Nassim, the Orphan

Journal August 2008
Chagcharran, Ghor Province
The “Healthy Child Program”
Chagcharran Orphanage

“Nassim” the Orphan

Last month I traveled with my son, Reese, my nephew, Will, and Connor, the son of dear family friends to Chagcharran to work for two weeks on our Healthy Afghan Child Program. These young American men had a remarkable education on all accounts but one of the most interesting stories is about Nassim, the orphan. The day I flew in I was hungry, cranky because as usual it had taken 4 hours of waiting to make a one-hour trip. I showed up to our office residence in a rare mood to also discover that Yasin and Dawn had recently taken in an “orphan”.

Nassim was so grateful for our attention. Yasin washed him and applied his medication. Dawn entertained him and mothered him. The arrival of three young men to play with was overwhelming and he was beside himself with joy and activity. Two years raising himself did not contribute to his social skills. At first,Will and Connor amiably attended to all of his demands, feeling tremendously sorry for young Nassim, the orphan. By the end of the second day I noticed that their mood had shifted. Nassim was taking full advantage of the compassionate foreigner’s. First Will came to me and asked me to please get Nassim out of his room before Will lost his temper. It seems that Will was trying to do his push ups and sit-ups and Nassim was mimicking him in a nasty way. Will finally pushed him out of the room only to find Nassim a couple of minutes later, outside hanging off his windowsill making faces at him through the window. I made the mistake of leaving Will in the car with Nassim for a couple of minutes only to hear Will bellow at me “don’t leave me alone with this kid!!!”. Nassim, as he attempted to figure out how to act in this strange family…went through Dawn’s purse and was found with $20 in his hands; and badgered the boys until they felt homicidal; disobeyed and disrespected everyone but Yasin which made his work very difficult as no one else would be with Nassim and Yasin had to take him everywhere. Finally, we all agreed to get him to the orphanage before we all lost our tempers over his antics. We celebrated his departure. On one of our last days the boys went out to Nassim’s village to confirm that the family could not care for him. Upon their return, all of them were white faced and sick by what they had found. The dislike that had developed for Nassim had transformed into respect and compassion for how this little boy had survived his life. In my experience survivors of any age are not usually very cute-they are tough because of how difficult life has been for them- but we are about the notion that they deserve a chance at a decent life and belive that under the right care they will grow into great people.

Connor wrote about his experience of this and I would like to share it with you.

“Nassim showed up on PARSA’s doorstep early in the morning before I arrived in Chagcharran. When Dawn and Yasin asked what he needed, he said that he had been told by some of the other children of Chaghcharan that we ran an orphanage. His face was bruised and slightly purplish, both of his eyes were swollen and there were dark rings underneath.

Nassim is about 14 inches shorter than I am, but he says that he's fifteen. We're still unsure whether this is because he's malnourished or because, like most Afghans, he has no idea when he was born. (As an aside, this is why a number of Afghan passports and ID's list the date of birth as January 1st, followed by the year. Even the years are often uncertain data). Either way, he didn't look like he could be older than 12.

Nassim was our guest for about five days as we worked to get him into the orphanage, and in that time we managed to learn some of his story, the rest of which we gathered through the unique displeasure of visiting his village a few days after that. For the sake of avoiding some tedious explanations and re-explanations of when we learned the chronology of events, I'll give you the full story rather than the pieces of it.

Nassim's father and mother divorced about a year and a half ago. Divorce in Afghanistan is a notoriously risky business as it is likely to result in allegations of adultery, which in turn can result in revenge or honor killings. Still, this one seemed to go all right--Nassim's mother moved back into the house of her first husband and his father quickly remarried. Nassim found himself left out of both arrangements however, and had an uneasy existence shuttled back and forth from his mother and father's houses, essentially begging for food and shelter and exchanging labor for meals. A year ago, his father beat him badly and told him that if he ever came back, he would kill him.

After that Nassim started the 45-mile journey to Chaghcharan. Because he had no money and no food, his progress was painfully slow. As he made his way there he was exploited for labor, exchanging work for two meals a day. Sitting outside on our porch at night, he told us how he saved up scraps of food so he had something to eat as he jumped from village to village. When we drove to Nassim's home it took us an hour and a half. It took Nassim six months to get Chaghcharan.

His troubles weren't over there. He found himself excluded from the orphanage because he lack and ID or and adult to confirm that his parents were unwilling to take care of him. For the following six months, in the harsh winter of Chaghcharan, he worked for two meals a day at a tire repair shop and slept in a garage. The bruises under his eyes explain the abuse, and the scabies infecting his arms and legs showed his living conditions.

This isn't a story designed to ruin your Wednesday or make you feel bad about your own life, in fact this story isn't particularly unique in terms of the way orphans and neglected children are treated here. That's the point. Labor exploitation has become systematized by three decades of war, hardship, poverty, and the destruction of familial and clan ties. These children, lacking the defense mechanism of parental protection, do hard manual labor to survive. The odds of receiving any kind of money are practically none; most wealth in Afghanistan is inherited, so starting on the bottom is a particular disadvantage. Being an orphan outside of an orphanage is to live a life without any hope for advancement or improvement. You will not be educated, you will not be paid, no one will help you when you get sick or hurt, you'll only be fed enough to keep you working.

Of course the orphanage isn't the only option, you could also do what Nassim's older brother did. Confronted with the same hopeless situation, he and a group of friends went to Pakistan to study in a "madrassa" the fanatical religious schools. There's little doubt in my mind that he'll be back on Afghan soil soon, working to shape his country into the same frustrated and angry mold that he himself was sculpted into.

There's a silver lining to this particularly dark cloud. Nassim is in the orphanage now and he says that for the first time in his life, he has hope for something better. He's getting an education, and he's being fed unconditionally. Afghanistan isn't a doomed country, just like Nassim, by taking his life in his own hands, has never been a doomed child. What our responsibility must be is to make sure that orphanages like these can continue to shelter the children stuck on the bottom rung of the socio-economic ladder.

My trip to Nassim's village:
First the roads. They were dirt the entire way and I was expecting this, but I had also figured that they would have been purposefully made, smoothed over even to facilitate the transfer of people from Point A to Point B. Silly me. The roads were the natural result of cars following the same path over and over; we drove in the ruts that had been imprinted by heavier trucks and from time to time our car's tires scraped against the sides of the ruts, bouncing us from side to side. At first I imagined it was like being on a particularly cloying rollercoaster. Then I imagined it was like being inside a piñata. Then I stopped imagining things.

I sat in the back seat, sandwiched between the principal of the orphanage and Reese, Marnie's son. Somehow, in a way I'll never be able to fathom, Reese managed to doze through the unrelenting turbulence, waking only briefly when the bumps in the road knocked his head hard against my shoulder. The principal just looked carsick, and stared out the window. In the trunk was Nassim, who had decided to come along to see his family and village for what was almost surely the last time.

The scenery impressed me. Just like in the airplane ride over, I got the sense that the hills around us were an endless expanse. Cresting each ridge showed more of the same, and the further east we went, the steeper the slopes became, until off in the distance they blended into proper rock-faced, dry, barren looking mountains. There was an unsettling sense of deja vu as we drove on. The landscape was so unchanging that time bended. Two hours could have been five, or it could have been 30 minutes. Whenever I looked at my watch, I forgot what time it had been before.

As we got close, the road got narrower until our car could barely squeeze along the track cut out of a steep-inclined slope. In front of us on the road, men and boys drove donkeys out of our way, whipping them roughly with thin canes and staring at us like we were in an armored convoy rather than a beat up SUV. Whenever we slowed down, the cloud of dust that we kicked up in our wake surrounded the car and streamed through the open windows. We wrapped the scarves we wore around our faces, and by the time we got there we looked like we'd showered in dust.

Now the village. I stretched my legs, rarely having been happier to get out of a car, and looked around at the houses. Some of them lay in the valley below, where a thin river snaked its way west, but the majority were mud houses built into the side of the hill--seemingly held there by additional mud that provided a ledge underneath. There was a breeze. It was nice. The weather and vegetation reminded me of home.

Then the people. A man and his son approached us, and his features struck me. He had light brown hair, stubble instead of a beard, a square jaw and very white teeth. He wouldn't have looked out of place in the United States or (I imagine) Spain or Italy. He greeted Nassim like he hadn't been gone for a year, but had just stepped out for an afternoon. Yasin and the principal of the orphanage stopped and talked with him, and it was then that I started to feel uneasy. I'm still not sure what was said exactly, Yasin translated bits and pieces for us reluctantly, but I was shocked to find how, even in a situation where I couldn't understand what was being said, I could still feel that something was--very deeply, very fundamentally--wrong. It was the way the man with the white teeth reacted--there was something superficial about his movements, his smile was strange and the way he looked at all of us was like he was just staring, like there was no seeing or recognition involved. We sat for a while in the shade of the trees. Yasin would say something, receive an answer, shrug, and look out at the river.


Before long we were ushered into a low room that had a carpeted floor, walls, and ceiling. It was on the way there that we saw the dried poppies, and it was the first and only time I've felt afraid on this trip. It wasn't a panicked fear, or a strong one, just a gnawing feeling that sat in my gut and made me go over the worst scenarios again and again. We were isolated, I didn't think our phone was working, these people almost certainly knew what they were growing was illegal. And here we were, sitting in a room lousy with flies, stuffy with heat, and listening to these poppy farmers tell lying versions of Nassim's story. Again, I got the unshakeable sense that something was very profoundly flawed in these people. The way they laughed, the way they acted normally when telling Nassim's ordeal, the glazed over way they looked at us, and the way Yasin responded in turn showed their disconnect from reality. I was struck with the conviction that these people were acting, that they had somehow lost any kind of emotional direction and simply spoke out of custom, out of habit rather than thought, rather than empathy. The more they talked, the more I thought that inside they had rotted away.

Yasin was the first to express what we all felt, he turned to us saying, "I feel sick here." And it was true, during the rough ride I'd felt tired but fine, here I felt nauseous and claustrophobic. I realized gradually that the claustrophobia wasn't just the room, it was socially suffocating. These people, shorn of any kind of deeper reality, made me physically ill.

We sat there for at least an hour. There was a window facing west and I stared through it and tried to imagine myself zooming home across oceans and mountains. I tried to picture the oak tree at my house, the sunroom and screen door, the mailbox, but the tide of nausea made it too hard to concentrate. Finally word came that Nassim's mother and father wouldn't see us, we could take Nassim and officially put him in the orphanage.

We got out as fast as we could (which wasn't that fast, because turning the car around on that narrow track was difficult) and drove west, chasing a bright afternoon sun. I looked out the window at the rolling hills, and smelled the air. I don't think I've ever been more relieved to leave somewhere.
And that's that.

Connor Osteen
osteen@uchicago.edu