Letters to My Daughters (30 page)

As Shuhra and Shaharzad blossomed and grew, Hamid was dying before my eyes. He was losing weight almost daily. The skin on his once-handsome face had turned dark, as though coated with a translucent layer of black. His eyes were bloodshot and he coughed almost constantly; by now he was beginning to cough up little drops of blood.

When Shuhra was three months old, I was asked to take part in a provincial medical survey for an aid agency. This meant joining a team of sixty nurses, doctors and support staff to travel across twelve remote districts assessing the medical and nutritional needs of the people. It was an incredible offer and the type of community outreach work I had dreamed of doing when I had wanted to be a doctor. Despite the bad timing of a new baby and a terminally ill husband, I couldn't turn it down. Hamid understood this and gave me his blessing to go.

I almost didn't, though. It was a gruelling trip for anyone, let alone a mother with a tiny baby. It would be hard to find clean water or proper washing facilities, and we would be travelling across remote and barely accessible mountain tracks. The journey was to take in many of the country's Ismaili communities—devotees of Shia, Islam's second-largest sect. In Afghanistan, they predominantly live near the Tajikistan border. Our trip would also take us to the wild and rarely visited Wakhan Corridor, a finger of land that connects Afghanistan with China. It was created during the so-called Great Game—the period in the nineteenth century when the Russian and British Empires were wrestling for control of central Asia—when it had served as a buffer between the military ambitions of the British Lion and the Russian Bear.

Despite my reservations, I knew I'd regret it if I didn't go. Good opportunities rarely present themselves at the perfect moment; that's just a fact of life. And I felt I could play a real part in the success of the survey.

As we set off in a convoy, I was reminded of the trips my mother used to make each year, driving my father's cattle herd out to graze the spring pasture. She would sit proudly on her horse, still wearing her burka, and go off on her annual adventures complete with a caravan of donkeys, horses and servants. I remember sitting on the horse in front of her, feeling so small against the huge mountains but so important in our mission. As we set off across rugged tracks on our survey I felt similar emotion, only this time it was me with the baby on my lap. The trip was to change my life. We visited some of the most remote places in the region—places I have never been able to visit again. The levels of extreme poverty we found crystallized once and for all my political awakening. I knew my calling was to help.

We began the survey in January. It was so cold that people were actually using fresh animal dung to keep their babies warm while they slept. Their biggest fear was that their children would freeze to death; they had no idea that the dung could cause disease or infection. Hygiene was non-existent, with children going barefoot in the snow, most of them malnourished.

By night, we would eat and take shelter in the religious leader's home. Usually the largest house in the village, it would typically have running water and a drop toilet, literally a large, deep hole in the ground. This was similar to the house I had grown up in, and although the western doctors on our survey team found it hard I found it reassuringly familiar. But, community leaders aside, the villagers lived in a level of poverty I had never seen before, not even as a child. Often we would find a one-room house with an entire family living inside, the animals in one corner and a toilet in the other. And when I say toilet, I don't mean even a bucket, just a corner of the room with feces piled high and babies crawling around all over the room. It was shocking. I tried to explain to the patriarchs of these families the dangers such poor hygiene posed, but digging a latrine—even one that might save children's lives—a safe distance from the house is sadly often more than these uneducated village men can bear, and they will not lower themselves by doing it.

I tried a different approach: “Doesn't your good Muslim wife deserve to have her dignity preserved when she performs her bodily functions?” But sadly, the indignity suffered by a woman defecating in the corner of the living room, or outside in full view of her neighbours, is outweighed by the male indignity of providing a facility that would give her some privacy. Seeing such things helped me understand why Badakhshan province has the world's highest infant and maternal mortality rate.

In Darwaz, one of the poorest districts, the women told me they had to go out at 4 o'clock in the morning in the snow to feed the animals. Sometimes, the snow can be as high as a metre. No one helps them, and when they get back in they have to cook the bread on an open fire and prepare food for the whole family. It is more than a life of domestic drudgery. It is a life of hard labour. The men too work hard, going out into the fields at 6 A.M., not returning until after dark, trying to grow enough crops in summer to last the family and the animals through the winter. It was a forceful reminder to me of how poor and marginalized people can be. Seeing their suffering triggered something of an epiphany about who I was, where I had come from and what my calling in life was to be.

We were in an area called Kala Panja, one of the Ismaili communities. We had been invited to have dinner and stay the night at the house of the local leader. I had never met him, but he greeted me like an old friend. I was rather embarrassed, and my colleagues were beginning to laugh at me when he revealed the reason for his effusiveness. He had known my father. As we sat, he told tales that depicted my father as a hard-working, dedicated man who did all he could to bring changes to the poor. He smiled at me and said, “Now, Miss Koofi, I see you sitting here and I see you are the same as your father.”

It was the first time that anyone had likened me to my father, and I flushed with pride. As I sat in the room surrounded by elders, doctors, villagers, all people coming together to try to make a difference, I was transported back in time—to a time when my mother ruled her kitchen, and servants and brothers stood in a line to hand out piping-hot pots of rice to that mysterious room where my father met with his guests. As a child, I had yearned to enter this mysterious secret room, to see what happened there and to hear its discussions.

I smiled to myself as I realized the mystery had lifted now. Those meetings my father had were actually just like the one I was in now. They were simply dinners with delegations of aid workers, doctors, engineers and local elders. How many nights had he sat and dined and discussed plans and projects and ways to bring development to his people? How many meals had my mother cooked for visitors like this? I sat there barely engaging in the conversation, lost in my thoughts and feeling secretly thrilled to be here, finally understanding such a critical part of my father's life.

When we left in the morning, the man made me a gift of a sheep for baby Shuhra. Wakhan sheep are short and fat and famous for their tender meat. The other Afghans on the trip were jealous and teased him: “Where is our sheep? Why did you give it to Miss Koofi?”

But the man just smiled and said, “It's a gift for Miss Koofi's father. I am honoured to have welcomed his daughter and his granddaughter into my home. And to see how his daughter has grown to work for good, just like him.” The words made me very proud.

As we travelled the districts, I met more people who had known my father and gained a deeper understanding of the political role my family had held. I had been hired only as a translator on the medical survey, which was not a senior role. But people heard my name and thought I was somehow here representing my father, that the Koofi family was back in Badakhshan mobilizing communities.

Villagers started to come and seek me out personally, presenting problems to me. I tried to explain that I hadn't organized the survey but was just a low-level helper. But they kept coming, with issues unrelated to the survey such as salary problems or land disputes. I found it a little unnerving and overwhelming. But it also gave me a growing sense of purpose and determination. And of belonging. It was here, with my father's political legacy and my mother's personal values, my baby at my breast, that I realized I wanted to be a politician. I don't even know if “want” is the right word. It was what I had to be. It was the role I was born for.

The survey took six weeks. Shaharzad was only eighteen months old, and I missed her terribly while I was away. Hamid was more than happy to take care of her because I think he knew in his heart that his days were limited; those few weeks of bonding alone with his beloved elder daughter were precious to him.

After the survey ended, I went back to my job at the orphanage. This further mobilized me. There were 120 students—sixty boys and sixty girls. Each child had a different story. They were terrible stories. Some had lost both parents, but not all were orphans. Some had a living mother who had remarried and a stepfather who refused to allow them in the house; others had been placed in the orphanage by parents too poor to feed them. It was heartbreaking, and I wished I could have taken every one of them home with me. I spent the first three months of the job interviewing children about their backgrounds and organizing their individual histories into a database.

Despite the sadness of the children's stories, the orphanage was a happy place. I was able to take both my daughters to work with me. Baby Shuhra stayed quiet, hidden under her scarf, and Shaharzad played with the children. I still occasionally see some of those same children. Several of them are at university now, and I still try to help them as much as I can. When some of them came to Kabul to study, I rented a house for them. In the absence of parents, they had no one else to help them. I don't have much money and it is a financial struggle for me to do these things, but I do them willingly and from a desire to help.

But things really changed for me when a few months later the United Nations opened a UNICEF office. I applied for and got a job as a children's protection officer. It was a small office, and I was effectively the second in charge. Working for the UN was a big step up for me. And the job was tough. It involved working with children and internally displaced people who had lost their homes during the fighting.

Part of my job was to network with youth and civil society organizations. One of them was called the Badakhshan Volunteer Women's Association. I worked for them voluntarily in my spare time, fundraising and organizing things like micro-credit loans for women wanting to set up small businesses. I was also involved in a team planning International Women's Day celebrations every March 8. International Women's Day is not celebrated everywhere and certainly not all over Afghanistan, but in Badakhshan we recognized it as an important commemoration. We travelled the villages giving gifts and organizing a Mother of the Year contest. It was a way of giving the village women a sense of pride in themselves.

We organized a big day of events in Faizabad, and it was there in 1999 that I made my first-ever public speech. I talked about how women were treated and how the civilians were treated in Kabul during the civil war. I spoke freely, angrily, about the strength and power of Afghan women, how during all the atrocities of the civil war, when they had seen husbands and sons murdered and suffered rape and torture themselves, they didn't lose their strength or their pride. I called them the “unstoppable Afghan women.”

Although the Taliban controlled the rest of the country, they still didn't control Badakhshan. Rabbani's government was very much in control in the region and because Rabbani was once with the Mujahideen, many people thought my speech went too far in blaming the Mujahideen for torture. In those days, people didn't want to criticize the Mujahideen—in fact, that's true even today. These were the men who had saved us from the Russians, so criticizing them is seen as unpatriotic, almost treasonous. I admire what the Mujahideen did in defeating the Russian invaders, but there is no denying that in the civil war years that followed they were responsible for many barbaric acts committed against innocent civilians, including my own family.

There were a few angry faces and shocked silences among disapproving government officials when I spoke of this. But afterwards, many ordinary people, including teachers, doctors and community volunteers, came up to me and told me what a good speech it was. I was finding my voice. And I was finding my rightful place.

Hamid was getting weaker and weaker, and in a desperate attempt to stave off the inevitable I spent most of my wages trying to source new medical treatments to help him. My sisters were harsh with me and told me not to bother wasting my money and to face the fact that he was dying. But this was the man I loved. Just as I could not sit back and wait when he was in prison, I could not now sit back and calmly wait for him to die. He was so supportive of me at that time, so happy to see his wife succeeding, that I felt I owed it to him to keep him alive. After Shuhra's birth, our physical relationship died, but in some ways our love came back. I think he felt guilty about the way he had treated me for giving him a second daughter and worked even harder to prove to me he was completely behind my work. When I came home in the evenings, he always made a point of asking me about my day, persuading me to share my problems and work worries with him. He was in so much emotional pain. After years of having waited for me, when he finally persuaded my brothers and married me the result was a slow descent into death. With sorrow in his eyes, he once held my hand and told me I was like having a dish that you'd wanted to taste for so many years, a dish you dreamed of eating every day and that you could taste and smell in your imagination. When this dish was finally served to you, you found you had nothing to eat it with, no spoon or fork, and all you could do was look at it.