Frisbee and Farsi

We ended the program by going back to Glencree to present our papers. I think everyone was relieved to be done with our academic work, and also happy to be seeing their families soon. While at Glencree we were lucky enough, that through a strange stroke of luck, a group of community workers from Afghanistan were able to talk to us and have a conversation. They had been at Glencree for a few days, and because of the volcano going off, could not return to Afghanistan. Apparently it is extremely hard to get a travel visa for Afghani's and they had to now find another plane that would take them back via Germany, or else they would have to apply for new visas. They made the best of this unfortunate situation, and were happy to talk to our group. The Afghans spoke different languages amongst themselves, and only some of them were conversational in English. One of the men, Shareef, translated, and as we found out later, it wasn't because of his English skills, but because he is very politically motivated and usually takes charge of the group.

The most odd thing had happened before the meeting when a group of us were playing frisbee out on the lawn to occupy our time. The Afghans came over and joined in on our strange American game and I really wish I could have gotten a picture of this group of American students and Afghan civil society workers laughing and enjoying a game, without even speaking the same language. The women in the group had a fun time tossing it to all of us and doing their best to catch the disk, while the men focused on seeing who could launch the frisbee the furthest.

It was a little bit of a confrontational meeting between the two groups and there was a strange tension in the air. This mood was added to by the fact that all of the Americans were sitting on one side of the room, and all the Afghans on the other. Shareef started off the questions by asking why would a group of Americans study conflict? (with a noticeable smirk on his face) It was no-nonsense questions like this that made some people uneasy and no doubt, resentful off Shareef, but I feel that he can ask me whatever questions he wants, however vague or loaded they are, I think after his life of experience with Americans I owe him this. Shareef also ended the conversation with an interesting pun that made some of our group, and also some of his own a little uneasy. He talked about how he was glad he could talk with us and he thought us to be good people, but unfortunatley if we came to Afghanistan and a Taliban fighter saw us, he would shoot us dead without the thought that we could possibly be good. He knows us now, and knows that students are good people with "big hearts", "but (he is) also talib". This little bit of humor was lost on us for a while, because we thought he was saying that he was a member of a group that would shoot us dead without a second thought. However the word talib simply means student, so he was actually saying how much we are not unlike each other.

I thought the conversation went well, and I was glad to see everyday people from Afghanistan. Not the images of Taliban fighters or corrupt politicians that plague the country, and American news sources, but instead local people finding local resolutions to local issues within Afghanistan.