July 2nd

July 02, 2010

AFCECO, Afghanistan
Ian Pounds

“To live in the hearts we leave behind is to never die.”

This is a quote attached anonymously to a video commemorating the life of Carl Sagan.  The video was brought to my attention this morning by a man who sponsors a child at Sitara I.  Sometimes I just like Nasruddin Hodha the foolish Mullah of Persian folklore, arrive on Friday with a blank mind. Seeing where that quote takes my thoughts, I trust somehow this page will be filled.

From what I can gather this is actually a quote by Thomas Campbell, not Sagan.  I doubt Sagan would ever have concerned himself seriously with the immortality of an individual soul.  He was interested in the future of the planet.  But the quote and the man nevertheless are now entwined, as thousands of people who have watched the video no doubt think these are Sagan's words.

Carl Sagan is a man I admire and who holds special meaning for me in light of the fact he died the same morning as my mother died, in late December of 1996.  The feeling that rushed through me that day was the strangest blend of sadness and fear and resolve and even excitement about the unknown.  When the mother goes, so goes love.  Love, of course, in the sense that only mothers know, no matter their deficiencies.  Throughout my life and my work B.A. (Before Afghanistan) I had known two kinds of orphans; the orphan parented by an adoptive family since birth and the one abandoned between the ages of 7 and 14.  Abandonment has enough categories on which I could devote a book, but the net result is the same as for true orphans, which is the loss of love.  To further complicate matters, somewhere along the line these children must also deal with mystification, anger, resentment and an array of other emotions that come with abandonment.  Even true orphans have expressed to me they to some degree have felt these feelings, even more confusing because there is no logic to them.

Now, keeping all that in mind, take a look at this list of the five most populous nations in the world:

China                    1,338,410,000

India                      1,182,867,000

United States           309,636,000

Indonesia                  234,181,400

Orphans                    210,000,000

Now consider that 70% of “orphans” worldwide have one or both parents still living.

Having nobody to live in your heart is utter despair.  Such people are apt to spiral into a variety of destructive behaviors, or they might discover a doctrine or person to which life can be devoted and thereby redeemed because it promises something “after”.  In either case life itself is expendable (and by proxy I might add, Earth as a whole). This is not to suggest that orphans invariably give up on life.  What I do suggest is that to be an orphan is to be especially susceptible, and more importantly to keenly understand loss of love, what the rest of us negotiating our own levels of despair stand to learn from.

That is why I believe it is important to change the way we think of orphans, as well as the way in which we rush to help them.  We must no longer think of them as mere victims we need to clothe, shelter and feed.  They are quite resourceful, as the world saw in the film Slumdog Millionaire and as we can see in streets from Kabul to Rio. Besides, notoriously our attempts to “help” these children have oftentimes added to their misery, and even more often set them up for a second abandonment; that of society dropping them from its radar.  These orphans end up in the next institution; prison.  Nor should we think of orphaned children as souls to save or a means to absolve our own guilt.  My grandmother adopted a baby boy after the death of one of her children.  This set up a life-long struggle, at the center of which was my mother who at the time of the adoption was ten years old.

First it may help to admit there will always be orphans.  Then it might be easier to think of them as a natural human resource, rather than a scourge. Extremists everywhere, political and religious have been tapping orphans for generations, but not to learn from, only to mold them or to put a gun in their hands.  Before they dissolve into the slums, get brainwashed, become killers, get thrown into jail or otherwise succumb to despair, rather than “fix” them first, why not join ranks with the orphans, learn from them as they learn from us.

Who should understand more than Americans?  For what is America but a nation of orphans?  Even Native Americans are orphaned, in some ways more so.  All of this talk of spreading peace and democracy, but how to prove we mean it without going to war, without appearing to the rest of the world we care only about ourselves, not just our notions of freedom but more brazenly our lifestyle of excess, our hunger for oil and a plethora of deodorants from which to choose?  America and Americans give more than any other nation or people, yet today we are primarily considered to be takers.  How might we turn this around?  There is one struggling nation out there that can do more to spread the noble notions of our founding fathers than any invasion ever will.  It is in fact the fifth largest nation in the world, and if we applied to it a fraction of a fraction of the resources we apply toward building roads and weapons, its people would sweep across the globe and change it as well as our reputation in the time we have already spent at war in Afghanistan.

These days, idealism is scorned.  It was even indirectly scorned by President Obama in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize, insinuating that the likes of his heroes Gandhi and King are brave, noble but naïve.  What I speak of is no more idealistic or less passionate an idea than the words of Tom Paine that incited an American revolution with “common sense”.   This idea is equally as simple and real and in the palm of our hand.  Last December Zainab went home to her village in Nuristan.  She had to ride a donkey to get there.  The entire region lives under the shadow of Taliban. Little 4 foot 8 inch, 14 year-old Zainab was received in her village like some sort of celebrity.  The people set her up in a hut and asked her if she would begin offering lessons to the other children, boys and girls.  Everyone began to call her “teacher”.  How did this happen?  Is it because Zainab has been given something so much more valuable than shelter, food and clothing?  Education, yes, but a Ph.D. alone would not have created this scenario.  It would be just as naïve to say all that was required is a home in which an orphan’s heart can be filled.  After all it is not known if any heart, given the loss of love, can ever be truly filled.  We may as well ask if America’s appetite for expansion will ever be assuaged.  No, I think it is a matter not of what was done for Zainab.  If she has been given anything useful it is the space to realize her own capabilities, her own dreams, her own will, and above all, to live with the loss of love, and to ask of herself only to somehow be worthy, through her actions and her words, of living in the hearts she leaves behind.

This Independence Day I am thinking not only of my country, but also of Carl Sagan’s “pale blue dot”.