Under an Afghan Sky (29 page)

I didn’t know what to think anymore, and I was getting tired of thinking. “I just want to go home,” I said out loud.

“Inshallah, you go soon,” he said, a little exasperated. His phone rang, and a quick conversation in Pashto followed. After hanging up, he turned to me. “We need to make video.”

“Video?” I asked. “I thought Abdulrahman did that on the first day! With his cell phone. And Zahir was supposed to take it to your father in Pakistan. Didn’t he do that?”

Khalid shook his head. “I do not know. Your friends—they do not believe we have you.”

What? How could they not believe they had me? I’d answered the second round of proof-of-life questions just a few days ago.

“They don’t believe it is you,” Khalid repeated.

This was not good news. The Sunday deadline looked less likely if they were demanding a video and the negotiators required further proof of life. “Well,” I said, “if they need the video, let’s do it tonight. Get Shafirgullah to bring a camera and then they can have the video tomorrow. That will work, won’t it?”

“We need camera,” he said.

“What do you mean, you need camera?” I asked. I was starting to lose my patience. “Don’t you have a video camera?” Khalid shook his head. I couldn’t believe it. My kidnappers were even less organized than I had first thought.

“What do you mean you don’t have a video camera? What kind of kidnappers are you? You’re wasting time. Your time and my time.” My captor took off his skullcap and scratched his head. I was doing the calculations in my head. It was now Thursday. If the negotiators got the video by Friday, I could still be released by Sunday. But it was starting to seem like a long shot. I looked at Khalid. He seemed as annoyed and upset as me.

“I have an idea,” I said. “I’ll write a letter, and then they will know it’s me.” Khalid looked puzzled, so I tried to explain that I would write a letter that he—or his father or Zahir—could read to the negotiators. Then they would have proof that it was really me. Khalid liked this idea, and I ripped the last page out of my notebook and started writing in big letters with double spacing.

My name is Mellissa Fung, and I’m a reporter for CBC News.

I had to convey information to prove that it was me. I should talk about my family.

Tell everyone I’m sorry for all the trouble. My sister’s name is Vanessa and she is a lawyer in Los Angeles. My parents are supposed to leave for Hong Kong next week, and I hope they will still go.

This was true. My parents were supposed to go to Hong Kong for a month to visit family and friends, and I had been worrying that my situation might screw up their vacation.

I am in some pain, from the surgery I had earlier this year, and I will need to see a doctor soon. Please help me.

The negotiators would be able to confirm that I’d had major surgery. I added only two words more, so there could be no doubt that it was me.

Go Canucks.

And then a message to Paul. I’d been writing to him all this time—letters he might never get.

xox

I handed the sheet of paper to Khalid. He read what I had written, then pointed to the second-to-last line. “What is this? Ca-nucks?”

“It’s my hockey team,” I said. “Do you know what is hockey?”

He shook his head, and I spent the next thirty minutes trying to explain our national game. He seemed intrigued, and so I continued to talk about my favourite sport. I can talk about hockey for hours. I explained that, similar to soccer, which was a game he knew, the goal was to get the puck into the net more times than your opponent. I had a little trouble getting him to understand the concept of skating on a sheet of ice. I then tried to explain the National Hockey League—with its teams in cities across North America—and how they played each other and the final prize was a big silver cup called the Stanley.

“Stanley?” he asked.

I nodded and explained that it was named after an important person whom the Queen had once appointed as her representative
to Canada. This Khalid couldn’t understand—and I wasn’t surprised. Even if he had attended school, it was unlikely that he learned anything about the British Empire.

He folded my letter and put it in his pocket.

“Promise you will read that to them,” I asked.

“I promise.”

“Tomorrow. You must read this tomorrow. Then we won’t need any video. They will know it’s me. It will save time.” He nodded and promised again to call the negotiators and read them my letter. I could only hope he wasn’t going to throw out the letter as soon as he left the hole that night.

Khalid seemed relieved when the digging started that evening. His time was almost done. If I was being released on Sunday night, he would have only one more night down in the cave. Shafirgullah took over, and I could tell that he too was getting tired of having to come down every other night to watch over me. Besides, the place was a mess. The stench of the toilet bucket and body odour must have been unbearable. Even I wasn’t completely desensitized. Shafirgullah started praying and chanting the Koran as soon as he came in, basically ignoring me and turning, as he always did, away from me and toward what I assumed was the direction of Mecca. It was a relief not to have to try to make conversation. I reached for my new blue notebook.

Dear P,

The first page of a new notepad. Khalid brought it for me because I was running out of space in my old one. I wonder how many more notepads I’ll go through before I see you again. My kidnappers have been saying soon, soon, soon, but they’ve been saying that all the time. I’m not sure what to believe anymore. I guess I should just be thankful I can still talk to you.

I’m still okay, and the scab on my shoulder, I think, is almost ready to come
off. Another good sign, maybe, that this nightmare is soon going to end.

I’m not sure where you are. Maybe you’ve left Afghanistan already, but I feel that you are close, and that makes me feel a little better. My kidnappers are starting to tire of coming in here every other night, and maybe that means the end is near.

I’m praying a lot, and trying to stay positive, but there are times when it’s very hard and the darkness of this place threatens to swallow me completely.

I hope I’ll see you soon. I miss you so much.

xox

I traced a few more crosses from my rosary on the page and coloured them in with the pen, admiring the patterns I drew. Shafirgullah had finished praying and was looking at my crosses. He frowned and reached for a new package of cookies, stuffing them one at a time into his mouth. I frowned at him in return, and he took two of the juice boxes out of the bag, guzzling one in seconds, then taking a few sips from the other. I looked in the bag. There were only three juice boxes left, and they would have to last us until the next evening. And then it would just be one more night until Sunday.

I dug around for an apple juice, stuck a straw in it, and took a sip. Shafirgullah was pulling out pieces of nan-i-Afghani from the bag. He ate it in chunks, chewing madly and washing it down with more juice. I suddenly found myself growing increasingly irritated by the way he ate—the noises he made while chewing, the way he wrinkled his nose, the way he chewed with his mouth open, with bits of bread flying out. I must have been glaring at him because he stared back at me. I got the feeling he was probably as sick of me as I was of him. We didn’t speak for the rest of the night. He went to sleep very early, leaving me, thankfully, alone again with my thoughts and my prayers.

No one came the next night. Abdullah came by in the afternoon and dropped several packages of juice and cookies, and
batteries and a pack of smokes, down the pipes. It was a signal that there would be no changing of the guard. Poor Shafirgullah would be stuck doing double-duty—but at least it would be the last time. A few days previously, Khalid had said, “No more girls,” and I think he meant it. It was much easier for them to kidnap men, beat them up, and leave them alone for days than to have to keep constant watch over a woman.

Shafirgullah and I had struck a bit of a truce earlier in the day, singing songs again, and he even opened a package of cookies and offered them to me, before eating them all himself.
One more day,
I kept telling myself.
Twenty-four more hours. I can do it, I can do it.
I had developed a little routine to help the hours pass: at the top of the hour I would smoke half a cigarette, then pray the entire rosary—five decades, which is the equivalent of fifty Hail Marys, and all the prayers in between. Depending on whether I sung it, which I usually did, it would take me about twenty minutes. At the bottom of the hour I would finish the cigarette and then either write or try to nap (which never worked) until the top of the hour, when I’d do it all over again. Sometimes I would let my mind wander in the hope that it would take me somewhere far away, until my captor or something else reminded me that I was still in captivity.

It seemed a bit ironic to me that the faraway place so often in my thoughts these days was home. I’d spent my childhood dreaming of going to far-off places. The farther away, the better. There was a whole big world out there, and I wanted to see it all. My parents both worked in the travel industry, so as children my sister and I had the privilege of being able to travel quite a lot—and as a result, I’d developed serious wanderlust, which was one of the reasons why I was attracted to journalism. I would imagine myself reporting from places like Moscow, Berlin, Beirut—places that seemed so foreign to a young girl in Canada. Except that now,
in Afghanistan, a place I couldn’t even imagine as a child, I was dreaming of Canada.

I wondered where young women in Afghanistan dream about going when they get older. Did they even know there was a bigger world outside their country? Were they curious about the West? Did they want to explore farther?

I thought about some extraordinary young women I’d met the summer before. Shokoor and I were in Kabul shooting a few stories on Afghan women and children. It was a blazing hot day and we had arranged to meet Awista Ayub, an Afghan-American, at the Kaldup Askari military field in the middle of the city. We were parked in a lot adjacent to the field, and as soon as we stepped out of our van we heard the peal of laughter.

It was tournament day for the girls of Kabul, and some fifty young soccer players, divided among about eight teams, had traded their traditional headscarves for baseball caps—an amazing event in a country where women, just years before, were forbidden from even being spectators in that same arena.

The tournament was Awista’s brainchild, part of the Afghan Youth Sports Exchange, an organization she started in order to teach leadership skills to young women in her home country. She herself had the opportunity to study and learn in the United States, and it was her dream to bring the same opportunities home to young women in Afghanistan who might otherwise not be able to play sports. It was about empowering girls in a country where girls grew up being told they were not equals. Sport, Awista told me, had the power to change all that.

She introduced me to one of the coaches, a man named Abdul Saboor Walizada. He was the coach of the Afghan national women’s team, and he was there to offer advice, and scout. “More women,” he told me, “are interested in playing, and there is a
lot of talent among the girls you see here. We will have a strong national team.”

In the few years since Awista had started the program, the number of girls participating had multiplied, from tens to hundreds. They had even played in Ghazi Stadium in Kabul, where the Taliban had routinely carried out public executions of women who were accused of violating the most minor of laws.

Awista was a remarkable person. She had studied at the University of Rochester, in New York, where she played goal for the women’s hockey team. We talked a lot about how participating in team sports as young girls helped to shape our views and built our confidence as young women. It was what she was hoping to do for the young women of Afghanistan.

“I’ve seen these girls,” she said. “They change. They come to the field in their school uniform and they have their long black jackets and their pants and their headscarves, and as soon as they put on their sports clothes, their personality changes, and these are girls you couldn’t recognize as being the same girls who walked on the field.”

She introduced me to some of the girls playing that day. Thirteen-year-old Maliha Mahmoodi told me through a translator that she’d been interested in soccer since she was very young but that there wasn’t an opportunity to play, even just a few years ago. Now, here she was, and thrilled for the opportunity. “It means it shows progress in the country,” she told me, her big brown eyes flashing with excitement. “When we play soccer, it’s like serving the country, and it shows that girls in Afghanistan are equal.”

Zainab Fakovi was sixteen, and she’d been watching boys and men play soccer since she was little but had just started playing herself a few years ago, with the Afghan Youth Sports Exchange. For her, the opportunity to play soccer meant more than just sport.
“It means I am a liberated girl, and it means girls can do anything we want. Men and women have equal rights.” When I asked what she thought it meant for her future, and for Afghanistan’s future, she didn’t hesitate. “It means I can be whatever I want. It means our country can be the best in the world.” When I asked her what she wanted to be, she looked straight at me and said, “A journalist. Like you.”

Lesson learned already. Sports can empower. Awista’s philosophy was playing out right in front of her eyes. But she credited the girls themselves. “I’ve seen some of these girls evolve in the last three years into being confident young women,” she told me. “And I have no doubt that soccer has played a key role in giving them that confidence. And whether they choose to play soccer, or they choose to take that confidence into the classroom, I’ve definitely seen them being able to emerge as leaders and have an ability to make life decisions, and own those decisions and have the confidence to make those decisions. And I think that’s a key lesson we can teach these young girls as they emerge as future leaders of this country.”