This commentary is by Jill Vickers of Bridport, a retired literacy teacher, returned Peace Corps volunteer in Afghanistan, and mentor for female Afghan students.
In my last days in Kabul in 1970, after Peace Corps service, I gave my American clothes to an Afghan. I sent my Peace Corps foot locker home with samovar, buzkashi socks, an old woolen rug, a tin cooking utensil and other items to remind me of my time there.
I would travel overland by bus to Istanbul. A friend who’d come to see me off gave me an ivory netsuke. It was a woman in a kimono with a face that one could turn to show her happy or sad. She was sad the day I left.
Three months later, I landed alone in New York. I was frightened by heavy traffic moving in every direction. Visiting three continents had depleted my money, my American friends were scattered, my Afghan counterparts did not know English and I didn’t know what I wanted to do next.
Within a few years, Afghanistan’s fate sharing a border with the Soviet Union manifested itself. The Afghan king abdicated under pressure, and leaders in favor with the Soviets took his place. Then the Soviets occupied for 10 years. With the mining of the country, the civil war after the Soviet withdrawal and NATO’s war on terrorists, there was no going back. I had to consider my husband and child in taking the risk and also believed I would put the lives of Afghans in charge of my security there at risk.
In Afghanistan, we were often vaccinating against smallpox, walking house to house — and a little girl would attach herself to us. She might have a baby on her back, but insist she also carry our needles. We knew when a bit older, she would move to her husband’s family to be wife and mother, subservient to her mother-in-law and any older wives. She would not have a chance to know more of what life could offer.
Over three decades later, in 2008, I had a chance to meet a female Afghan student. Now I could meet a girl who had that chance. That evening at Middlebury College, after Shabana told her story of life under the Taliban, attending secret schools, we met and became friends. After her graduation, as director of the School of Leadership Afghanistan in Kabul, she matched me with Afghan students to mentor remotely.
One of the girls I mentored is Aminah — not her real name. We met remotely for two years, and then she earned a scholarship at a private school in Pennsylvania. That allowed us to meet face to face. Aminah’s widowed mother, a home tailor who raised her four children on her own, had sent a gift. Aminah handed me a package and asked me to go into a bedroom to open it.
I emerged in a modern version of a traditional Afghan women’s outfit. The dress was fitted, unlike the long, loose dresses that village women wore. It was like tops we had made by bazaar tailors when we arrived. The outfit Aminah’s mother made fit perfectly. From seeing me on a computer, Aminah had shown her mother how to tailor an outfit for me. She had so little to spare, so Aminah’s mother had given me a bit of herself.
During Aminah’s stay with us the summer of 2021, she invited an Afghan friend I’ll call Jamila to visit. The girls had met at the School of Leadership Afghanistan eight years earlier and kept in touch. The friend was a senior at Wellesley College, where I am an alumna.
I couldn’t wait to talk to Jamila. What was life like on campus during the pandemic? What changes have you seen in your home country? Jamila said remote learning was stressful, of course, and a “war culture” Afghans of different ethnic groups don’t get along as well and no longer appreciate the classic literature.
Listening to Jamila sparked memories. Some of us were based in northern Afghanistan our first year. We found rooms in a government hotel in the bazaar town of Kunduz in the harshest winter the area had seen in decades. Our male Afghan counterparts were holed up in rooms over the bazaar, waiting to be paid. We hung out on cots in the one hotel room with heat, reading, playing cards, writing home, as we waited for work to begin.
We would climb into horse-drawn carts for taxi rides through the snowy streets to a teahouse. Inside we sat cross-legged on the carpeted platform to eat a pilau of mutton and rice with our hands, Pakistani torch songs blaring from the radio, and male customers unabashedly staring at us. On the way back to the hotel, more stars than we’d ever seen and the sound of harness bells tingling in the cold air accompanied our thoughts of home and unspoken questions of what lay ahead.
When I snapped out of the past and remembered my manners, I asked Jamila about her family. Her family lives in Kabul, she said. Thinking that her parents’ generation may well have grown up in the provinces, I asked about that. Yes, her grandfather had worked in Baghlan Province when her father was growing up.
Spring did arrive in 1969. The hills around Kunduz turned green, and we left the hotel to rent a compound in Puli-cum-ri, a bazaar town in Baghlan Province. Seven of us lived there and shopped in the bazaar when not working in the outlying villages.
“Would your family have lived in Puli-cum-ri?” I asked.
“That’s right,” she said.
It has been over 50 years since young American women lived there. Jamila is 20, but she said she has older siblings. Was there a chance her father would have been old enough in 1969 to remember us?
“How old is your father?”
“Sixty.”
I couldn’t believe it.
“Would there be any chance he’d recall American women there as vaccinators?”
“I’ll call him and ask.” And she did.
Over the years, I had occasional contact with Afghans hired as language instructors. They had fled rather than become Communists. I had no idea what happened to the people we had vaccinated or to our male counterparts we’d been overnight guests with in the villages.
Within moments, Jamila had her father on her cellphone. In English, her father told me that yes, he was in grade school then and did remember. “You may have vaccinated me and my classmates.”
Then he asked his daughter to take the phone. In my living room, over 50 years later, through the translation of his college daughter, I listened to his gratitude for our efforts so long ago to help save his people from the scourge of smallpox.
Our role was to vaccinate the village women and older girls. The Afghan team leader had to procure permits from the local bureaucracy. This involved our waiting for hours in a largely bare office. We sat among the men who were squatting on chair seats, also waiting for the slow arm of government to get around to them.
An Afghan on the team would search for transport over the unmaintained dirt roads to a village. Once there, we might find a man who knew about vaccine and wanted people vaccinated. Sometimes a man had just visited the village and used the traditional method of inoculation, using the smallpox virus. We had the much safer cowpox virus supplied by Russia.
But our real work began when we got inside the compound with the wives. They were often curious, touching our hair, even feeling our chests to see if we actually were women. They asked are you married, where is your mother, aren’t you sad? In the meantime, we’re trying to get them to roll up their sleeves and let us prick their skin and apply a bit of vaccine.
Some were terrified of needles. Some thought this would allow an evil spirit to enter their bodies. Some thought having us chase after them would be fun. After the commotion and the vaccinating, they wanted us to stay and drink tea.
When the World Health Organization shifted to targeted rather than mass vaccination, we made individual decisions about whether to take a new role and how long to stay. However, we eventually all left, taking with us a love of the people who had reached across the gap between their norms of behavior and our individual choices, as single women, to travel on mobile teams working with men unrelated to us. The women often expressed the difference between us by asking: “Does your father know what you’re doing?”
Back at my house, this bright young woman and I took a long moment to look into each other’s smiling eyes as she prepared to leave. Layers of life stories and developments in technology had brought about this serendipity.
