I walked out of my house today for a final Nowruz in Afghanistan. I had spent the day before with an Afghan-Iranian family; we had set up a simple haftsein and read a few verses from the Qur'an as the minutes ticked towards the approaching equinox and the beginning of true spring. When we were done reciting, we went right back to watching the crazy, kitsch Persian music videos that no new year is complete without. I was inspired by the strength and dignity of the family I was sharing these moments with. Marzie was a Kurdish-Iranian woman from Kermanshah who had moved here to Baghlan province ten years ago to work with our education unit. Her first Afghan husband passed away a year or so ago, and she had since remarried.
Her two sons and daughter from her first marriage had fallen in love with their new baby brother and he was always on someone's shoulders the entire time I was there. Their new father, too, was an extraordinary man who had braved three decades of war and was completing his final year of high school at thirty eight years old. It was powerful and humbling to see the rest of the family, graduates themselves, excited along with him, cheering him on and making him feel at home. Marzie and her husband Zakaria spent the night telling us stories from the times when Baghlan was at war with itself, stories of Kurdish childhoods, about Marzie's shouting matches with local Taliban commanders and government bureaucrats. As always, there was plenty of poetry in the air; everyone quoting from Hafez, Saadi, Moulana Rumi, Khayyam and everything else we could think of.
Nowruz was always sacred for my family. I guess being away from Iran made us even more obsessed. I will never forget going to the post office in the campus center at William and Mary and finding a large box Mom had delivered for the occasion. It was a do it yourself Nowruz kit, complete with little wrapped garlic, coins and some sabzi that had somehow survived the journey. I never thought, sitting there in the Arabic House, that I would be spending my next year in Afghanistan. Nowruz out here makes me think of our little displays outside the UC, jumping over makeshift candles in the sunken garden and those wonderful Farsi lessons I would force onto the heads of many a hapless student! I still feel kind of guilty that Kayvan and I spent all the money we earned from those lessons on a giant Middle Eastern dance party...but in our defense, the Mediterranean finger foods were amazing...
Today was a holiday too out in Baghlan. I climbed to the top of Farhad hill on the edge of town. The sky was full of kites, battling away to cut eachother's strings. When a kite came loose, a small army of children would run after it, over adobe roofs and into nearby villages and return with their hard earned prize. I remember coming to Afghanistan expecting to find a warzone. Instead, I found my days full of the these sacred moments of peace. Thousands of men and women, families, picnicking, kites and music in the air and hawkers selling chickpeas and fries. These are my final days in Afghanistan after a long, challenging year deep in the field. As much as I look forward to returning to "normal" life, I know that this place is going to be completely different for me now. It is no longer that frightening, war ravaged frontier I read about in the papers. Afghanistan is simply a place where I made amazing friends, worked with great people, climbed mountains, caught fish, wrote a lot of boring reports and learned that the best thing to do when there is a fire fight going on down the street is to watch another episode of The Office.