Start Again: An American Volunteer in an Afghan Orphanage

Ian Pounds

The following are two excerpts from the journal of an American, Ian Pounds, who this year volunteered to teach children in an Afghan orphanage. He resided in the orphanage for five months, through the mounting tension surrounding the Presidential election, in a section of the city off limits to any westerner working in the city.

16 April, 2009

I awoke this morning just before dawn, 4am Kabul time, wrapped in blankets on a hard bed in a dingy, tiny, smelly fifty-dollar room in a guesthouse. The sound I awoke to was a far away siren, which I soon realized was the winding up of morning prayers broadcast through the air above this devastated city. The forlorn call to prayer was soon joined by a second call, singing in a kind of slow dance, and then a frog throated cock crowing. Then came the birds, one and then what must have been a hundred, chirping so loud as to resemble wind squealing through a small crack in a car window while speeding down a highway. I got up and washed, then stepped outside. The birds were actually green parrots, a hundred or so, cloistered in a twenty-foot birdcage. Yesterday is something to spend some time with, sorting it out, coming to this place.

As I retrieved my cittern and duffel bag in Delhi airport, I felt a small panic in my chest. I was about to get on a plane to Kabul and all I felt like doing was crying. Try doing this on a 50 year old jet that looked to be a hand me down from some now defunct airline, confiscated by Kam Air for the hop over the mountains to Kabul. Weeping, surrounded on this plane by tough, seriously tough Afghan men of all ages, is not what I envisioned. One group of boys looked like a gang of thugs, scorpions not tattooed on their arms, but branded, their skin raised like a worm had dug its way through. There were three women, all khawla-jans, ancient eyes, covered in thin embroidered cloth but for their faces from noses to brows. The plane lurched and suddenly we were in the worst turbulence I’ve ever experienced. That just seemed to excite the men. They got louder, walked around the plane, laughed. The two next to me pushed some opium into their palms, rubbed it into little brown balls and stuck them into their cheeks. I was moving forward, whether I liked it or not. No turning back. Not now.

Then came the central Hindu Kush. Peaks reaching close to 20,000 feet. The jet could hardly rise above them. I felt like I was in one of those old stylized movies showing the prop plane weaving through a pass and dropping into Shangri-la. White and jagged are these, like the young Olympics or Tetons, but the sheer immensity of them took my breath completely. Something about their spacing, as if the earth had grown so huge as to afford extra space for them to be scattered here and there, not squashed so tightly as to be there and then gone. There was Paghman mountain, most prominent of Kabul, the sentinel. I couldn't stop staring as we dropped quickly into the city, one of the highest capitals at 5,800 feet. Ancient Kabul, surrounded by natural walls like the sheer walls of mountains in Hawaii, but again, dwarfing the likes of those volcanic dollops of earth. And so it finally began.

I waited in a spring rain for the bus that would drive passengers to customs. Nothing seemed foreboding. Once inside, as I waited in line, a police officer wandered up to me. They were everywhere, these police, a dozen in this small entryway. Their uniforms are almost caricatures, like fake ones worn on Halloween. They are a strange greenish gray, not the color of anything smacking of police, ill fitting, baggy. The bearded policeman now courting me asked what my work was. I immediately broke every rule I had warned myself against, like a stupid tourist, as if I was in London. “Oh, I’m going to teach in a girl’s orphanage for five months!”

He smiled. “Come,” he said. He led me to the special booth for business class, where there was no line. As he processed my visa and passport, he kept smiling. “My friend,” he said to his colleague sitting in the booth and nodding in my direction. “My new friend.”

The other man caught the joke, “Yes, I can see. So you have a new friend…” I didn't like the implication.

This new friend of mine followed me into the baggage collection area. I was so overjoyed my bag and my cittern actually made it, I didn’t notice him following me outside. He of course was a spy, for which faction of which element in the police, the army or the government, with allegiance to which tribe or former warlord and war criminal who now walked around in a suit and tie, I could never know, but one thing is for certain, he wanted to know where it was I would be working, and with whom. I had stupidly raised the worst possible red flag; a foreigner, American no less, and a man coming to “teach” and live with children in Kabul, this was something straight out of the Taliban Top Ten People to Look Out for list.

I hauled my 57 pound red firefighter’s duffel bag and my 25 pound hand bag and my cittern across the parking lot and out the gate, and still the man followed. I called Andeisha on my new international phone, and she said frantically to keep walking. “Follow the people,” she said. “Now.”

I continued from one parking lot to another, when suddenly a scrawny Afghan civilian came up beside me and grabbed the ridiculously heavy duffel, lifted it onto his shoulder and carried it for me all the way to the third parking lot. It did not occur to me at the time he was out for anything, not even a tip. Perhaps the policeman, who could not leave the inner sanctum of his post, had sent this man to spy. I’ll never know. Finally, Andeisha appeared, a beautiful woman, dark eyes, long dark hair, modestly dressed with shawl about her head. She placed her right hand over her chest, as I did in greeting a woman properly in Afghanistan, but then she stuck out her hand, and I accepted the offer. She had her little son with her, Damoon, and was accompanied by her husband Jamshid, who was smiles and enthusiasm. He is equally dark eyed, dark haired, beautiful, both of them are terribly slim, but strong. Together, the two run the orphanages, and for the foreseeable future will be my only contact, my only lifeline in Afghanistan.

I paid my strange luggage carrier a U.S. dollar and he left like a shadow after a cloud appears. We loaded up in a mid sized white Toyota station wagon, one that I wondered if it had ever seen better days. The driver, Yasin was big and kind faced, balding and mustached in the way of a postman or a barber or a jeweler. I would later learn he is husband of the couple who live in the orphanage as house parents. We drove out of the airport parking and immediately picked up a security guard, a man named Hakim who I also learned goes wherever my hosts go, his Russian rifle in hand. It was a heavy load on that poor white car, and the streets here are a minefield of giant potholes. It is the end of rainy season. With no shocks left, the wheels ground against their wells more often than not, and puddles were so deep as to drown the muffler. We made some very small talk, but I accepted that it was not the time or place to speak, but rather to pay attention. So instead I watched out my window as Kabul passed by.

I’ve been in Manila, Bangkok, Madras… I’ve never seen anything like Kabul. It is, first of all, a post thirty-years war zone. Everywhere there are police armed to the teeth, and so many different kinds. This army and that, security forces, regular police, body guards, there doesn’t seem to be any order to who is posted where. They peek inside the cars and trucks, stopping some without apparent reason. I was amazed to see even a few brave bicycles jammed into the few passable streets. All the way, miles through the city, is devastation, single story buildings held up by faith, others simply left collapsed. Shops are miraculously being wielded from the rubble. Women are the beggars here, in their blue burkhas, standing dangerously in the middle of traffic, how can they see? Many don’t seem to have the strength to stand, so they just sit by the side of the road. A truck could run over one, easily, and who would notice? Then come the shiny new buildings, fresh modern towers built with aid money. The contrast is outright confusing. As we made our way to the orphanage, the idea crystallized in my mind, most certainly what Sarah Chayes meant in her book when she wrote that this is a nation suffering, in its very fabric, from PTSD. The citizens, the warriors, the government, the doctors, the institutions, everything suffering from this condition. Imagine if you will, the symptoms of one who suffers from PTSD. Now expand it to include an entire nation.

Then, finally we turned down a side street, bumping over a series of holes in the pavement, and there it was, the orphanage, painted almost a quiet pastel peach, the color of skin. Yasin tooted the horn and the gate opened. We pulled into the drive, parked, and as I lifted myself out of the car I felt I’d left one world and entered one anew. Twenty or so of the children, standing there in the courtyard garden, smiling, curious beyond belief, expectant and, in their faces, every single one of them, hope. “Salam!” I said. And they answered with such immediacy, as if I’d said Guess what everyone, you are going to be happy for the rest of your lives! My heart felt it had found a home.

“Salam!” they said in unison.

They are all girls, ages 7 to 16, from all over the country. Andeisha informed me there are now sixty in just this orphanage. We hiked up some steps and removed our shoes, and I was given a tour of the facility. Clean, organized, healthy. Room enough for the children to learn and be safe. One dorm room contains at least ten double bunk beds. There is a game room, a large classroom, and dining area. I was shown the guest room, which is luxurious compared with most living conditions in such cities as Kabul. I even had my own bathroom.

But I was to discover layer by layer that all is not well, and I learned first hand the Afghan propensity to get to some points circuitously, like a spiral getting closer and closer to its mark. Certain elements here are under siege, and the government is vehemently against them. These are the elements that are simply refusing to be silent about the one major issue that is destroying the country once again, the empowerment of warlords, their place in government, men who participated and even orchestrated massacres of civilians during the years of civil war. This orphanage is accused of being a cover for such an element.

Andeisha and Jamshid and I talked for two hours. It was serious and terribly sober talk. I would have to spend the night in a guesthouse, security is just too scary right now, even though the orphanage is gated and armed by guards. A man living among girls who in this country are of marrying age may incite a row, and various factions would love the opportunity to kidnap an American, but more dangerous is the government believing this orphanage to be some sort of cover for what it considers to be a radical resistance movement, specifically RAWA. If we cannot convince the children’s relatives of my role and trustworthiness, keep my presence and movements a secret from the streets, if we cannot find a way to get government official approval, to convince them this orphanage is an open book, that there are no radicals here, for security reasons I may have to find other living arrangements. But I can’t afford to pay the supremely inflated cost of housing in this ramshackled city, and how safe would it be for me to commute to the orphanage? Worst-case scenario, I go to Pakistan and work in an orphanage there.

I was devastated. Months of preparation, raising support, a flight from Boston to London to Delhi to Kabul, and in a flash it may disappear. How strange and preposterous to be so attached not to just helping Afghan kids, but kids in Afghanistan. My lovely, brave, gracious hosts were heartbroken to even entertain the thought. They dearly want me to stay in Mehan orphanage, they see the faces of the children already. For kids to learn English and computer would empower them to get real jobs. To teach them music would empower their hearts. How could this be a threat to the government? It all comes down to perception. I am an infidel. I am here to steal a girl as wife, to spread Christianity, a spy for Israel, all of it.

I was exhausted, emotionally spent. I accepted my fate. I’d leave the country in the morning if necessary. Security comes first, if not mine than certainly the future of the orphanage. As I accepted I told my hosts, and I cried for the second time that day. Their relief was evident, but their sorrow was evident in their own tears. We ate a meal of potatoes and fruit and yogurt, and we loaded with Yasin and our Kalashnikov totting Hakim, and made the drive back into the heart of the city, into the night and glowing generator powered lights to this guesthouse where I’d pass my very first night in Afghanistan, the crossroads of Asia.  

May 15th

Last night the girls and I had watermelon with our rice and beans. My first seed traveled in a graceful arc the entire length of our dinner “table” (a fifteen foot mat rolled out on the floor), landing with a “plink” in Fatima’s metal saucer. Thirty pairs of eyes stared in amazement not only at what I had done but that I had done it. From one small childhood memory I had initiated the swiftest cultural exchange in history. The cellar of the orphanage erupted in laughter as the kids drew battle lines and puckered up. A generation of Afghan girls learning to spit watermelon seeds; take that, Taliban!

Children are children everywhere. They get bored with adults who talk too much. They tease. They ostracize. Some learn physically, some emotionally, some are purely of the mind. In an orphanage these things are mitigated by proximity. Here there is a unique blend of individual development and dedication to communal interest. Still, if you think about so many fledglings in a given nest, when it comes to competition the gloves come off.

At Sitara I the little kids are fresh from their worlds, wild in that, though relaxed from the growing comfort that comes with distance from war, having regular meals and a bed they can expect will be there come nighttime, the fear habituated for survival sits just beneath the surface. None exhibit this modality more than Razia. She comes from Farah province. Lighter skinned, crooked teeth, rounded features, she could be from a peasant family in the northern Caucasus. Her eyes are identical to the eyes of the famous “Afghan girl” photographed for National Geographic Magazine, a blend of jade that reminds me of the waters in Glacier Bay. She does not know her own birthday, has no answer when I ask how old she is. I’d guess six, but here guessing age is at your own peril. Upon arrival her lice ridden hair was shaved. Everything she wears is filthy and ruined in no time. She understands no boundaries, randomly steals and for some time could not make it through the night without soiling her bed. Following class I spend time with her alone, writing letters on a white-board. She is willing and able to learn. Then I watch her interact with the other children. There are older boys who attempt to manage her as they would manage a stray from a herd of goats, but this girl is a fighter. Half their size, she will run head first into them, fists flailing. She has, against all probability, made a few friends among the girls her own age, and elicited compassion from a few of the boys. They sit and bide what free time they have playing a game with dried apricot pits. It resembles “jacks” in that the player, using one hand, tosses a pit into the air and must in the time it takes for that pit to descend collect as many pits from the floor as they can. Razia is an expert. She will collect three or four of the pits in her fist and catch the falling pit precariously with the back of her hand. All comers-on fail to unseat her. It may be premature to say she is happy, but I see it seeping into the expressions on her face. If she can stay here, it is not a leap of faith to know she will be spared the fate of that other refugee whose eyes penetrated the imagination of so many people from the cover of a world renowned magazine, but could not spare her a life of growing old before the age of thirty.

At Sitara II there is less a sense of regimentation. All boys, ages 10 to 17, they are a little messier, a little more carefree. They get out to see and do more than the girls of Mehan. Every day, aside from going to school they play football. The code of ethics in these orphanages includes tolerance and equality. But the residual effect of the culture engulfing them is unavoidable. The boys have a leg up no matter what. Still, they do not come cleanly into the world. Though they gallivant around, spar with one another, emote a sense of confidence that verges on cavalier, they carry with them a sense of immediacy, heaviness of spirit, even foreboding I do not sense in the girls. Perhaps that is why they easily wrap arms around each other’s shoulders, hold hands as they walk down the street. The separation of genders emboldens the need for intimacy, nurtures a rather heartwarming appreciation for all things beautiful and fragile, roses for example, and kites. Take Dariush. He is thirteen, from Farah, strikingly south Asian in his looks, almost fierce with his pronounced jaw, his mustache and sideburns so black as to be painted. Yet he is by far the gentlest of the older gang. This is not to be confused with passivity. He is first to volunteer, as active a participant in our lessons, games and discourse as his more aggressive peers. He wishes to be a journalist. He may succeed. He has the knack to be present without being detected. He wrote down a dream he had the other night, which he shared with our photography class. In the throws of an obvious mix of stage fright and untapped emotion, he clasped a single piece of paper between both thumbs and index fingers. The page trembled as he read out loud his narrative of the dream.

One day I went to hospital and saw two persons near to me, and facing me they said come. I went near to them. They said this box, give the box and put another name. I said no, no, I am not working for you. Suddenly I saw the other man bring a rifle out. They tell me go. I went to another place, a home with the box. I saw one police near to me. What is this? I said I don’t know. He said give me. I gived he. He opened the box and he saw in box. He said what is this! I saw a bomb. He said how got this box. I said they gave it to me. They escape. After, police tell me let’s go. I said where? To jail. I said why? He said let’s go. I went into jail. I was two days in jail. Suddenly, I saw one tormentor near to me. He tells me, who give box to me? I said they gave to me. He said no, you lie me, and he bring out knife he said tell me. I said I don’t know. He to thrash me with knife. Suddenly I to awaken. I saw to dream.

It would be simple to say the girls of Mehan are the reciprocal of the Sitara II boys. The truth is they are more complex, walking a tightrope between the world outside and their blossomed freedom inside. When they go to school they wear black uniforms. On their heads they wrap white scarves. They do not have “recess” per say, and do not go outside. After school they return directly to the orphanage. This is due to security as much as the strength of conservative mores. Once back inside the gates of Mehan, off come the “drobes”, whereupon the girls dress freely and imaginatively, even though their choices are few. Modesty is expected here; for both genders the exposure of skin hardly goes beyond face, hands and feet. This, combined with a multi-cultural population makes for a society where the expression through clothing is dizzying, a pure extension of ancestry, distinctive from all others. The girls amalgamate these distinctions, making every day a costume party, or at the very least reminiscent of “dress up”, as if they have discovered a never opened trunk up in the attic of grandmother’s house. Add to these traditional articles the contributions from sponsors in the west, and what would have been a bow to lineage is now self-expression. Orange skirts over jeans, crimson sari’s with T-shirts, brown boy’s overshirts worn with yellow sarongs, track suits with scarves of every color worn across the chest, the waist, or lavishly around the neck and head.

Regardless, the girls can ill afford to be obsessive about their clothes, or their hair for that matter. Their priority is to be useful and valued among their peers, while applying themselves to their studies. Rarely is there a lazy bug among their ranks, and they are deeply committed to learning. Masuda is a case in point. She is around seventeen (again, approximation is the best we can do), from the north, Mazar Sharif. She does not consider herself pretty. She has a scar across her nose, but more notable are her Mongol-like features that separate her on racial lines drawn not in her favor. (The majority Pashtuns under Taliban rule persecuted the northern minorities, and visa-versa.) She, more than any other girl, presses me to correct her English. She works hardest and demands the most of her peers’ behavior. The other day I was up at five, hoping to squeeze an hour of quiet writing time into my day. There she was sitting at my desk, pouring over her physics notes in preparation for an exam. No daintiness here. If I am working on an editing job for the orphanage, she fiercely protects me from the onslaught of attention getters, sometimes clearing the room with the vocal chords of a drill sergeant. I reciprocate with the feigned respect of a subordinate (which on many levels I am), as well as frequent attempts to make her laugh. Many of the children have sponsors, with whom some develop relationships. Masuda has none. “E-N,” she asks, “You can be my sponsor?”

I try not to compare or estimate the intangible of my developing role here. Will the children’s language skills improve? Will their forays into drama, photography and carpentry be at best welcome distractions from the monotony of their routine? I have my worries. Otherwise there is only the day to day. I too am confined by the circumstances of this war. The girls share their space with me, and I solve little problems like crooked eyeglasses, join in a rush to save drying laundry from the rain, scoop some of my overfilled dinner plate into an already empty saucer. I check foreheads for fever, point at the silly newscaster on the television, and greet each sleep filled, grumpy gaze as my own father greeted me every morning of my childhood, with an oh what a beautiful day. Is it cruel of me to offer these children something resembling the love of a parent? It has been a month and the damage is done. Four more to go. I turn my head and there is a twelve year old rocking a two year old in her arms, singing softly a lullaby. Maybe it won’t be such a tearing away. Perhaps they will be content knowing I have born witness to the real absences in their lives, and with me go their stories.

Once, as dusk fell upon Kabul on a sultry evening, I gathered with five of the girls around the outdoor stove used to heat water. It was the closest thing to sitting around a campfire they’d ever experienced. A full moon had risen. Red roses had just begun to bloom in the small courtyard; we could just make out their faint, sweet perfume. In a hushed voice I related what it was like for me as a kid to be afraid in the dark, and how I came to brave it. Farzana was there, helping to translate. In a while the deepening night and brightened fire must have emboldened her. She launched into a kind of confession. The other girls listened intently, but they didn’t have enough of a grasp of English to know what Farzana was saying. Her confession was directed toward me.

“When I was five,” she said, “for a while I didn’t think my father was dead. I mean, I knew he was dead, I saw him get taken away. But one night he came to me in a dream. He asked me to make tea for him. I made him tea. He was so real, I believed for long time he was alive.”

What is an orphan but an opening line cut off from the rest of its story? In these children are a pinch of Russian poetic, a sprinkle of Chinese aesthetic, a dollop of Persian propriety, and a dash of Indian ecstatic. Who’s to say the rest cannot be imagined?

I saw to dream…

Ian Pounds began his education sailing around the world with Semester at Sea, a shipboard campus devoted to global studies. He acquired his B.A. in creative writing from The Evergreen State College, and later studied Elizabethan literature at Oxford University. He was a scholar at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, where he served twelve years on the admissions committee and coordinated the Bakeless Literary Prizes. He has recently completed a memoir, The Hippie and the Marine: an American journal. He hails from Ripton, Vermont.

To become involved with these orphanages and their vision for the future of Afghanistan, go to www.afceco.org and learn about the programs, the people, and if you wish become a sponsor of a child, or donate time energy or money. If you have questions for me, please feel free to get in touch with me at ian.pounds@gmail.com.

If you are interested in becoming a volunteer somewhere in the world, please look at www.omprakash.org for direction and support. They supported me through my entire journey.