In My Father's Country: An Afghan Woman Defies Her Fate by Saima Wahab

Author:Saima Wahab [Wahab, Saima]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Social Science, Biography & Autobiography, Women, Islamic Studies
ISBN: 0307884945
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2012-04-24T00:00:00+00:00

NINETEEN

Outside Jalalabad a handful of big refugee camps languished on the desert plain that extends into Pakistan. Without plumbing, heat, or electricity, they were bursting with tens of thousands of people who were forced to return to Afghanistan after the settlements where they’d lived for decades in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province were demolished and closed. Most spent their meager savings buying a space in a truck traveling over the Khyber Pass, only to find that once they arrived in Afghanistan they had no place to go. Often, their homes and villages had been destroyed by the Soviets, or the mujahideen, or the Taliban. But just as often, their land had been confiscated by the current government officials.

Most Pashtun tribal land is passed down from son to son, and has been for centuries. When the Soviets began carpet bombing Afghanistan in 1979 and millions of Afghans were forced to flee to Pakistan, the government was in chaos. No one thought: Before I flee for my life I’d better go to Kabul and see if there is some public office still open for business where I can file the deed to my family’s ancient village, so that when we return I can prove it belongs to me. When the refugees returned to their villages, after the war was over, they assumed they would be able to resume the lives they’d left. Then someone would show up from the governor’s office and say, “Sorry, this isn’t your land.” It cost only a few hundred dollars to forge a genuine-looking deed, and many provincial governors drew them up to claim the most attractive, fertile tracts of land in their province, and would put it under the name of a brother or cousin. The rightful owners couldn’t produce any paperwork, and so the family land was lost.

One sultry morning a few weeks after I’d arrived, we set out for a refugee camp just after breakfast. It was stuffy inside our Humvee. Even though summer, with its triple-digit-degree days, was waning, it was going to be hot—the soldiers were already sweating.

Judy liked going on missions to refugee camps because the problems there were easier to solve, hence the visits were known as quick-impact missions. You need some HA, some human aid? Sure, here are some bags of rice, some pencils, and clean, bottled water. Here is a portable mosque. The missions were low-effort but high-impact. I’d learned in Farah that often a PRT’s missions—for better or for worse—were determined not by what needed to be done but by what could, realistically, be done. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that the whole of Afghanistan could benefit from reconstruction, but whereas it might take years to rebuild a stretch of road, in an afternoon you could cure a dozen ear infections.

This camp huddled on a rocky plain near the border. It was crowded, a flat sea of blue U.N.–issued tents. Some families had strung plastic sheets around their tents to create a kind of courtyard; the sheets flapped in the wind, fanning random pieces of garbage.

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