|
Roya's Return to Afghanistan
"Besides my mother, my country is my mother."
Listen
to this Commentary!
By Roya Aziz
Many young people in Afghanistan are strangers in their homeland, having fled the country during its 22 years of war. Since the fall of the Taliban and the creation of a new interim government, Afghans are returning, from neighboring countries, and the West. Youth Radio's Roya Aziz recently returned to Kabul for the first time since her family fled the Soviet occupation in 1981.
In Kabul, I stayed with my uncle's family. The centerpiece at our dinner was usually a gas lamp. On most nights, we didn't have electricity. We would sit in the darkness, around a tablecloth spread out on Afghan carpets, drinking tea, listening to the radio and sharing stories. They told me about the period before the wars, when our extended family lived only houses apart. Then at the end of every story, they'd ask - when are your mother and grandmother coming back to Afghanistan...like you have?
Bringing back skilled expatriates is a national priority. You hear it everywhere - from President Hamid Karzai's speeches to casual conversations with relatives and strangers - everyone told me that they hope Afghans living abroad...will return. In fact, there's a word people use for expatriates. They're called musafirs - meaning travelers who've moved just temporarily, and will return to Afghanistan.
Jawad Ahmed is like me - a musafir who just returned to Afghanistan. He came back to start an English language center, after living in England for the last few years. Jawad says it's a sense of homeland that drew him back.
JAWAD (on tape)
I should not be so emotional, but I really love my people and I love my country. Besides my mother, my country is my mother.
ROYA
Afghanistan may be like his mother, but Jawad doesn't want to live in Kabul permanently. He complains about the lack of electricity and running water, and says he's homesick for his family in England. That's the challenge – no matter how much Afghans abroad want to help their country, the lack of basic infrastructure and opportunities keeps many returnees from staying long, and others stay away completely.
Those of us who left more than 20 years ago were forced out by the wars, back to back wars. We've formed communities elsewhere ... where we go to school and where our families have established businesses.
I think I could make a life for myself in Kabul... but like Jawad, most of my family is living abroad. My parents talk about leaving California, but there's still too much insecurity in Afghanistan.
Frozan Khalilyar stayed in Afghanistan throughout the wars. Like me, Frozan is a journalist, but she's also a wife and mother. With a smile, she tells me that she's proud of me for speaking our language and hanging on to our culture, and she welcomes me back to Afghanistan.
We're both 24, but you can't tell by looking at us. I ask her if she thinks of herself as young.
FROZAN (on tape)
If you ask me, I've become very old already. People in Afghanistan never had a chance to be young because we have seen so much fighting and because of all the poverty. Our suffering has made us old.
ROYA
Frozan says because of the wars, her father just couldn't afford to support her, and had to find her a husband. She wanted to get a postgraduate degree so she could find a good paying job. But she had to give up those dreams. Now she depends on a government salary of 20 dollars a month.
As an educated Afghan, Frozan could have a better life in another country, but instead, she's staying in Kabul, struggling to pay rent and feed her family. She hopes the Karzai government can build new political structures - with a lot of help from expatriates - the Afghan diaspora coming home.
At a center for street children in Kabul, a group of kids are rehearsing for a play about a boy who becomes a warlord's bodyguard ... a lingering political challenge from Afghanistan's past. The boy's friends tell him to give up his guns because schoolbooks and pens are their new weapons.
STREET KID (on tape)
Look Shams. We are your classmates. Why don't we have any guns. This notebook, this pen, these are our weapons! Go turn in your weapons. And from this moment, think about education. Free yourself from fighting.
ROYA
In the finale, the boy decides to go to school, and the young actors celebrate by performing the Afghan national dance. I find myself getting emotional because I also feel a sense of victory...one child, one step at a time, the country is rebuilding.
I realize that...like being in that audience, I have been an outsider until now, looking in at the country's struggles. And now it's up to those of us who have been on the outside in Pakistan, Iran and the West to join the effort to connect Afghan society back with the rest of the world.
- “Roya's Return” was produced by Youth Radio's International
Desk, in association with National
Geographic.
|
|
