by Dayna Curry
Shafique suffered from a persistent, oozing eye infection. On occasion he shared with me about the dire conditions in which his family was living. They barely were able to buy bread, and his mother was sick.
“Have your mom come to the house so I can meet her,” I told him, “and we will try to help her.”
Soon afterward Shafique came with his mother, Omira, a young lady in her thirties who was very gaunt and looked much older. We invited Omira inside and sent our chowkidar, Khalid, to the bazaar to buy her some food. Omira explained that she suffered from a stomach illness. We gave her some money for the doctor and asked her to bring us the prescription so that we could fill it. We prayed with her before she left.
Omira began to come to the house regularly after that. She would always cry and kiss our hands in reverence. “No, no,” we would insist. “We are just normal people like you. We want to help you. Do not feel ashamed.”
One day I arranged to go to Omira’s house to determine what kind of help the family needed to survive long-term. I took a taxi up into the hills behind our neighborhood and came to a two-story mud house unfit for any person. There were no toilets, no electricity. The walls were filthy. Only torn-up pieces of fabric covered the floors. The windows were wide open, and the house was infested with flies. The children all wore rags.
I learned that Omira’s husband at one time had run a small business selling fruits and vegetables off a karachi—a four-wheeled cart with a canopy that merchants pushed through the streets in the bazaar areas. We heard that for some reason either the Taliban had run over the husband’s karachi with a vehicle or had stolen the karachi and locked it up somewhere. Whatever the case, we decided to use benevolence money and buy the man a new cart along with the necessary produce to start his business again. We committed to fronting him the capital for produce every week for six weeks on a decreasing scale.
Dayna and I asked Khalid to take the family to the bazaar and purchase the cart along with the first batch of produce. As foreigners living under Taliban rule, we could not accompany an Afghan family to the bazaar area. Moreover, Khalid could get better prices on goods—whenever a foreigner showed up at a shop or stall, prices doubled or tripled.
The first night the family’s business was up and running, Omira, beaming with joy about her future, brought a melon as a gift to our gate. But by the time we were arrested, we had given the family only two weeks’ worth of their six-week allowance.
I remember Khalid saying to me on the day I visited Omira’s home, “I am very worried for you, Khatera-jan.” My Afghan friends knew me only by this adopted Afghan name. “What you did was dangerous, going to that Afghan house alone. I am worried for your safety.”
In fact, Dayna and I probably related with Afghans in their homes more than most people in our circle. We tried to be careful about it, but we could hardly keep up with the demand. Our educated Afghan neighbors across the street would have had us over for tea regularly if we had been able to carve out the time. Even Khalid invited us to his home. He and his wife served us a beautiful meal. I trusted Khalid and dearly loved him. He was a loyal friend. Once he said to me, “You are like my family. Your house is my house, and my house is your house.”
Dayna: When I returned to Kabul with Heather in March after my two-month break, it took me a while to get back in touch with my Afghan friends. Previously I had lived in Karte Se on the other side of town—first with the Masons for a year, then with some other single women. It would take some doing to reconnect with my friends now that I was established in Wazir.
When I lived with the Masons, a small group of beggar kids congregated daily outside our gate. Anytime I stepped onto the street, the kids would run to greet me, calling out requests for food and money. Four of the children were related and had relocated to Kabul after the Taliban destroyed their family’s home and crops in the Shamali Valley. Each day the parents sent these four children out to beg. We often gave the kids food, and once I took them to the bazaar to buy plastic sandals. Sometimes we invited the kids into the Masons’ backyard to play on the swing set, and the kids had the time of their lives.
One dusty, ragtag little girl, Noorzia, would grab my hand and walk with me in the street for a while in whatever direction I happened to be going. She had the cutest freckles, but her complexion was severely cracked from overexposure to the sun and vitamin deficiency. Noorzia always smiled and hugged foreigners whenever she saw them. It was hard to believe that a girl who had absolutely nothing, not even shoes for her feet or clean water to drink, could be so genuinely happy. Her example encouraged us.
Another child who stood out among the Karte Se street kids was a taller boy with a gentle disposition. He usually asked us for things in a soft, hesitating voice. When I finally visited his family’s home, I learned that this boy was actually a girl. The family dressed her up as a boy so she would be able to beg on the street and do more for the family.
Dealing with these kids’ requests for help day after day began to drain me, so I came up with an idea. I told the four kids from the Shamali Valley that I would give them something every Saturday if they wouldn’t ask me for anything during the week. They agreed. I went to the bazaar weekly and bought them kilos of rice and beans, several oranges, oil, soap, shampoo, and other things. Someone from our church in Waco sent me ten dollars a month to help.
Once I moved in with the single women on a less conspicuous street a few blocks away from the Masons’ house, I would invite the kids inside on Saturdays, read them a story, and give them their food. The arrangement brought some stability to the kids’ lives and did wonders for our relationships. During the week the kids would come hold my hand and walk with me on the street as before, but instead of asking for things, they would talk to me about their lives.
After I moved to Wazir with Heather, I was able to bring the kids a large supply of food once a month. They all quickly fell in love with Heather. The international church was located in Karte Se, so whenever Heather walked from the church to the hospital on Fridays, the kids would follow her. She usually bought them bread or fruit in the bazaar.
One of the many women from whom we bought eggs in Karte Se was a widow named Leena, a petite Hazara woman barely more than twenty. I met Leena, too, while living with the Masons. A soft-spoken, timid young woman, Leena was illiterate and had grown up in a small village. She seemed naive about many things in life. Her only relatives in Kabul were her two small children and her ailing mother.
The Taliban had taken Leena’s husband one day while he was out working in the bazaar. She did not know whether her husband had been arrested or perhaps forced to fight for the Taliban against the Northern Alliance. She had not seen him for more than two years. Katherine Mason helped Leena get a widow card, which qualified her to receive flour, rice, chickpeas, and oil each month; but Leena needed some other sort of income for things like soap, washing powder, tea, and clothing.
To make ends meet, Leena would go to her neighbors’ houses, collect eggs from their hens, and sell the eggs to foreigners for a small profit. Katherine would usually buy twenty to twenty-five eggs a week. An egg was selling for about seven cents at that time. Leena made a profit of a couple of pennies per egg, but she had to take two buses to get to Karte Se and forfeited a percentage of her earnings on the trip.
After the Taliban beat a group of Afghan women standing outside the Masons’ gate one day and forbade the women to return, we arranged for Leena to bring eggs to the women’s health clinic where I worked. Leena would sell me the eggs once a week, and we would sit and talk, usually in a back office. Leena cried often, particularly about her living arrangements. The older woman who let her a room in a compound of mud houses was beating Leena’s children. When I prayed with Leena about it, she would cry out, “Oh, dear God, dear God.”
One day I visited Leena in her compound outside of the city in a rural area with no running water and little, if any, electricity. As we sipped tea, Leena told me about a terrible i
ncident, weeping as she talked. The husband of one of the women living in her compound had entered Leena’s room in the middle of the night and lain down beside her. The man awakened Leena as he touched her. “No!” she exclaimed. “I am not that kind of a person. Leave me alone!” He left her, but she was badly shaken. Such violations of a woman’s person are anathema in Afghan culture. I told Leena it was not her fault and that God loved her.
We tried to think of ways we could help Leena earn more money and eventually used our benevolence fund to buy her some hens; that way, at least she would get to keep all of the profit on her eggs. When Heather and I moved to Wazir, we asked Leena to come to our house and sell eggs. We always paid her more to cover the extra bus fare.
Heather and I also gave work to a woman named Tamana, whom I knew from the Masons’ gate. Tamana had a round, youthful face and was only in her thirties, but she got around slowly due to chronic pain in her leg. We commissioned Tamana to make our toshaks and some clothing.
A widow, or so we thought, Tamana came often to the Masons’ gate when I lived in Karte Se, seeking food and work. We helped her secure a widow card from an aid agency so she could feed her six children, and we gave her some sewing jobs. One day Tamana came to Katherine Mason anxious about her daughter, who was at home with a fever.
“Do you mind if I pray for your daughter to be healed in the name of Jesus?” Katherine asked. Tamana accepted, and by the time Tamana arrived home, her daughter’s fever was gone.
“My daughter got better,” she told Katherine afterward. “Who is this Jesus you prayed to?”
Later I gave Tamana a cheap radio like those for sale in the bazaar and told her that if she wished to learn more, she could listen to various radio programs about Jesus.
More than a year afterward, Tamana had two dreams. One night she dreamed that Jesus came to her, touched her leg, and healed her. Another night she went to bed very worried for her six children—how she would feed them, what kind of future they would have. In her dream, Jesus came into the room and put his hand on each child’s head. He said, “Don’t worry. I will be their father. I will take care of them.”
After the dreams, Tamana brought all of her children to the Masons’ gate and asked how they could get closer to this Jesus. I was there at the time. We let the family into the house, and Chris explained to Tamana that becoming a follower of Jesus would be very dangerous.
“Do you understand what this means?” he asked. “Do you understand the risk? You could lose everything, even your children. You could die.”
Tamana was afraid. She asked whether we would be able to help her if something bad happened. We told her we couldn’t give her assurances of material help, but that we would pray for her and support her in friendship.
Tamana, and eventually her oldest children, decided to take the risk.
We later showed Tamana and her children a film about the life of Jesus in order to give them some understanding about the faith they had chosen. Tamana was illiterate and her daughter couldn’t read very well, so we thought the film would be helpful.
The family loved the scenes in which Jesus calmed the storm, healed the blind man, and fed thousands of people with a few loaves of bread and some fish. Tamana remarked how kindly Jesus treated women. He showed compassion to a prostitute. He was good to the poor. The whole family sobbed during the scene when Jesus was beaten and crucified.
The Taliban showed up at Tamana’s home some weeks later. Tamana’s neighbor had reported the family to authorities for failing to fast during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, a common complaint used by Afghans to work out rivalries. When the police ransacked Tamana’s house, they discovered a book about Jesus. The oldest son was beaten severely, and the Taliban imposed an enormous fine on the family. We were devastated.
After the beatings, Tamana came to my gate in hysterics. She pounded frantically on the gate, and when I let her in, she pulled down the neck of her dress to expose long, thin, red welts on her back. I prayed for her and tried to comfort her.
“I wish I had been beaten instead of you,” I said to Tamana. And I meant it with my whole heart.
Several days later, Tamana came to visit again, and as we conversed we heard an Afghan woman in the house next door let out a piercing scream. The woman continued to scream for some time, and it soon became apparent that her husband was beating her. We stopped talking and listened. I was visibly unnerved. Tamana told me we could do nothing to stop the man, as there were no laws to protect wives from such abuse.
She looked at me and remarked gravely: “Those screams are nothing compared to the screams that came from my house when the Taliban were there.” My heart ached for her.
Tamana’s oldest daughter, a teenager with her mother’s round face, visited me at the women’s health clinic that same week. She, too, recounted the beating story and cried when describing how badly the Taliban police had beaten her brother. Then she said something that startled me: “It’s okay,” she said, “because Jesus was beaten for us.” In Dari she said “lat khord,” meaning Jesus “ate lashes” for us.
I was so moved I did not know what to say. Really, it was incredible none of the family had been killed.
After Heather and I moved to Wazir, Tamana confessed that, in fact, she was not a widow and had two more children. She sat with us in the Masons’ new house in a neighborhood nearby and explained that she had been hiding something. She told us she was having nightmares about us discovering her lie. She would wake up scared that we were going to walk in and see her other two children.
We told her we loved her but that in good conscience we would have to go back to the aid agency that gave her the widow card and tell the truth about her status. “We’re so sorry we have to do this,” we explained. She understood, which we found remarkable given the amount of guaranteed food she would lose if her widow card was revoked.
Amazingly, when Katherine Mason and I went to the agency and explained the situation, the staff allowed Tamana to keep the card. They reasoned that the challenge of providing for eight children and a sick husband was close enough to a widow’s plight to qualify Tamana.
The Masons and the rest of our Waco group were planning to set Tamana’s husband up in a small shop, but Heather and I were arrested before we had gotten very far in the process. The husband had found a space to rent and made a list of the supplies he wanted to sell. We were in the process of reviewing the list at the time we were taken.
Heather & Dayna: On Saturdays we tried to coordinate our schedules and visit our Afghan friends together. Often we would flag one taxi on a given Saturday morning and monopolize the car for the day, which suited our driver. As discreetly as possible, we would travel to our friends’ houses in poor neighborhoods located in different areas of town, sometimes stopping at this or that bazaar to pick up gifts for our hosts.
Walking from the taxi up to the gates of our friends’ mud houses in summer was an experience that left something to be desired. Metal piping running along courtyard walls would empty human waste from the mud houses into the alleys, and we would have to be careful stepping over puddles and rivulets. Black clouds of flies hovered over the liquid waste and piles of trash left out in the streets. At times we would have to pass through the black clouds to get to a friend’s gate. The stench was overpowering. In winter the alleys weren’t as gruesome—the human waste would freeze over and the flies would be gone.
We remember one Saturday in early summer as being particularly eventful. As on most Saturdays, an Afghan woman came to our house at 10 A.M. and dropped off some embroidery work. We did not visit with her long on this morning and were out of the house by eleven with much activity ahead of us.
One of the young women in the burn unit at the ICRC hospital had died and we planned to pay our respects to the family. Also on our agenda was a visit to the compound where the clan of beggar kids from the Shamali Valley lived—we needed to take them their monthly supply of food items. And we needed to visit our
egg lady, Leena, and her new roommate, a young widow with a desperately malnourished child.
We left in a taxi with one of our regular drivers, a nice Pashtun man, and stopped first at Chicken Street in Shar-e-Nao to pick up food for the grieving family of the burned girl. We bought some kabobs and a plate of Kabuli palau, an Afghan dish containing rice, carrots, raisins, and meat.
Next we traveled to the hospital to ask for directions to the family’s home. We looked in on Lida while we were there. When she saw us, her eyes lit up and she clapped. Thankfully, one of the Afghan nurses at the hospital had been to the young burn victim’s funeral and knew where her aunt lived. The nurse offered to ride with us in our taxi and show us to the aunt’s home; the aunt, in turn, could ride with us to the home of the young girl’s family.
As it turned out, we would never have found the house without assistance. Once we picked up the aunt, we proceeded through a number of narrow, rocky alleys deep into a neighborhood of mud houses. Our driver had trouble clearing the turns; in places we barely had an inch to spare on either side of the car. Finally, we arrived at a squalid mud home.
We walked through a beat-up gate and entered a dirt courtyard containing only a metal pump well. Beyond the courtyard was another courtyard where bricks were stacked. We took off our shoes at the door of the house, as is customary when you visit an Afghan home, no matter how poor.
The atmosphere inside the house seemed very somber, but the mother of the girl who had died greeted us with kisses. We gave the family the food, and they gratefully received it.
Heather: I hugged the girl’s mother for an extended time. She and I had visited together in the hospital while her daughter was still alive. Now I cried with her and whispered in her ear, “I am sorry.”
Heather & Dayna: We sat down with the mother and the aunt in a simple hospitality room containing a red carpet, toshaks, and a small cabinet for the teapot and glasses, essentials in any Afghan home. The walls were bare and the paint was peeling.
