Sisters in Action - Racine Dominicans

Afghan Peacemakers
S. Pat Chaffee, OP

Abdulai is a 15-year-old boy from a village near Baniyam, Afghanistan. Every day he walks a mile with his two donkeys to draw water into buckets. His donkeys carry the water to the village, where he sells it for the equivalent of $.50 a bucket. Then he heads back for another load. In summer he walks two hours to the forest to gather wood for the winter. He is also a farm boy and a shopkeeper.

Abdulai’s father was killed by the Taliban. Today Abdulai says, “I want to live in a world without wars.” This is the message of the boys and girls, the young men and women of the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers. (click the + symbol by the article title to expand this article)

From March 17 to March 22, 2011, I “hung out” with eight boys from this group in Kabul, listening to their stories, hearing their passionate plea for peace, simply enjoying their company. (Girls of the Afghan Youth were not present because girls are not allowed to travel from their conservative villages.) I was with a 27-member delegation organized by Voices for Creative Nonviolence. The Afghan Youth had invited us, and they welcomed us as friends saying, “We never thought that ordinary people would come to see us,” and “Your coming gives us strength.” They believe that the more friends they find, the more widely they can spread the word that ordinary people in Afghanistan want peace and will work for peace nonviolently.

Preparing to celebrate the Afghan New Year on March 21, they organized several peace actions. On March 17, before we arrived, they held a walk that included persons from different ethnic groups: Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazara. And because other demonstrations had erupted in violent words, and sometimes violent action, they chose to walk silently. Each walker wore a powder blue scarf because “The blue sky is above all of us.” They carried large blue banners, each with a message in Dari (official language of Afghanistan), Pashto, and English: Warmongers, do not turn our houses into war bastions! Today we make a resolution to stand for peace tomorrow. The citizens of Afghanistan say NO to war. Riot police faced them as they walked; the walkers smiled and flashed the peace sign to them.

We worked with the group in a second action, planting 55 trees in a school yard – poplar, apricot, plum, apple, and peach trees. We first met with school personnel, including the principal, a teacher, and Afghan’s Minister of Education. Among the questions we asked them was: “If the international troops were to leave, would Afghanistan be better off or worse?” Without a split second hesitation, the teacher and principal said “Better!” They admitted that there could – probably would – be violence, but their response was, “Let us Afghans solve our own problems.” Later, one of the school employees argued, “We need the international troops for security.” During our time in Kabul, we heard other individuals and groups who argued both sides of this question. The Afghan Youth unanimously call for responsible withdrawal.

As we left the meeting, the Afghan Youth greeted us with balloons and invited us to gather together, as they stationed themselves on the steps of the school. There they recited a poem they had composed, titled “We Need a New Tree.” You can see a video of the tree planting and read the students’ poem at www.livewithoutwars.org.
At first, I considered this to be a visit of friendship, not a political fact-finding visit. But politics is about power, and what greater power for peace is there than friendship, especially friendship among supposed enemies. Most, if not all, of the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers are ethnic Hazaras, a minority and marginalized group in Afghanistan. As one of their peace actions, they made leather cases suitable for cell phones, tooled the Dari word for Peace on each one, and delivered them as gifts to a village populated by ethnic Tajiks. The villagers responded with, “We didn’t know there could be such love.”