BY WENDY ROSS | OTISFIELD, MAINE Following six years of traumatization under the Taliban regime, and years of war in their country, twelve teenagers from Afghanistan—six boys and six girls—are now discussing those days in daily sessions mediated by trained facilitators at the Seeds of Peace lakeside camp in rural Maine.
It is the first time that Afghan youth have been included in the Seeds of Peace program that each summer brings 13- to 16-year-old young people from war-torn areas of the world—principally the Middle East, South Asia, and the Balkans—to this bucolic site. The participants stay for several weeks, living together and discussing the tensions between their nations.
The Seeds of Peace program, founded in 1993, is funded primarily by private and corporate donors, with some help from the U.S. government. The U.S. State Department, in conjunction with Seeds, is sponsoring the Afghan youth under a pilot program.
Including the Afghans, there are 166 participants at the camp’s first session, which runs from June 26 through July 17, and culminates with a visit to Washington, D.C.
The program for the Afghans, said Bobbie Gottschalk, the program’s executive director, “is a little different from what we have done before.” They are not at the camp to discuss differences among Afghanistan’s ethnic groups, but rather to share with each other the experiences they went through for so many years, she said.
Here, she said, there are people who can help the kids understand the trauma and help them make some sense of it, because what they went through was “crazy.” Under the Taliban regime, “they couldn’t do all the things that children usually do,” she said.
“Most of them were kept inside and the girls couldn’t go to school. They had underground schools. Their parents were arrested, their parents lost their jobs, their English teachers were shot because they taught English. Just all kinds of horrible things like that,” said Gottschalk.
When they first arrived at the camp, the Afghan kids did not talk very much, and did not understand very much, she said. “But we have some staff members who speak Farsi and that’s close enough to their own language, and also some of them speak Urdu, and that’s what the Pakistanis can speak to them in. So they’ve had a chance to get things explained and connections made. And I think everybody here is very welcoming to them,” she said.
“I have pictures that I have taken of them from the first days and all through the time and you can see the openness emerge on their faces,” Gottschalk said.
The Afghan program is a completely new initiative, said Marieke van Woerkom, a facilitator at the camp and fulltime Seeds staffer, who has been with the program for seven years.
“With the Afghan kids, we have them all together daily in one session,” to discuss their recent history, she said, “with two facilitators, one who speaks Farsi.”
“There are conflicts within the Afghan group itself,” she noted, “because the kids, even though they all live in Kabul now, are from different parts of the country. Some of them are from refugee families that ended up in Kabul. So the different conflicts, different ethnic groups, within Afghanistan are also represented within that group.”
The Afghan campers, she said, “are working on sharing their stories of what it has been like to live under the Taliban; what it has been like to live in a country that has been destroyed by war on so many different levels.”
Just to be able to talk together about their experiences, their fears, and their oppression in an environment that is nurturing and safe, is wonderful for them, van Woerkom said. “The girls especially have so many stories of what it was like for them to live under the Taliban. What it was like to not be able to go to school, and the way they were oppressed,” she said.
“Initially they said they were not going to swim, even though we have a separate swimming area for girls and boys. But three of them decided they would swim, so we got them long tights and long sleeved shirts and they swim in those. And it’s wonderful. They are learning how to swim. They are as happy as can be in that regard,” she said.
Aside from holding daily discussions together, the Afghan youth in every other way are part of the overall camp population. They share cabins with boys and girls from India and Pakistan, are assigned to dining tables with campers from all the different nations, and they participate in all the camp activities together with the other kids.
Coming to the United States was “a very big shock for them,” said Megan Hughes, education coordinator for the Seeds of Peace program. For six years the girls were not allowed to attend school under the Taliban regime, she said, and as a result “their English is not as good as that of some of the other campers. But they are doing well.”
When they first arrived at the camp “they were probably among the campers that felt the most intimidated by other campers, by their surroundings, by what was expected of them. I think they didn’t really have a clear idea of why they were here. But over the past few weeks there has been a huge transformation,” Hughes said. “Just yesterday we had a girls’ dance party that was going on during general swim time, where the Afghan girls and the Pakistani girls knew the same kinds of music, so they were teaching all the other girls their traditional dances which are very similar. So you can see in little ways how they are starting to feel more acclimated, how they feel more comfortable being here.”
An example of that is fifteen year old Sapna Rasoul of Kabul, one of the six female campers from Afghanistan, who was able to explain in broken English how much she likes the camp and how much she will miss it and her new friends when she returns home. Sapna said she “is so much happier” now that her country is free, and she can go to school, and speak out openly. She is now in the ninth/tenth grade, she said, and wants either to be a physician or a lawyer when she grows up so she can help her people.
When she first arrived in the United States, she said, she was shocked by the way women dressed, since in Afghanistan under the Taliban, women had to be completely covered whenever they left their homes.
Fourteen year old Mojibullah (Mojib), also from Kabul, said his time at the Seeds of Peace camp has been “very useful” to him, despite the fact that he was initially wary of coming to it. His parents, a Red Cross worker and a housewife, he said, were instrumental in sending him, but he objected at first. But as soon as he disembarked from the airplane in New York “after a very long and very hard trip,” he said, he knew his parents had made the right choice for him.
Mojib says he enjoys the camp “very much because we learn about peace and friendship, so that we can help our people when we return home.”
Asked about the plight of girls under the Taliban, Mojib pointed out that when he first began school, his big sister took him by the hand to school. She was in the sixth class and he was just beginning school. “Now we are both in the same class,” he said, because under the Taliban she was not permitted to go to school for six years.
“That’s amazing,” he said. “She was studying at home by herself, and now when the education starts back both she and I are in the same class.”
Mojib said both he and his sister want to become engineers so they can help in the rebuilding of their country after years of war. “It is impossible to forget quickly what happened,” he said.
He pointed out that the Seeds of Peace program he is participating in lasts 24 days, compared to the 23 years of war his nation has endured. “For 23 years we had a war in our country, so they gave us 24 days here,” he said, but that is not long enough to forget.
“We cannot forget 23 years of war in 24 days,” he said.
He said he is “very thankful” that the U.S. government and Seeds of Peace made a place for the Afghan kids this summer. He said he is sad at the thought he will be leaving the United States soon and added that he hopes he can return one day to study here where the educational opportunities are better than in his own country.