Kids of Kabul (9 page)

But there are powerful groups in Afghanistan who are always looking for things to use against us. They are part of the old way of thinking I was telling you about. That thinking will end, but it is still around. So I don’t know if we will make it to Canada or not.

My hope for Afghanistan is that all girls will be able to play football, basketball, volleyball, track, or whatever other sport they enjoy. We are free when we are playing sports, and girls need to be free.

My hope for myself is to become the best referee in Afghanistan.

We have to be brave and strong and stand up for our rights, and not let anyone take us down.

Noorahu, 16

Afghanistan is one of the most heavily land-mined countries on Earth. A land mine is a cheap weapon. It can be easily put in the ground, and whoever walks on it will lose a limb or their eyes or their life. Many of the armies that have trampled on Afghanistan since the 1970s have put down land mines. But they didn’t pick them up again. The mines stayed in the ground and kept on killing long after the war was declared over and the armies went home.

The Afghan Landmine Survivors’ Organization (ALSO) supports victims of land mines through education, rehabilitation and job training. An important aspect of their work is struggling against the stigma faced by people with disabilities. Parents, not knowing what to do, will sometimes neglect their disabled children, and the city is not accessible, so disabled people have a hard time getting around.

One of the ways ALSO fights against the stigma is to run a community center in a very poor neighborhood that holds classes and brings together students of all ages, with and without disabilities.

The center is in a small rundown building a short way down an alley off a busy street. It is one room with torn plaster walls, divided up into classrooms by boards and sheets of plastic. The classrooms are crowded with kids sitting on the floor and looking up at chalkboards.

Noorahu is a student at this center. His legs were damaged by a land mine.

Some of the children at this center are like me. They have bad legs or no legs or a hand missing or something wrong like that. Other students have everything they are supposed to have. We are all treated the same. When a teacher is talking you can’t tell if they are talking to a disabled kid or a regular kid. So no one feels different.

This is the first time I’ve gone to classes. It has been too hard to go to school before this. Before this community center opened up, the nearest school was very far away.

It is hard for me to walk with my legs damaged. I have crutches to help me, but it is still hard and it hurts. There is no money in my family for me to take taxis to school, so I haven’t been able to go to a regular school.

My father doesn’t work every day. He is a cook, and he helps prepare meals for wedding parties. When there is no wedding, he does not work, so there is very little money in our house. Sometimes when he cooks for a wedding, there is food left over, and the family who has hired him lets him take some food home to us. We eat very well on those nights because my father is a very good cook.

Outside of this center, people say negative things to me because of my disability. They call me names. They say things that make me feel not good about myself. When there are a lot of younger boys and they make fun of me, it is very hard for me to get away from them. They can run and jump around me and try to knock me down, and when I fall, they just laugh. I can’t get away from them when they come at me because my legs are damaged. My legs won’t move fast.

It’s not just small children who act bad this way. Sometimes grown men say bad things to me, like I am bad luck and I am moving too slow. Not all adults are like this. Many are kind and they help me up if I fall. But some are not nice.

In this place, everyone is nice to me. Even kids who are not disabled. They treat me like I am normal.

Our teacher was hurt by a land mine when she was a child. She was thirteen when it happened. Her family had just finished a meal, and she had to do the dishes. She walked to the back of the house where the dishwashing area was and she stepped on a land mine. Some army had put land mines in her house. She stepped on a land mine, and the next thing she knew she was waking up in the hospital and her leg was gone.

She is a good teacher. When she teaches us we don’t see that she has a leg missing. If she can become a teacher with no leg, maybe I can do something important, too.

Here I have friends, and I never had friends before. My good friend is Mosan. His father was killed by the Taliban. His mother makes carpets at home, and he thought his whole life would be making carpets, too. Then he started lessons here, and now he has bigger dreams.

We both want to be artists, which we can do whether we have legs or not. This center is big on art. Many kids like to draw, and the teachers put our best work up on the walls to encourage us.

I like to draw nature. Mostly what I have seen in my life has not been pretty. We live in a very poor area of Kabul. It is not beautiful. But I have seen photos at this center of beautiful natural places in the world. And even in the ugly parts of Kabul, flowers bloom. You just have to take the time to look for them.

Angela, 17

One of the ways people from different nations get beyond thinking of other nationalities in stereotypes is by meeting each other and getting to know each other as individuals.

The Youth Exchange and Study Program (YES) was set up in 2004 by the US State Department to give Afghan kids the chance for a first-class education and to get to know Americans as ordinary people, beyond the soldiers they see in Afghanistan.

Angela spent a year in the United States going to high school as part of the YES program. She is now such an accomplished English speaker that she has been hired several times to do short-term translation jobs for foreigners, including myself!

Meanwhile, the YES program was suspended in 2011 after many of the students fled the United States to become refugees in Canada rather than return to Afghanistan

I am originally from a village in Bamiyan. My parents are still there.

I was very young when the Taliban were in power. The war in Bamiyan was really bad. The Taliban were fighting an army called Hezbe-Watan, an army of Hazara people. The Taliban hated Hazara people. They killed so many people in Bamiyan. If they saw men or boys on the street, they would just shoot them dead, right in the street.

My family was in danger like everybody else in the country. The men, especially, were in danger. We all went up into the mountains with my uncle and his family. First we tried hiding the men in a basement room, but we were afraid that the Taliban would not believe us if they came and we told them the men were all dead. Plus, women alone could not go out of their homes and we were running out of food. So that could not last. So we went up into the mountains.

Remember, I was very young. I was not too bothered by the trip to the mountains because my mother was with me and I knew she would take care of me. I knew that the journey was hard. We left in a hurry, when the Taliban were patrolling another neighborhood, so there was no time to pack what we needed. And we didn’t have much anyway. No water, almost no food. It was very cold and uncomfortable. We had no house in the mountains, no tent. We just slept on the rocks and tried to stay out of the wind. I was young, so they protected me as much as they could, but I knew that we were in a bad condition.

I don’t know how long we stayed in the mountains. Weeks, I think. We ran out of food very early. I remember being cold and hungry and bored and scared. My brother and uncle tried to return to the village to get us food and blankets, but the Taliban were all over the place. There was a lot of killing going on. So they returned to the mountains with empty hands.

We were all so cold and so hungry that it was decided that the women and children would return home and the men and teenaged boys would stay in the mountains. The women would try to get food to the men. I remember the journey back down the mountains. It was not good.

We were home for three days. It was bad.

My brother loved books. He was a good student and had a lot of books. The Taliban were against books and they would arrest people who had them. So the first thing my mother did when we got back home was she burned all my brother’s books and then she threw the ashes away far from our house. We had a cassette player, too, and some music cassettes. We buried these in the yard because they were also against the law.

My father was worried about us and came down the mountain to check on us. The Taliban arrested him.

The Taliban really hated the Hazaras, but they also didn’t like Tajiks. My mother is Tajik but she looks Pashtun, the tribe of the Taliban, and she speaks their language. So she did a very brave thing.

She took my little brother — because women could not be outside without a man, and even a little boy qualified as a man — and she went to the Taliban’s compound. She went right up to them and said, “I want my husband out of jail! Why are you doing this to us? We are poor people. If we had any money, we would have run away!”

By a miracle, they released my father. As soon as he was out, we started walking. We left everything behind in Bamiyan and just walked, for days and days.

We ended up in Kabul. The Taliban were in Kabul, of course, so I don’t know why my parents thought it would be safer. Maybe they thought we could hide better in a big city. We went into a little room and stayed there for a long, long time. I forgot all about my school. The world became very small.

But then the Taliban fell and I was able to go back to school. I really wanted my education!

They put me into the fifth grade even though I could barely write my name. I studied really hard and after a year I could read and write properly.

I kept on working hard, and in grade seven I started to learn English. I had some books and I taught myself for a while until my school got a teacher who could help me.

Then, in grade eleven, I got accepted into a program that would pay to let me go to high school in the United States for a year.

I was very excited. I had seen pictures of the United States, of busy cities with lots of shops and different things to do. But when I got off the plane, I was in Iowa, and all I could see was farmland! That was a bit of a shock.

I stayed with a host family in Iowa. In the beginning I was scared of everyone. My English was not good, and I had heard terrible things about Americans. I had been told that they hated Muslims and liked to shoot each other and did not behave like human beings. But after a couple of weeks I learned that what I’d been told was not the reality.

It took me about three months to get used to the Iowa accent and the people, and then I was fine and comfortable. I even attended church — not because I was forced to but because I wanted to. After all, Jesus is very respected by Muslims. On Saturday nights this church had a youth Bible study, and I went and met some friends there.

The Bible and the Qur’an are very similar. I was glad to learn more about the Bible and I was able to answer the American kids’ questions about Islam. So we learned from each other.

For the rest of my time in the US, I was just a normal student. I was happy.