outside my school listening to the familiar sound of heavy artillery and watching as the men of the city boarded trucks, volunteering to go fight the Taliban alongside the mujahideen army loyal to the Rabbani government. Part of me wanted Hamid to join them, but then I told him not to go. He was a teacher, not a soldier, and he didn’t even know how to use a gun. Besides he was too weak to fight anyone. Many of the young men who got on trucks that day never came back. But they were successful in keeping the Taliban out of Faizabad and succeeded in pushing them back.
In the middle of all this Shuhra decided to make her own entrance to the world. I had a terrible labor that lasted for three days. My sister and a female doctor friend were with me. Hamid stood waiting outside. This time he wanted a boy. I already had given him a girl, now I really was supposed to produce a boy. His family, my family, our neighbors, our entire culture of boys before girls, expected it thus.
But I failed to deliver them the son they wanted. Instead my second daughter Shuhra came kicking and screaming into the world. She was tiny and red faced, just five and a half pounds, which was a dangerously low weight. When I saw her I was reminded of how I might have looked when I was born. I was the baby that was described as ugly as a mouse. The same description could be said of Shuhra. She was wrinkled and bald and red and screaming nonstop. But as I looked at her my heart filled with so much love that I thought it might burst into hundreds of pieces. Here she was. This little girl who was almost not born, whom I had shamefully almost killed, here she was alive and screaming and looking just like I had.
I was overjoyed but Hamid was not. This is Afghanistan, and sadly, even the most liberal or modern-thinking man is affected by hundreds of years of culture. And that culture dictated that I had failed in my biggest duty as a wife by not giving Hamid a son. This time the cruel gossip and innuendo got to him.
I think somebody a made a joke to him about the $20,000-dollar girl being a bad value. Perhaps he had heard these jokes at his expense so many times over the years that he was just sick of it and something snapped inside.
He didn’t come into my room to see me for almost nine hours. I lay back on the pillows with Shuhra in my arms, waiting for him and unable to understand where he was. She was so tiny she almost disappeared into her swaddling clothes and I could hardly hold onto her.
When he finally came in, Shuhra was asleep in a crib next to me. He refused to look at me. When Shaharzad was born he had burst into the room excitedly, stroking my hair and cheek as he gazed in wonderment at his child. This time he offered his wife no tender touch or reassuring words. His angry face said it all. He looked into the crib and at least managed a wan smile at his sleeping baby daughter, another of Afghanistan’s “poor girls.”
In the weeks that followed I found it difficult to forgive Hamid for how he had treated me the day she was born. I knew he was only behaving like countless other Afghan men and within the confines of a culture that makes boys more important, but I had not expected it from him. He had always been so supportive in the past, taking pride in his ability to fly in the face of the gossips and the patriarchy.
Perhaps I had expected too much from him. But I felt disappointed and badly let down.
His coughing kept me and the baby awake at night so he moved into a separate room. That marked the end of our physical relationship. We never again shared a bed or any sexual intimacies.
But despite my own upset at him over this, I was aware of how lucky I was that he was such a wonderful, tender father to his girls. He loved both of them openly and deeply, and if he was still angry at not having a son, he never once let that show to his daughters. For that I was grateful.
By now he was barely strong enough to teach, and he cut down his days at the university to just two a week. The rest of the time he stayed at home and looked after Shaharzad. She has wonderful memories of a father who sang to her, played games with her, let her play dress up with him, and even allowed her to make him up as a bride and put ribbons in his hair.
Hamid was everything to me and he was an extraordinary Afghan man. In many ways he was very ahead of his time. We were in love when we married, deeply in love. But I suppose the years together, the trials and tribulations of his imprisonment, and his illness just meant that over time we grew apart from each other. The casual intimacy, the laughter, the joy of being in the same room and sharing secret glances had gone. I think it’s probably a sad truth, but over time that happens to couples all over the world, wherever and whoever they are. We forget to take a moment to listen to what our partner is trying to say to us, we jump too easily to harsh words and impatience, and we fail to make the special little efforts that we used to. Then one day we wake up and our intimacy and love is gone.
Up until she was about six months old I was desperately worried Shuhra would not survive. She was so tiny and frail I was scared that even washing her would give her a fever. I was also terrified and wracked with guilt that the medicine I had taken to try and abort her had affected her development somehow. If she had died I don’t think I would ever have forgiven myself. Like my mother before me I felt my denial of her then gave me an even greater debt of duty to her now.
Gradually she grew stronger and put on weight. And as she did so she became all the more funny and clever. Today she is the brightest, cheekiest, and sometimes naughtiest little girl that ever lived. I see myself and both of my parents in her. She has my father’s wisdom and my mother’s wit and strength.
She also wants to be president of Afghanistan when she grows up. Thankfully she is far removed from the image of a “poor girl.”
A couple of weeks after she was born I had received a part-time job offer to manage a small orphanage. I didn’t want to return to work so quickly, but with Hamid sick we needed the money. I left Shaharzad with her father and wrapped baby Shuhra in a big scarf that I tied around me. She would lie quietly against my breast, hidden under the burqa. I would attend meetings with my baby hidden this way and people wouldn’t even realize she was there. She didn’t complain and rarely even made a noise. I think she was just happy to be alive and to be snuggled so close to her mother. I carried her at work like this until she was five months old and became too heavy. I think it’s one of the reasons she’s so secure and confident as a child today.
As Shuhra and Shaharzad blossomed and grew, Hamid was dying before my eyes.
He was losing weight almost daily. The skin on his once handsome face had turned dark, almost like a translucent layer of black coated it. His eyes were bloodshot and he coughed almost constantly, and he was beginning to cough little bits of blood.
When Shuhra was three months ol
d I was asked to take part in a medical survey of the province for an aid agency called Foundation for Children. The survey meant joining a team of 60 nurses, doctors, and support staff to travel across 12 remote districts assessing the medical and nutritional needs of the people. It was an incredible offer and the type of community outreach work I had dreamed of doing when I had wanted to be a doctor. Despite the bad timing with a new baby and a dying husband I couldn’t turn it down. Hamid understood this and gave me his blessing to go.
I almost didn’t, though. It was a grueling trip for anyone, let alone someone with a tiny baby. It would be hard to find clean water or proper washing facilities and we would be traveling across remote and barely accessible mountain tracks. The journey was to take in many of the country’s Ismaili communities—devotees of Shia Islam’s second-largest sect. In Afghanistan they predominantly live near the Takjik border. Our trip would also take us to the wild and rarely traveled Wakhan corridor—a finger of land that connects Afghanistan with China. It was created during the so-called Great Game—the nineteenth-century period when the Russian and British Empires were wrestling for control of central Asia—and it served as a buffer between the militarized ambitions of the British Lion and the Russian Bear.
Despite my reservations I knew I’d regret it if I didn’t go. Good opportunities rarely present themselves at the perfect moment, that’s just a fact of life. And I felt I could play a real part in the success of the survey.
As we set off, I was reminded of the trips my mother used to make each year, driving my father’s cattle herd out to graze the spring pasture. She would sit proudly upon her horse, still wearing her burqa, and go off on her annual adventures complete with a caravan of donkeys, horses, and servants. I remember sitting on the horse in front of her feeling so small in the large mountainscape but so important in our mission. As we set off across rugged tracks on our survey I felt a similar emotion, only this time it was me with the baby on my lap.
That trip changed my life.
We visited some of the most remote places in the region. Places I have never been able to visit again. The levels of extreme poverty we found crystallized once and for all my political awakening. I knew my calling was to help.
We started the survey in January. It was so cold that people were actually using fresh animal dung to keep their babies warm while they slept. Their biggest fear was that their children would freeze to death, so they thought they were helping their child. They had no idea that the dung could cause disease or infection. Hygiene was nonexistent, children were barefoot in the snow, and most of them were malnourished.
By night we would eat and take shelter in the religious leaders’ houses. That would usually be the largest house in the village with running water and a drop toilet, literally a large, deep hole in the ground. That was similar to the house I had grown up in, and although the Western doctors on our survey found it hard, for me it was reassuringly familiar.
But community leaders aside, the other villagers lived in a poverty I had never seen before, even as a child. Often we would find a one-room house with an entire family living inside, the animals in one corner and a toilet in the other. And when I say toilet I don’t mean the traditional hole in the ground, or even a bucket—just a corner of the room with feces piled high and babies crawling around all over the room. It was shocking. I tried to explain the dangers such poor hygiene posed, but the reality is, it would fall to the husband to dig a proper latrine a safe distance from the house. Digging latrines—even ones that might save his children’s lives, is sadly often more than the Afghan machismo of these uneducated village men could bear and they didn’t like to lower themselves by doing it.
I tried a different approach: “Doesn’t your good Muslim wife deserve her dignity being preserved when she performs her bodily functions?” But sadly, the indignity suffered by a woman defecating in the corner of the living room, or outside in full view of her neighbors, is outweighed by the male indignity of providing such a facility. Having seen all that, it makes me understand even more why Badakhshan province has the world’s highest infant and maternal mortality rate.
In Darwaz, one of the poorest of all the districts, the women told me they have to go out at four o’clock in the morning in the snow to feed the animals. Sometimes the snow can be as much as three feet deep. No one helps them, and then when they get back in they have to cook the bread on an open fire and prepare the food for the family. It is more than a life of domestic drudgery. It is a life of hard labor. The men, too, work hard, going out into the fields at 6.00 a.m. and not returning until after dark, trying to grow enough crops in summer to last the family and the animals throughout the winter. It was a wake-up call to remind me how poor and marginalized these people are.
Seeing their suffering triggered something of an epiphany about who I was, where I had come from, and what my calling in life was to be.
We were in an area called Kala Panja, one of the Ismaili communities. We’d been invited to have dinner and stay the night at the house of the local leader. I had never met him, but he greeted me like an old friend. It was slightly embarrassing and my colleagues were beginning to laugh at me when he revealed the reason. He had known my father. As we sat he told tales of my father. He talked of a hard-working, dedicated man, one who did all he could to bring changes to the poor. He smiled at me and said: “Now Miss Koofi, I see you sitting here and I see you are the same as your father.”
It was the first time in my entire life anyone had likened me to my father and I flushed with pride. As I sat in the room surrounded by elders, doctors, and villagers, all people coming together to try to make a difference, I was transported back in time. To a time when my mother ruled her kitchen, and servants and brothers stood in a line to hand out piping hot pots of rice to that mysterious room where my father met with his guests. As a child I had yearned to enter, to see what happened, to know what discussions took place in that mysterious secret room.
I smiled to myself as I realized the mystery had lifted now. Those meetings my father had were actually just like the one I was in now. They were simply dinners with delegations of aid workers, doctors, engineers, and local elders. How many nights had he sat and dined and discussed plans and projects and ways to bring development to his people? How many meals had my mother cooked for visitors like this? I sat there barely engaging in the conversation, lost in my thoughts and feeling secretly thrilled to be here, to be understanding such a critical part of my father’s life.
In the morning when we left the man gave me a gift of a sheep for my baby Shuhra. Wakhan sheep, short and fat, are famous for their tender meat. The other Afghans on the trip were jealous and teased the man: “Where is our sheep? Why did you give it to Miss Koofi?”
But he just smiled and said: “It’s a gift for Miss Koofi’s father. I am honored today to have hosted his daughter and his granddaughter. And to see how his daughter has grown like him.” Once again, the man’s words made me flush with pride.
As we traveled the districts I met more people who had known my father. And I gained a deeper understanding of the political role my family had held. I had only been hired as a translator on the medical survey, not a senior role. But people heard my name and thought I was somehow here representing my father, that the Koofi family were once again back in Badakhshan mobilizing communities.
Villagers started to come and seek me out personally, presenting problems to me. I tried to explain to them I hadn’t organized the survey, I was just a low-level helper. But they kept coming, and they came with problems unrelated to the survey, like a salary problem or a land dispute. I found it a little unnerving and overwhelming. But at the same time I had a growing sense of purpose and determination. And of belonging.
Here, with my father’s political legacy, with my mother’s personal values and my baby at my breast, I realized I wanted to be a politician. I don’t even know if “want” is the right word. It was what I had to be. It was what I was meant to be.
The survey took six weeks. Shaharzad was only 18 months old and I missed her terribly while I was away. Hamid was more than happy to take care of her because in his heart I think he knew his days were limited and I think he enjoyed those few weeks of bonding, just him and his beloved daughter.
After the survey ended I went back to my job at the orphanage. This further mobilized me.
The children all had different stories. Terrible stories. Some had lost both parents, others had a parent who remarried and refused to allow them in the house, others had been placed there by parents too poor to feed them. It was heartbreaking and I wished I could have taken every one of them home with me. I spent the first three months of the job interviewing them about their backgrounds and organizing their individual histories into a database. There were 120 students, 60 boys and 60 girls. Despite the sadness of the children’s stories the orphanage was a happy place. I was able to take both my daughters to work with me. Baby Shuhra stayed quiet, hidden under her scarf, and Shaharzad played with the children. I still see some of those same children every once in a while. Some of them are at university now and I still try to help them as much as I can.
But things really changed for me when a few months later the United Nations opened a UNICEF office in Faizabad. I applied for and got a job as children’s protection officer. It was a small office and I was effectively the second in charge. Working for the United Nations was a big step up for me. And the job was tough. It involved working with children and internally displaced people (people who had lost their homes during the fighting).
Part of my job was to network with youth and civil society organizations. One of them was called the Badakhshan Volunteer Women’s Association. In my spare time I volunteered for them, trying to fundraise and organizing things like micro-credit for women wanting to set up small businesses. I was also involved with a team that planned annual International Women’s Day celebrations every March 8. International Women’s Day is not celebrated everywhere and certainly isn’t celebrated all over Afghanistan, but in Badakhshan we recognized it as an important symbol. We traveled to the villages giving gifts and organizing a Mother of the Year contest. It was a way of giving the village women a sense of pride about who they were.