Jabar, from Kandahar, met David, from Nebraska, in the late 1970s. Political upheaval threatened – but never severed – their ties
Afghanistan20 years. As the Taliban retook control of the country, one Afghan family was forced to make a decisionFour decades before, they had welcomed an American into their family. Now, it was his chance to return the favor.In 1978, there was a coup in my country. The Communist party took over in what is now called the Saur Revolution. It all happened very quickly. I remember walking back into my family home after saying my goodbye to David, a man I considered to be my brother.
We became friends pretty quickly. I learned that he liked basketball, so I invited him to play with the team at our school. Since our houses were only about a 10-minute walk from each other, we would ride our bikes together to and from school. Wilson would also come to my family’s home toIn Afghan homes, there is usually a separate room to receive guests, and only the men of the family are allowed to greet them while women must hide their faces.
The national security forces became suspicious of my friendship with Wilson. They thought that I was spying for the US, so they searched my house and held and questioned me for a week straight. Wilson, who was back in the US by then, heard about this and asked me to stop writing to him. It was too dangerous, he told me. I did not like that. We lost contact for almost a decade and a half.Years later, in the mid-1990s, I was working with the UN, in Herat.
My older son is in Germany, and my other daughter is in Brazil. She hopes to continue on to the United States, too, once her asylum claim is processed.But I don’t want to be under the protection of the United States. They destroyed Afghanistan and stole all the wealth from my country; they did not come to build it. There is no place for Americans in the heart of the Afghan people. To this day, Wilson is the only American I have a relationship with, and he will always be my brother.
I arrived in Kandahar and moved into a small apartment in the city’s south-west. For the first months, I spent about six hours a day at the school where I taught English. I had kind, curious fellow teachers, but once school was over, we didn’t interact much. I was pretty lonely. I was at Jabar’s home when his student knocked on his door and told us to turn on the radio. There was military music playing; the same music that had played five years earlier, when the prime minister, Daud Khan, had overthrown the monarchy to become Afghanistan’s first president. Jabar knew that this time it was the Communist party, and that Americans might be in danger. Less than a year later, the American ambassador to Afghanistan, Adolph Dubs, would be killed in Kabul.
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