WE THOUGHT we had organized everything properly. We had distributed coupons to the most needy families in the camp, saying clearly when and where they should come to collect one of the fifteen hundred blankets we had to distribute, each piece of paper valid for one blanket only. We had negotiated with Pakistani officials for permission to use a small building in the camp, which belonged to them. We particularly wanted it because it was set in a compound surrounded by a wall, which would enable us to control the flow of refugees coming to collect the blankets. Or so we thought.
Hours before the distribution was due to start, several hundred refugees had gathered outside the gate to the compound. Ameena and I, together with a dozen other RAWA members, spread piles of blankets around the main room of the building and told our male helpers, who were standing by in case there was any trouble, to let the first refugees in.
We had barely handed out the first dozen when we heard shouts coming from outside. “Why are you giving the blankets to some people and not to others?” I heard a man cry. “We all need blankets!” someone else shouted.
Within seconds, the men we had stationed at the gate were overwhelmed and the crowd charged toward the house. Pushing and shoving one another, men in rags and women wearing veils or burqas fought their way through the door and into the room. The handful of male supporters who were in the room with us tried to push them back, wielding their batons to try to form a barrier in front of us. We urged them not to hit the refugees hard, but they told us it was the only way to protect us.
These people were driven wild by desperation. I was pushed back against the wall, and so were the other girls. A few steps in front of me, an old white-haired woman thrust out her piece of paper. When I shook my head, unable to move and get her a blanket, she threw herself to the floor, screaming her anger. Some men tried to calm her down.
Nearby, a man and a woman pulled on a blanket as they struggled to push each other to the ground. “My children are dying of cold!” the woman screeched. The blanket ripped in two, and they started fighting over the pieces. Soon, bits of cloth were drifting about the room above the heads of the men and women who were now destroying all the blankets it contained—so many bits of cloth and fluff that it became difficult to make out the refugees. It was like the sandstorms that sometimes blew across the camp making all the houses and tents invisible and finding its way into our house to smother everything in grains of dirt and dust.
We had no choice but to flee. I felt no anger against the refugees. I couldn’t help thinking that if I had been in their place, I would have done the same.
Later, I saw the white-haired woman striding across the camp, proudly carrying a torn piece of blanket on her head as if it were the most valuable thing on earth.
That evening, Ameena looked exhausted. She hardly touched our dinner of rice and vegetables. Her face was very white, and her eyes looked strange. I said something to her, but I could see that she was not following. When she got up to take our plates into the kitchen, they suddenly slipped from her grasp and she slumped to the floor. As I stared, her body started shaking. Her head rocking backward and forward, she pulled at her hair. I could see strands of it in her hands.
I knew that it was an epileptic fit and that I should force something into her mouth because she risked biting her lips or suffocating on her tongue. I grabbed a spoon, but there was so much power in her that she was too much for me and I had to scream for help.
When she became calm again, she turned to me and smiled. I was so tense I tried to joke about what had happened. “You just made me go completely crazy, and now there you are smiling,” I said.
She sat up. “I hope I didn’t hit you or bite you.”
“I think you were doing it on purpose. You just felt like getting at me,” I said, smiling.
Before falling asleep, she told me about her family. She was no longer on speaking terms with her father, who had returned to live in Afghanistan two years earlier. “He wrote to me to say that my mother is sick, that my brothers are also angry with me, and that I should go back and marry. My father says I have to respect his authority. But how can I leave here? I feel desperate if I miss even one day at the camp,” she said.
Ameena always apologized to me after her fits, and we always joked about them. Even for Ameena, whom I see as the strongest person in the world, the weight of the lives of the refugees sometimes becomes too heavy a burden. I tried to persuade her to see a doctor, but she always told me that she felt fine, and that there was no need. Whenever I left the camp I tried to bring back some fruit for her. Once, when she was alone in a room at a house in the city, she fainted, her hand resting on a heater. When a friend found her, Ameena’s hand had severe scorch marks on the skin.
I never suffered physically as much as Ameena did, but sometimes my heart would start beating very, very fast. I would not be able to move, I would feel a pressure on my chest as if someone were pressing down on it with all their strength, and I would start sweating. Then, just as suddenly, the rhythm would change until the heartbeats came slowly, much more slowly than normal. I would just wait for it to pass.
One of the most common diseases at the camp is malaria, which is spread by the mosquitoes that plague us day and night. I’ve caught it three times. The worst time was when I was about to attend a meeting in the town and my hands started to tremble. I had felt sick in my bones earlier that day but had promised to go to the meeting all the same. Still I could not stop my hands from trembling. I felt cold and hot at the same time.
My friends realized what was happening and covered me with a mountain of blankets even though it was early summer. I was in a high fever and started vomiting. My friends took me to the hospital, where I was told that I had caught malaria. I lost five kilos but recovered quickly. Malaria is normal at the camp, and our doctors always have malaria patients to care for.
ONE SUMMER MORNING I watched as Fatima, an Afghan doctor in her mid-thirties, prepared to receive patients in 104-degree heat. Fatima’s office was an old chair set under the beating sun in the dirt between two rows of mud houses. Her dispensary was the open trunk of a car where a pharmacist waited to hand out the medicine she would recommend. Her uniform was a scarf that made her all the hotter but that she had to wear around her head so as not to offend the refugees.
The lack of facilities did not matter to the old women who had scuttled like ants from all over the camp to wait in an untidy huddle for the doctor. For them the doctor was a goddess with the power to change their lives.
An old woman, her face as brown and wrinkled as a walnut, was the first to get to Fatima, and she started speaking without any form of greeting. “My daughter, please help me, I am sick,” the old woman said.
Fatima did not bother to ask her age, as the old women usually have no idea how old they are. But before she could ask what the woman was suffering from, the woman continued, “My daughter, I am weak. Give me the medicine.”
Many of these elderly refugees believe there is only one kind of medicine that cures all ills. It took Fatima several long minutes to find out what the woman was suffering from, and the line of people around her was swelling all the time.
“Everything is wrong with me,” the woman kept answering. “All the sickness of the world is in me, in my bones, and I am weak. Give me the medicine to make me strong.”
Finally Fatima found out that the woman was deficient in proteins and vitamins because of her diet, and gave her a slip of paper to show the pharmacist. For longer even than it had taken to establish what was wrong with her, the old woman seized Fatima’s head in her bony hands and kissed it. She thanked Fatima again and again, wished long life to her and her children, and was still praising Allah for his mercy when one of the camp workers gently led her away.
It took the pharmacist all his powers of persuasion to convince the old woman that no, she should not take all her medicine in one go and that if she did it could kill her. When he told her to take the pills three times a day with her meals, the old woman looked blank—she did not have three meals a day. She counted herself lucky if she managed to have one. So the pharmacist timed the doses by the calls to prayer from the small mosque in the camp. “Mother, take the first pill after the second prayer…,” he told her.
Fatima was already listening to another refugee, and there were hundreds more waiting. Fatima knew that she would have to listen to them tell her not only about their ailments but also about their lives. “Doctor,” they would say, “I have lost everything. My brother has disappeared in the fighting.” And Fatima would listen, because it is she who has chosen to abandon her white blouse and a quiet, clean visiting room in the city to spend her days among the poor and the dirty who worship her like a deity.
I watched Fatima, and I thought of the clandestine medical teams that RAWA would send to the more remote areas of Afghanistan where, under the Taliban, women were dying of curable diseases simply because there were no women doctors to see them. The teams drove into the most desolate villages, using ordinary cars because an ambulance is too easy to identify, and tried to spread the word that they had arrived.
The villagers were so happy at their visit that when a doctor entered their home, a child would bring a basin of water with a towel so that the doctor could wash her hands. It was a long-established tradition in the most rural villages, but it had little to do with hygiene, as no soap was used. I disliked it because it was a legacy from feudal times, a sign of submission. Often the medical team would sleep in a tent because they did not want to expose to danger someone whose hospitality they would otherwise have accepted.
I hope that one day I will be able to study to become a doctor myself.
I HAD NEVER thought that I would play the part of jailer, but it was the only way to ensure that the women would keep attending the literacy classes that Ameena and I had started up in the camp. So I always slipped the heavy chain across the door of the classroom and locked it from the outside because without the lock, children would be slipping into the class every few minutes to stand in a corner, pointing and poking fun at the sight of their mothers perched on the small chairs designed for kids.
For weeks, Ameena and I had spent our evenings walking up and down the camp trying to find enough women willing to come to the classes. We always tried to speak to the women on their own because we had to persuade them before they mentioned the plan to their husbands, as they felt they had to do. Most of the women simply laughed in our faces.
At seven o’clock one morning, a woman knocked at our door and brought us a breakfast gift of one egg. When I held it in my hands, it was still warm from the hen. I offered it to Ameena, my hands stretched out, but she pushed them back toward me. It was a particularly welcome present because breakfast usually meant just one or two slices of bread—we had no butter or jam—and some tea.
We showed the woman in and offered her tea, and she sat herself down. But it was some time before she explained why she had come to see us.
“My daughter is going to the school, and I have seen how fast she writes. I am thinking of going to the school too. But I am worried that people will wonder what a woman of my age—I am fifty-five years old—is doing in a school when she should be at home and praying. My hair is gray. Is it shameful if I start at this age?” the woman asked.
I clapped my hands and assured her that she should feel no shame, only pride.
“But my daughter and the other children will laugh at me,” she said.
“You must give it a try. What about the shame you feel when you see your daughter write and you know that you cannot even write your own name? Imagine, you will be able to write letters to your relatives and your friends in Afghanistan, and someone will read out your news to them,” I said.
I offered to accompany her to the class, which we were starting that afternoon. She turned up as promised, although she told me that her husband had poked fun at her, saying that he did not know he had married a great writer and philosopher.
We had managed to get together a little group of courageous pioneers, and just before four o’clock, one by one they slipped into the classroom where their children studied in the mornings, holding their veils over their mouths, as embarrassed as if they had been caught stealing their neighbor’s chicken.
Several of the women had come without telling their children, but the word had got around, and shortly after Ameena started distributing a notebook, a pencil, a sharpener, and a ruler to each of them, some of the women’s daughters turned up, darted into the room, and started giggling. Ameena asked me to chase them out and lock the door so that she could continue the class.
It was some time before the mothers had the courage to ask their children for help with their homework. Some of the mothers, when they were finally able to write their names, thought that the lessons were over and that they now knew everything they needed to know. We managed to keep them coming, partly by giving them rewards—some soap, a kilo of rice—if they did not play truant.
The literacy classes were important to us because they were not just about learning to read and write. We used them to teach the women about the different kinds of contraception available to them and tried to discourage them from having many children. The shame that so many women felt about the literacy classes never totally vanished, but gradually we found more and more candidates. Even some grandmothers came to sit on the little chairs. I was proud of them. I felt that they were braver than I would have been under the same circumstances.
SOMETIMES IT WAS HARDER to get the children to school than their mothers. One little girl kept coming to me in tears, saying that her father—a man who had served as a soldier with the Mujahideen—was beating her because he did not want her to go to school.
After asking her mother for permission, I went to find the father. He wore a white turban, and his manner was strange from the moment he opened the door. I was wearing a small scarf over my hair, but he did not even look at my face. He simply stepped back and announced to his wife, “There is a woman at the door.” His wife, who was wearing a big scarf over her head, led me into the tiny room they shared with their six children. There was a cloth embroidered with a prayer to Allah on the wall.
I explained that I had come to talk to him about his eldest daughter. “What do you want?” he asked sharply, still avoiding my eyes and without offering me anything as would have been the custom.
“Your daughter is crying every day because you do not want her to go to school. But you must realize that if you love your daughter, you should allow her to study. If you don’t allow her or any of your children to study, it will be bad not only for their future but for yours too,” I said.
I might as well have been talking to the dry mud wall behind him. “But I am a Moslem,” he said, “and I want my children to be good Moslems too. Why do you not teach only the Koran? Why do you teach these other subjects too? You are infidels, and I do not want my daughter to become an infidel.”
I thought of the madrassa schools that Grandmother had told me about during my childhood in Kabul and more recently in Peshawar, which taught only the Koran and from which the Taliban had emerged. “The families who are sending their children to the school are also good Moslems. Good Moslems are allowed to study other things as well as the Koran,” I answered.
I was becoming increasingly irritated, not only by his words but also by the fact that he kept staring at the ground as if I were too distasteful to look at. He knew very well that we respected Moslem culture. When we showed videos of Western films to the children, for example, we always censored them first. One of the best films we got for the camp was Schindler’s List, and we cut a scene that showed a man and a woman in bed together. If we had left it in, the children would have talked about it to their parents, and the parents would have wondered what kinds of films we were showing.
But my arguments that knowledge was power, that knowledge could give his daughter a chance of a better future, had no effect on him.
“She is my daughter, and I will decide whether her future should be dark or bright. She is of more use to me using her little fingers to weave carpets. Now you can leave,” he snapped.
I got angry. “I came here for the sake of your daughter. You do not know what is best for her future. She wants to learn. She is lucky to have a school here. But you want her to be ignorant. If you beat her again because you do not want her to study, we will take steps to have you removed from the camp.”
I was furious with him, and furious that his daughter should pay such a heavy price for his beliefs. She stopped coming to the school entirely.
ONE OF MY DREAMS is that every town and village in Afghanistan should have access to a library with many, many books—books on all the sciences, literature, and art in both the Persian and Pushto languages, books that will document the heritage of Afghanistan and what the Mujahideen and the Taliban did to it.
It was in the camp that I met a woman from the province of Bamiyan who had lived within sight of the two giant stone statues of the Buddha that the Taliban shot to pieces with their artillery. “I woke up every morning with the mullah’s cry,” she told me, “and every morning the first things my eyes went to were the Buddhas. They had gone, after one and a half thousand years. Now they will never come back.”