Tiny Dancer by Anthony Flacco

Author:Anthony Flacco
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY/Medical
Publisher: Diversion Books
Published: 2013-01-03T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

Zubaida’s eldest sister, Nacima, had already married and was living away from home, by the time Zubaida was flown to America. Nacima and her husband had been driven from their home by the U.S.-led war on the Taliban into an Iranian refugee camp near the Afghanistan border in the town of Zabol. They were the only members of Zubaida’s family who lived there, but Nacima’s hometown of Farah was so remote that it was actually easier to communicate with someone inside the camp than in Farah. Zabol is enough of a city to have some small municipal services and a few telephone lines that functioned sporadically amid the ebb and flow of insurgent combat.

The town is located alongside the ancient caravan roads winding through the region and only about a third of its residents have running water or electricity, and farming and grazing are difficult to sustain there because of the lack of available water. The presence of huge rock surfaces on the ground prevent farming and drilling, but at least the camp was relatively safe from military battles. Existence for the refugees there was as bare bones as it can get.

In the month of December, 2002, Peter and Rebecca used a telephone number that Mohammed Hasan had given Zubaida during their first telephone call, reaching Nacima inside the camp through indirect means. They helped Zubaida to call her sister once every week. Although the results were always hit or miss with the unreliable satellite connections and spotty local phone service, sometimes the calls actually got all the way through. The number would ring at the home of one of the permanent homes in the area, so when someone answered, Zubaida would speak to them in Dari and explain enough of her situation to enlist their help and persuade them to locate her sister in the camp. That person would then run down the street and fetch Nacima back to the house so that Zubaida could call again later that same day and speak with her. It was the only direct contact that she ever had with anyone in her family except for those rare phone calls that her father was able to place to Peter and Rebecca’s home from the U.N. office in Kandahar.

Nacima, however, left the camp to visit the family home in Farah often enough that she could occasionally relay messages from them back to Zubaida, helping to provide her with some sense of still being in touch with her family. At first, the calls had a visibly positive effect on Zubaida and lightened her spirits like few other things could. But when Nacima heard that there had been a custody dispute over Zubaida and that she had left the host family’s home under cloudy circumstances, Nacima also took the position that Zubaida should return to Afghanistan right away without finishing the surgeries. To her, the whole impossible enterprise that was going on over in America seemed doomed to fail. Nacima’s hardscrabble experience and

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