by SAIMA WAHAB
It didn’t help matters that from the moment I arrived in Afghanistan every Afghan I met complained of having a headache. At first I thought this was just an aspect of general conversation: How are you doing today? My body aches. I have a headache. Later I would realize that the entire nation lived in a perpetual state of dehydration. When asked, most villagers confessed to not having had a drink of water in two or three days. They had had tea, of course. Arguing that this wasn’t the same as water was futile. I thought they were insane, going for days without it, as I swigged regularly from my Aquafina spring water, provided by the U.S. government. Then I remembered living in the village when I was five years old, and walking with my mom to the kareez, the ancient irrigation system consisting of channels that run both above and below ground, to fetch our daily mungai, the water pot made of clay. The kareez was our only source of fresh water; the mungai held no more than three gallons and had to last the day. Mamai washed our faces with it, used it for our meals, and made our tea with it. If there were guests, she used it for their food and tea. Like all Afghan women, my mother had constant chores. If we ran out of water early in the day, sometimes she wouldn’t have time until the next morning to walk to the stream to fetch some more, and we would have to do without it.
I worried that the hospital would not be the best place to start my new job. But I was desperate to meet and interact with real Afghans and maybe even some Afghan women. I agonized over what to wear. This would be my first meeting with my father’s people in my father’s country, and I was determined not to wear anything that would take away from the importance of this solemn day. On my narrow bed in the interpreters’ transient B-hut, I’d laid out jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt. Then I put them away. If there were women for whom I would be asked to translate, they might think I was being disrespectful by dressing like a man. I’d sewn a handful of long, colorful tunics and MC Hammer—style pants, as my American friends called them, before I’d left Portland. This outfit was more constricting and would provide no protection against the chilly wind, but I didn’t feel that I had a choice. I wanted to dress as much like the local women as possible.
I folded my arms against the cold as I turned onto Disney Drive, BAF’s main road and the only paved one at the time. The hospital was a huge structure with canvas walls, equipped with exhaust fans that sounded like the exhalations of a huge asthmatic monster. Once inside I told the first female medic I saw that I was the Pashtu interpreter, there to translate.
“Yes!” she said. “Doc is going to be so excited that we’ve got a female Pashtu speaker.” She pulled out her radio to let everyone know.
Then I felt someone touching my elbow. I turned to see another medic, a stethoscope slung over one shoulder. She was small, with short, dark blond hair tucked behind her ears. “You’re a turjuman? I was waiting for our regular ’terp, but you know what happened. I’ve got a little girl in here who really needs to be treated, but I can’t talk to her mother without you,” she said. All soldiers knew how to say two things in Afghanistan: the traditional Muslim greeting, Salaam alaikum, or “Peace be unto you,” and Turjuman, which could mean “Are you the interpreter?” or “Help, I need an interpreter” or “Get me an interpreter, now!” depending on the tone of the speaker.
She was a fast walker; a woman with too many patients. I followed her to the ICU. Every room I passed held several beds containing people swathed in bandages and hooked up to blinking, beeping machines. I couldn’t help wondering, as I peeked into one room and saw both American soldiers and local villagers lying there, whether the Americans despised their Afghan roommates, whether they blamed them for the terrible situation in which they found themselves. At the time, I was not as aware of the dynamics of the relationship between the Afghan patients and the injured American soldiers. Years later, I would ask soldiers what they were thinking as they lay in beds next to local Afghans, some of whom might have been the ones shooting at them through the fire of combat. But that day in BAF, I was too stressed about my own first interaction with local Afghans to pay attention to the tensions between them and the U.S. soldiers.
The air was circulated by the roaring ceiling vents, but they couldn’t dispel the rusty smell of blood and bleach. I felt myself perspiring inside my tunic, beneath my hair.
“Her mother brought her in,” the medic explained. “We’re not sure what happened. Might have been a fire or explosion. I don’t think it was an IED.” Afghan men refused to allow their wives to come to the clinic, regardless of how sick they were. An injury from a land mine or an IED seemed to be the exception, overriding their old fear of the airfield, where the Soviets raped their women or sold them to other Soviet soldiers.
The medic showed me to a bed in which lay a tiny girl, no more than three years old. I bit my lip to keep from gasping. The girl’s enormous eyes and pug nose reminded me of my own three-year-old cousin, Mariana, back home in Oregon.
I would have been surprised to learn that she weighed more than thirty pounds. One side of her face was shiny with burns dressed with a thick yellow lotion. One eyelid was charred and swollen shut. Her other eye, fringed with thick black lashes, followed me as I sat on the side of her bed. An IV needle was injected into her hand. A thin white tube disappeared into one small nostril. She reached up to touch my hand, to grab my attention, as if I could look anywhere else.
“Durdh,” she whimpered.
Durdh is the Pashtu word for “pain.” I thought again of Mariana. One day not long before I came to Afghanistan, I bought her a cup of strawberry ice cream. She was just beginning to form sentences. I asked her if the ice cream was yummy, and I could have sworn she almost rolled her eyes. “No, it’s not yummy. It’s delicious,” she replied. I couldn’t help comparing her with this little girl, who already knew the word for “pain.” I wondered if this girl had ever eaten ice cream.
I told the medic that the little girl was still in pain. She injected some liquid—probably morphine—into her IV.
The girl’s mother stood beside her bed, her face covered completely beneath her red scarf. The scarf was beautiful, its edges embroidered with beads and tiny mirrors, in the traditional Pashtun way. I could see she, too, had suffered burns; her hands, the only visible parts of her body, were also dressed with the thick yellow lotion.
“Why are you trying to save my daughter? Why won’t you show her some mercy and let her die?” the mother asked me in an angry and pained voice. I must have looked stunned. How could a mother say this about her beautiful little daughter? The astonishment must have shown on my face because she made an impatient huffing sound. Her fingers trembled as she tried to hold her scarf around her face. “Can you imagine what life is going to be like for her? She’s going to be scarred. No one will marry her. Her brothers are all dead. She will have more of a chance at happiness if she dies and goes to heaven. She will grow up to curse you for saving her. Is that what you people want?” The strong belief in the afterlife is what holds the faith of many Muslims in Afghanistan. It’s like they have given up on ever finding happiness on earth, and so they grasp on to the promise of eternal happiness, living in misery but counting down the days until they can be welcomed to a heaven filled with all the joys they were denied in this life.
The air from the vents roared in my ears. Of course—how could I have forgotten what it would mean to be a scarred Pashtun woman with no men to take care of you? I had introduced myself to her as a Pashtun, and she was looking at me with scorn, as if I didn’t understand the first thing about her or her life.
“What’s she saying?” the medic asked.
“She wants to know why we’re trying to save her daughter,” I told her. Would the medic understand that in Afghan culture it’s better for a female with no male relatives to be dead than disfigured? Telling her such a thing might make her throw up her hands—why help a child when her own mother could cast her aside this way? I was so new at this, I couldn’t think of a way to communicate the mother’s cultural logic, or
her love for her child, or her concern, or the hopelessness she must have been feeling, looking at her young daughter in pain, believing that things would only get worse if she survived. I realized at that moment how distant I had become from my own people, and how difficult my role as a turjuman was going to be.
“Can you ask her what happened?” the medic requested.
Bit by bit, the story came out. The mother had been in her kitchen cooking when their brand-new heater ran out of kerosene. Heater? I asked. What heater? The one that had been handed out in her village by a modisa, an NGO, just days before. Her children had been playing inside and trying to keep warm. She asked one of the older boys—he was nine—to fill the heater with kerosene. She had had no idea how the heater worked. When the NGO had brought the heaters to the village, they had passed them out with the cans of kerosene. Her son started to refill the heater without first turning it off. The explosion killed the boy and his two brothers on the spot. The parents survived, the little girl just barely.
I recounted the tragedy to the medic. Well-meaning but inept NGOs are legion—this one had donated some kerosene heaters to a local village without telling the locals how to use them or how dangerous they could be. I couldn’t help but remember how the actions of another NGO had caused the death of one of my distant young cousins. Inspired by The Kite Runner, this NGO had decided that it would bring some joy into the lives of some Afghan children by giving them new kites. The organization purchased the kites in the United States and shipped them to Kabul, where local representatives traveled to a few villages and passed them out to the kids. Then the kids did what kids the world over would do—they went crazy with excitement. They launched the kites into the air and ran into the surrounding fields. The NGO didn’t think to check with the village elders before they passed out the kites to the kids, who in the process of flying the kites ran over old mines left there from Soviet times. My cousin, a seven-year-old boy, was killed instantly, and several others were injured. The elders went around collecting the kites from the kids and burned them to save any other children from dying. Villagers recount this story to show that, no matter how well meaning, Americans often don’t take the time to understand other people or their past.
The medics took the mother to another room to attend to her burns. After she left, I sat holding the little girl late into the afternoon. Looking down at her ruined cheek, her cracked lips, I was again reminded of my cousin. I understood this Afghan mother’s concern—she wasn’t being cruel, she was being realistic—but I couldn’t imagine the desperation of a mother in that position, or how hard it must have been for her to verbalize it. The little girl hung on to a handful of my hair as if it were a cherished security blanket, something I’m sure she’d never had. Sometime later I noticed that my tunic was smeared with the dark yellow lotion dressing of her burns. No matter what happened to her, if her parents didn’t want her, much as I couldn’t imagine that, I would take care of her, I silently promised her.
AT FIVE O’CLOCK the clinic closed, and the locals who weren’t patients had to leave. The mother pressed her hand into mine and thanked me. Her anger was spent, and she had remembered to be thankful that at least I understood the source of her anguish. Like most women all over Afghanistan, she had nothing to give but her prayers. She said she would ask God to grant me heaven.
“Before you go,” I said to her in Pashtu, “what is your daughter’s name?”
She furrowed her brow as if she didn’t understand what I was asking. “Angelee,” she replied, using the Pashtu word for “girl.” Since so many Afghan children die in infancy, many of them are not called by their proper names until they are much older, and this angelee was no different. Of course this is a protective mechanism mothers have come up with, knowing that when you name a child, only to lose him or her to one of several diseases that claim thousands of young lives in Afghanistan, it is harder to get over the grief. In fact, it’s not unusual for mothers to wait to start using the names of their children until after they’re old enough to marry. My own mother calls me Angelee to this day.
That angelee’s mother scurried off. Later, the medic would tell me she should have been admitted; her burns were more severe than they appeared.
I dragged myself back to my hut, over the gravel that reminded me of diamonds. My head ached, as if someone had jammed a crown of steel into my brow. An icy wind swept down from the mountains, making my ears and eyes burn. Back at my B-hut, I changed my clothes, but my hair and skin still reeked of the hospital.
I hated the hospital: the smell of blood and chlorine, the loud drone of the huge exhaust fans, the doctors pulling me in different directions, the burned and bandaged bodies, the mewling sounds of people in pain. I vowed to talk to my site manager about being reassigned. I’d go anywhere, do anything. This wasn’t what I signed up for. Then I berated myself: I knew I’d accepted the interpreter position hastily. The company had been so eager to hire me, a college-educated Pashtu-speaking female, and I had caught their enthusiasm. My job in Portland had become so routine. I had known that this would be exciting, meaningful work, helping the people of my native and adopted country learn to understand one another. It had all sounded so airy and romantic then. I had never imagined it would include sitting and holding the cool, trembling hand of a severely burned three-year-old. Just because I was the only female Pashtu interpreter on base, that didn’t mean I didn’t have a choice. I was a civilian contractor. I had a say in the matter, didn’t I?
I took a shower. I had never thought I was the type of person who would yearn for better plumbing, but I missed my bathroom back in Portland as if it were a person. I hated the smell of the chemicals on my skin after I showered. I had e-mailed my sister and asked her to go to Bath & Body Works and buy an assortment of the smelliest shower gels and lotions she could get her hands on and send them to me the fastest way possible. At first I was embarrassed to take tubes of fragrant shower gels and lotion into the shower, but then I was relieved to learn that every woman on base, whether army or civilian, depended on scented shampoos, conditioners, shower gels, and lotions to conceal the awful smell. When a soldier ended her rotation, or a civilian’s contract was up, she donated her cache to those of us left behind.
But that day I didn’t even bother trying to smell good. Instead, I stood zombielike under the water until it turned cold.
No matter how I attempted to shuffle my thoughts, no matter how I tried to convince myself that I would be just as useful somewhere less horrible, I couldn’t escape the fact that I’d promised the little girl that I would check in on her tomorrow, so the next day I returned.
The weather had turned frigid. It had snowed in the mountains. I entered the hospital to find the exact same scene as the day before, nurses paging their doctors when they saw me coming, doctors sidling up to me wanting me to duck into a room for just a minute to interpret for them.
I knew I should have stopped and helped every one of them, but my mission was to keep my promise to Angelee.
As I rounded the corner into the ICU she heard my voice and began to cry. Her bed was the last one in the row. In Pashtu she named everything that hurt. I had thought I would go for a few minutes to say hello, but I wound up staying for six hours.
I asked Angelee whether she might like to go outside and sit in the sun, and she looked at me with what I took to be interest. So I put her in a wheelchair and rolled her to the back door. But outside, the diamond-like gravel was bumpy beneath the wheels. I pushed her over it; and with every bounce she cried out. I called for the nurse, who gave her a shot of morphine. After a few minutes, I picked up Angelee in my arms and the nurse took away the wheelchair.
I sat her on my lap. I could smell her burnt hair and the oily medicinal odor of the dark yellow lotion. I had hoped for a view of the snowcapped mountains, but all we saw were a collection of sand-colored CONEXes. Still, Angelee was more responsive sitting on my lap than she’d been inside, where she would shut her eyes and sigh eve
ry few minutes.
Suddenly I felt shy. I had no idea what to talk about. What is wrong with me? I wondered. I had never had any trouble talking to my three-year-old cousin, Mariana. I started having doubts about my ability to do what I was hired to do. If I couldn’t talk to a little girl, how was I going to speak with adult Afghans, who would be much harsher judges of what I was saying and doing? I was relieved when a medic appeared with some biscuits and a small stuffed bear and gave me a break from my thoughts.
“What’s the word for ‘bear?’ ” he asked me, wanting to tell Angelee himself what it was.
I blinked and shifted Angelee on my lap. She was so light. What was the word for bear in Pashtu? I swallowed, felt another twinge of panic. Here I was, failing on my first mission. But it wasn’t like I had cause to use the word bear much, in English or Pashtu. Angelee took the bear and held it on her knee. She didn’t seem to notice or care that I was unable to come up with the right word.
Her mother didn’t come to visit her that day, or the next. Both days the medic who had given Angelee the stuffed bear asked me whether the mother had stopped by. I knew what he was thinking, but I had to say no; the mother was gone.
If the doctor was not going to allow Angelee to die, then the mother’s next best hope was to abandon her, hoping one of the American soldiers or doctors would take pity and adopt her. In America she could get skin grafts and plastic surgery. In America there was hope for her. In the end, the mother believed that the mercy of the American people was greater than the mercy of her own people.
As I sat beside Angelee’s bed I tested out the idea of adoption. Even though I knew that she would be only the first of many children I would want to adopt, I imagined bringing her home with me to Portland, thinking of the playdates she would have with Mariana, the strawberry ice cream I would give her as a treat. It was pure fantasy, of course. As a military contractor I was forbidden to adopt any locals, and in any case, there is no official system in Afghanistan for adoption. Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s president, had passed legislation making Western-style adoption of Afghan children by other nationalities illegal.
