Afghanistan: Welcome

May 2005

Afg 9: In the wavering light

Hi everyone. Hope you’re well.

I’ve been busy, working in Kabul with the UN on strengthening local Afghan media's ability to address gender issues. It's been fascinating observing UN processes from the inside (rather like it was to observe US politics and media from within the US) and I'll be happy to share my experiences a bit later. The subject of this update is slightly different, though, so I hope you'll bear with me as I digress…

I had a pretty bad month in February, with two friends passing away in sudden accidents within a week of each other and a good friend with whom I was living and I having an irreversible falling out. I guess I was hurting a bit, so instead of visiting my friend in Malawi (sorry Krista!!) I decided to spend my eight-day vacation in a woman's shelter in Kabul.

The shelter was one of five in Afghanistan and was run by long term Afghan contacts of mine. I asked if I could stay at the shelter, explaining that I needed some quiet time and a way to gain some perspective as well as be with women I was trying to reach through my work. I had recently heard about the shelter's financial difficulties and so it made sense to me to use my travel funds to support them rather than make an airline negligibly richer.

The shelter organizers very kindly accepted, displaying a great deal of generosity and trust in allowing me to enter such a sensitive sector of Afghan life. Some snippets of my week at the shelter follow:

I enter the shelter with my two changes of clothes and bags of oranges and sweets. I am ushered in by a male gatekeeper, who asks if I want to stay with "the girls." I say yes. "The girls" turn out to be 8 energetic teenagers with whom I share a room for the next four days.

The girls leap up and surround me, seating me, pouring tea, chattering excitedly, telling me they have been anticipating my arrival for several days. Then I face a ring of expectant faces as they ask me to tell a story.

“Um…” I am somewhat at a loss. I’d like to stay normal enough in their eyes to fit in, so would rather not tell them exotic details of where I’m from or what I do. I am also wary of slipping up in my stories and crossing cultural or religious boundaries. I flail about trying to think of stories that are safe, then smile weakly and ask them to tell me stories instead.

“How about jokes? Tell us some jokes…” they say. Even worse. I have to be the worst joke-teller in the world. I tell them so.

Nasia, at everyone else’s urging, tells jokes instead, her giggles at the punch line making the jokes unintelligible.

My eyes widen. My Dari is barely good enough to catch a few of the less polite words she is using. I am from a somewhat similar cultural background as these girls, and I remember blushing in Grade 6 anytime someone said “sex.” If a radio station played George Michael’s “I Want Your Sex” I would almost pass out.

I marvel at their comfort in breaking taboos. I don’t think I’ve met Afghan women quite like these before.

Shahla wrestles with Nahid and their shrieks and giggles fill the air. The rest of us smile and watch.

“I play and tease the others so that time passes,” Shahla declares, her face turned to me as she sits on a muffled but vigorously protesting Nahid. “Our pasts are so painful. We need to laugh otherwise we would be crying all day.”

It is Ashura, a day of mourning and self-flagellation for Shia Muslims to commemorate the 680 AD martyrdom of Hossein, the third Shi’ite Imam. The day begins calmly, with sugary tea and plain bread for breakfast. For once there is electricity and everyone rushes to sit in front of the TV.

On TV an Iranian singer, his face not in view, sings beautifully, movingly, of his devotion to Imam Hossein. The camera pans around the praying audience, then focuses on the back of the singer, which is bent in mourning. He straightens, and there is a breathless pause. Then he turns around, and we all see tears streaming down his face as he begins crying “oh God, oh God.” The crowd on the television erupts in frenzied mourning.

The women in the room also erupt. Nasia begins to cry and hit herself in the head. Her sobs set off Rahela, who begins a wordless keening. “Hey, hey!” I say, grabbing Nasia and holding her tight. The mood in the room has darkened instantly, and collective sorrow hangs like a physical weight in the air. “Ok, enough of that,” I say with mock severity, rocking Nasia. She gradually quietens. The rest of the girls look somber. Most have averted their eyes, but held on.

The Iranian TV show is repeated several times as we watch in continued fascination. Nasia and another girl later begin wailing and pounding their breasts in time with the mourners on television, but the rest of us continue talking and drinking tea as it is clear they are doing it in fun rather than despair.

Maryam is suffering from pimples that she thinks are because of a dread disease. I try not to look at the long scar on her cheek from when she used to cut herself.

It is night. As I sit cross-legged, writing in my book, they all gather to watch my speedily moving pen in the dark, a circle of flickering light on friendly inquisitive faces. Shahla holds the oil lamp for me, slightly envious of and awed by my easy literacy.

I feel very privileged to be here.

I am jarred by recognition in the middle of an alien universe. Their stories change: a "dead" husband turns out to be a very alive 60-year old that Maryam married when she was 11. He beat her for not being a good wife (she used to play with dolls instead of cooking meals) and so she ran away. I am fascinated by her changeability - one moment she is crying and pounding her breast for Ashura, then next she turns around, bares her reddened neck, and says "touch my neck! it's so hot!!" with a typically impish teenage grin.

I try to reconcile her drawings of happy faces, “I love you” doodles, and exuberant way of grabbing my hand and dragging me everywhere with her history of being raped three times by the “trusted family friend” who delivered her to the shelter.

What’s normal? I have no idea anymore.

I think a tiny bit of my money has disappeared, and a girl who catches my look of dismay as I open my wallet calls over the headmistress who conducts a massive search despite my protests. I call the missing amount 30 Afghanis (60 cents – my taxi home money) but I think 10 dollars (my emergency stash) are missing as well. I feel awful as the personal belongings of all the girls are upended and searched in front of everyone. "This happens here all the time. We will find the culprit!" the headmistress tells me, her eyes glinting with determination. She takes each of the girls one by one into her room and interrogates them into tears.

You will all be searched down to the last body part before you can ever leave this shelter!" she exclaims. “Nothing stays lost!!” She moves me and my belongings out of the girls’ room into the mothers’ room upstairs. I sit with a mother and her three children, feeling a mixture of cowardice, guilt, and betrayal as I hear the continued chaos of the ground floor.

Suspicion centres on one particular girl who stole once before and was alone, on cleaning duty, in the room. The other girls surround her after the headmistress leaves and begin their own pressure tactics. When I hear them all screaming at each other, I return to the heated angry room as the former thief bursts into hoarse unintelligible sobs. I don’t think she’s done it (I am suspicious of someone else) and I hug her and murmur as her tears dry in surprise.

The next day I realize I had put my money in another “safe” spot. I feel like a complete heel. I go tell the headmistress, but she’s reached the same conclusion anyway (she knows her girls well). “Oh well, we’re all human and make mistakes,” she says. But what a bloody mistake, I think to myself.

Two days later my purple headscarf disappears. I never liked it anyway.

I hear a bit more about everyone's stories today after we gather around my candle in the dark - again from their initiative, not mine.

Shelters in Afghanistan are a step up from women’s prisons, but not by much. Once an Afghan woman is admitted to a shelter, she is not allowed to leave unless lawyers or social workers resolve her case. Often the girls fake sickness just so they can leave the compound and visit a doctor. A few have escaped by scaling the walls.

Very high social stigma is attached to females who leave their families. Damage to personal and family honour is even worse if the female enters a shelter, which Afghan society regards as a place for prostitutes. It is true that some of the women have indeed been sex workers, one has committed manslaughter, and several have been transferred here directly from prison. But what illegal act have the runaway girls committed? The battered wives? Sexually abused daughters? It doesn’t seem fair.

The women ask me what will happen to them in the future, and I don’t know what to say. “Will my family ever take me back? I’ve been here for a whole year!” one girl exclaims. Another, a nineteen-year-old whose skull has had multiple fractures from a physically abusive husband, and only won a divorce through losing custody of her son, cries large wet tears. “My father has suddenly said he is willing to take me back, but I’m afraid once I am out of here he will beat and kill me for the shame I have caused. What do I do?”

It isn’t fair. No question.

I find myself wanting to discipline the girls very strongly. I am fed up with the little violences they perpetuate on each other - the screaming, slaps, the pettiness, jealousy that I'd give things to the little ones. I am about ready to leave. Apparently they've been calm with me here - normally they have fistfights and vicious quarrels that make the whole shelter tense and explosive. One girl had to be locked in a room where she bit the walls, another managed to lock herself in a bathroom and poured fuel on herself before the door was broken down.

I have been organizing Tae Kwon Do classes for them every morning at 6am so I can tire them out for the day and also repeatedly emphasize the discipline and self-control that is part of holding power. It hasn’t seemed to make a dent in their aggression, though. “You’ve been victims of violence yourselves, and here you are being violent,” I tell them finally, angrily. “You know how it feels – so cut it out!”

Teenage pent up energy and confusion mixed with traumatic pasts - it is potent. It’s not my place to tell them what to do, and I know they are only repeating behaviour they learned from the adults in their lives. I can’t seem to help myself, though, anymore perhaps than they can.

I realize we’ve all been masking ourselves somewhat. I have pretended to live all my life in Iran, and they have pretended (until recently) to have families back home missing them and wanting them back when in fact their being in a shelter is enough for their parents to wish them dead.

We tell our little lies, all trying to be normal, all trying to belong and have a place.

I hate rats, and there is an intrepid little beast chewing away on my blanket as I try to sleep. I feel him scuttle over me three times while I am awake and find tufts of blanket scattered around in the morning.

The little girl who also stays in the mother’s room with me is terrified of rats, her dark eyes dominating her scared face as she looks at the destruction the rat(s) leave behind in the morning. Today is a particularly bad day – somehow the rat(s) knocked over the can of baby formula in the middle of the night, leaving a trail of cream-coloured powder by the thin mattress on which they sleep, close to her beloved mother’s head. I can’t imagine how I would feel in her place.

I have to go to the bathroom, it is night, and as usual there is no electricity. The little girl picks up the lamp and says she will show me the way, warm love in her voice. As we walk into the dark hallway, there is a scuttling sound as something streaks into a hole in the wall. The girl jumps, but leads me to the toilet doggedly. “They can’t get you if you stand in the lamplight,” she tells me, not sounding entirely convinced. Then she stands inside the small cubicle with me until I am done, holding the lamp high and standing guard for me, a tiny, terrified sentry in the wavering light.

I’ve returned now to my official working life and lead a bit of a bizarre double life, working at the UN on weekdays and visiting or sleeping over at the woman's shelter on weekends. The stories of the women I have met there continue to preoccupy me. I don't know what they'll do when they leave. Whatever fights they have while at the shelter, they are surrounded by people who understand and accept them. Their families and Afghan society are not as kind.

For myself, I am very grateful. Whenever I think I have it bad, I meet people with life stories that exist in a category of their own. I share blankets with people who daily, consciously, barely, choose life instead of death. I have tea with people who live with injustice that is normal.

Rat-induced bad sleep aside, I have gained a lot from the shelter: for my work, a much better sense of the problems women face; for my studies, some of the threads linking cultural restrictions on Afghan women; for myself, an enduring connection that I cherish.

I feel relationship is so long term, leaving bits of me, taking precious moments of shared history along. It is moments of opening up, vulnerability, confession, being understood and facing accepting eyes, having a champion in a moment brief yet fulfilling. Whatever my frustrations, struggles, and periods of rawness in Afghanistan, I am experiencing what I treasure here – occasions when I gasp, and like my breath, the moment is suspended in timelessness before its gentle release.

So to all of you - my friends who’ve left, my friends who are here, and the moments we share: I am gasping, I am breathing, I miss you. And I’m fine. Gentle releases and all.

Wishing you all your own terrified but determined sentries,

Sarah.