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Turning the Corner:
Notes from a Teacher’s Afghan Journal
“We’ll pay for your flight and accommodations—the usual,” Irshad pleaded. It was Memorial Day, and my friend was calling from Kabul to ask if I
would volunteer again.
Living in the high desert, I never expected to end up in Afghanistan, but I’ve traveled there twice, to teach Afghans who work for the Aga Khan
Foundation, the largest development agency in the country outside of the UN.
As the HR assistant in charge of staff training, Irshad needed to find a teacher by August. I told him I had re-enrolled in grad school.
But that wasn’t what made me say no.
In Kabul, I had seen our Marines halting traffic, but I resisted the urge to shout out my car window—hey, you know Josh Tree, Landers (my home)?
They looked too intent on searching vehicles for IEDS—and making it back to base alive.
Of the 20,000 troops in Afghanistan, 2000 are Marines, including at least one battalion from 29 Palms. That day, I also wanted to ask what they
thought of their mission. But like they say, their job is to uphold democracy, not to practice it—they just have to trust that our leaders and politicians know what they’re doing.
Judging from what my students told me, our politicians are not winning hearts and minds, but neither are their own “leaders.”
On my first trip in winter 2006, my students talked about Afghanistan turning a corner. Then the Taliban beefed up with al Queda fighters burned or
bombed over 330 schools, killing and maiming dozens of teachers and children. Then impoverished farmers indebted to drug lords produced a bumper crop of poppy, probably more than the world’s current
demand for heroin. Then a drought decimated wheat fields, forcing farmers to sell emaciated cattle, and some of their children.
In two months last winter, I traveled to four of AKF’s northern offices and taught 126 people.
By January 2007, no one talked about turning a corner.
“But, Miss.” Esmat, 28, a project assistant in my intermediate class, shot up his hand. I had just capitalized a month on the whiteboard. We were
sitting in an unheated classroom in Puli-Khumri, a small city one hundred miles north of Kabul.
We turned to Esmat, expecting one of his usual jokes. “What do Afghans care about dates when all we’ve had for twenty-five years is war?” he said.
I turned from the class’s laughter, and glanced out the window into the icy afternoon. A band of children in rags bundled brush for cooking fires
in more rags. Some of them wore plastic sandals; most were bare-footed.
With the Taliban back from Pakistan, I wasn’t surprised Esmat had grown testy, although I often wondered if patience hadn’t been hardwired into my
students. At one point or another in the last twenty-five years, most of them had fled the country, joining six million of their countrymen, a fifth of the population. They were back now to build
bridges, teach farmers how to dry apricots, teach women how to grow kitchen gardens, and teach villagers to elect village councils.
But at the end of the day, they left for homes without electricity and running water. They had no access to health clinics. Their children went to
school in tents. And there was no snow cover in Doshi Valley this year, nor in the south as I saw from my plane’s window, forcing AKF to divert funds from reconstruction projects to emergency wheat
rations.
At the end of their day, female staff went home in their burqas in official vehicles because two years ago in Puli-Khumri, jihadists stirred up by
local mullahs slit the throats of three of their colleagues, leaving them on a road outside of town with notes warning people to not work for international agencies.
“Why doesn’t Karzai show his wife in public—unveiled—like Amunallah Khan did in 1919?” Nikfar, an engineer, had just watched my class of zero
beginners in Bamyan giggle out of our classroom. But when the class, women in their early twenties, went to the villages to teach villagers how to vote, they needed to travel (according to Koranic law)
with a marham, a male relative to whom they couldn’t be married. Otherwise people would talk but not to them.
Karzai hasn’t presented his wife in a single public ceremony. Some say he’s afraid of alienating Islamists.
I also wondered if my students, as employees of an international agency, held insights that impoverished, jobless Afghans did not.
“People don’t trust the government, the UN, or the U.S.,” said Mutahar, a thirty-year-old project manager in Faisabad, my third assignment. “People
think the U.S. is friendly with the Taliban. They think U.S. helicopters supply the Taliban with weapons.”
Astounded, I asked him if people knew about the coalition, the international security force.
“No, all they see are the Americans wandering around with their guns,” he said.
The U.S. has led a provincial reconstruction project, with teams in at least 24 of Afghanistan’s 32 provinces, but their work is hampered by lack
of funds.
At times, it seemed a mess. AKF couldn’t afford to pay me. Our short trainings were only long enough to leave my zero beginners comfortable with
saying, “Fine, thanks, and you?” But that wasn’t my students’ fault. Given a choice, wouldn’t people want to feed and clothe their families, live in peace and work towards a secure future? If governments
would let them.
In six years, the U.S. has pledged—but not spent—an estimated $11 billion of reconstruction aid to Afghanistan. We spend about $8 billion a month
in Iraq. But Osama is still at large, clinics in southern Afghanistan can’t handle half the wounded civilians, American contractors stuff their pockets, and a real estate agent tells me he can’t sell
homes in 29 Palms anymore because the Marines aren’t thinking about buying, only about staying alive
And on March 11, we watched a powerless Karzai sign a bill passed through the lower and upper house, granting amnesty to members of parliament for
killing children.
The road to Baharak, my final assignment, snaked along an icy turquoise river, wound through mud-brick villages with young girls with sad, old lady
expressions as if there were nothing ahead of them. A toddler in plastic sandals and a thin dress with mirror spangles.
Two years ago in Baharak, a northeastern cranny of Afghanistan fifty miles from the Tajik border, people had torched the old AKF compound after
seeing a photo in Newsweek of pages of the Koran being flushed down a toilet at Guantanomo Prison.
I supposed I shouldn’t have left the new compound, but I did. There were no women about. Not a one. But this could be partly because their numbers
are fewer here, with the highest recorded rate of death from childbirth in the world—one of every fifteen births.
In Baharak, my favorite student was Khalid. His face was road map. His eyes sliced through me. He wrote every assignment about needing a generator
for his Chinese seed-cleaning machine. When the others groaned about his seed-cleaning machine, he shrugged and laughed.
One day after class, he asked, “Why don’t you stay? You know the people, the background?”
No, my students needed someone who didn’t have her other priorities. Someone with the guts of a Marine. Someone as strong as they.
Rebecca Martin has lived in Landers since 2002, during which time she has also been enrolled at Vermont College, in an online MFA in Creative Writing program. Before moving to
the high desert, she taught English overseas for six years, including postwar Bosnia and Lebanon.
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