CLAIMING AFGHAN CHILDREN AS OUR OWN

When Sister Mary Pat White and Sacred Heart Associate Kristi Laughlin left California in mid-June for a post-9/11 journey to Afghanistan, they wanted to bring to the people of that country a message of reconciliation, peace and hope.

Sister Mary Pat White (right) and Kristi Laughlin in front of a village on the Shamali Plain that had been occupied and destroyed by the Taliban.

“What I found was a people who had incorporated reconciliation into the very fiber of their hope for a healed, safe and prosperous Afghanistan,” Sister White said in an interview after her return. “I met a people working peacefully with a courage that outstrips anything I could ever have conceived of.”

That courage and hope astonished her because it arises in the midst of so much misery and devastation. The country lacks even a minimal infrastructure, she said. Huge sections of Kabul are bombed out, largely as a result of ethnic fighting that broke out after the Soviet occupation ended in 1989 and continued until the Taliban brought its repressive form of order to the country in 1994.

Sister White’s interest in Afghanistan evolved in the months after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Kristi Laughlin was among friends aware of her interest. Laughlin oversees the Afghanistan campaign sponsored by Global Exchange, a San Francisco-based human rights group that organizes “Reality Tours” to Third World countries. The campaign’s goals include lobbying U.S. officials in support of a compensation fund for Afghan civilians injured by U.S. bombing in recent months, as well as promoting “ongoing exchanges with the people of Afghanistan.”

The trip was one of those exchanges – and among its most appealing aspects, Sister White said, “was the opportunity for a Religious of the Sacred Heart and one of the Society’s associates to do it together.”

Krisiti Laughlin is one of 30 women in the San Francisco Bay area who have become associates of the Society of the Sacred Heart. She met Sister White when she was a student at the University of California-Davis and Sister White was a campus minister there. Associates in the Bay area meet about once a month for prayer and faith-sharing.

Laughlin and Sister White were among 18 people who signed up for the Afghanistan trip and agreed to pay $3,500 to go.

Sister White’s first challenge was to raise the money. The Society gave her $500, wishing that it could be more, she said. Another $500 gift came from the Ministerial Association, an interfaith organization of religious leaders in San Luis Obispo, where Sister White lives. The Newman Center at California Polytechnic State University, where she does campus ministry, pitched in, as did many other friends, supporters, even strangers, she said.

Sister White and Laughlin stayed in a guesthouse in Kabul – the same house where an international group of Christians, including two young American women, were arrested and held by the Taliban last year on charges of proselytizing. The specter of 9/11 was everywhere, Sister White said. “On our block was the house where Osama bin Laden was believed to have been when he was taped gloating over the wreckage of the World Trade Center. Down the street was Karzai’s nephew’s house.” She referred to Afghan President Hamid Karzai. As the group was preparing to leave the United States, border tensions between India and Pakistan were heating up.

Despite the risks, and efforts from family members to dissuade her from making the trip, Sister White said she was not afraid. “I’m not a very fearful person,” she said. “Those things were all there, but nothing was going to stop me from going.”

Among her souvenirs, Sister White has a repertoire of sad stories. There’s the story of Amiena, for instance, an 8-year-old girl who got up one morning to make breakfast for herself and her brothers when a U.S. bomb intended for the Taliban 10 kilometers away hit her family’s home. Her extended family had come for a visit. Everyone was killed, 16 in all, except Amiena and her father, who is barely hanging onto life. Among the dead was a two-day-old infant who had not yet been named.

Amiena’s caretaker is now an uncle from another village.

“One thing I really would like for people to understand,” Sister White said, “is that the people of Afghanistan really are looking to us for compensation. Many families have lost their breadwinner, and women aren’t able to bring money in for their families. What is that family going to do?

“If we compensate (American citizens) for the 9/11 disaster, we should compensate people in Afghanistan for what we’ve done there. People’s lives there have been ruined. They think that because we live in a democracy, we can just pick up the phone and talk to President Bush.”

The suffering in Afghanistan after so many years of occupation, instability and then repressive control, is huge, she said. It’s estimated that between 400,000 and 600,000 land mines lie waiting in the country’s soil for a misstep to cause them to explode. “There are land mines in war-torn countries throughout the world,” she said, “but there are more in Afghanistan than anywhere else.”

In part because she was overwhelmed by the enormous needs of the people, Sister White decided even before she left the United States to focus on helping Mirwais School in Kabul. Now that the Taliban and its ban on education for girls is history, the school has begun educating girls. Though the school building has only three sides – one was blown out by the Taliban – some 1,400 students, nearly half of them girls, are enrolled in first through ninth grade. The school is multi-ethnic, and both children and faculty are very poor, she said.

Sister White hopes to find many people in the United States who will want to support the students in the school in a variety of ways. “When I asked the girls in about the seventh grade what message I should bring back to children in the United States, they said they were so happy to be back in school. They would like children in the United States to help them, because they have nothing, not even a blackboard. Many need to buy uniforms – black dresses and white scarves – required by the Ministry of Education. Many would like to have pen pals. And most of all, they would like to have an after-school program so they can learn English,” she said.

Sister White asked the children on the first day of her visit to draw pictures about their lives with the paper and crayons she brought. “I expected sad, even depressing pictures,” she said. “But they presented me with bright, joyful images of birds and trees and flowers. This is so representative of the hope and happiness I found everywhere. These people are not depressed. They do not seem bitter or angry. Where do they draw this strength? All I can think is that they must know how to forgive and go on with their lives.”

Noting that the Society in its recent documents has listed “internationality” among top priorities for ministry, Sister White said, “I want to make up for war by bringing peace.”

One way toward that goal, she said, is for students, faculty and staff of Sacred Heart schools in the United States “to come to realize we have children in Afghanistan too; that we have a responsibility there as well as here.”

She noted that after all the trials that went into founding the Society of the Sacred Heart in post-Revolutionary France, St. Madeline Sophie said it was worthwhile even “for the sake of one child.

“In the Society, we’ve always looked at each child in our classroom as that one child, to bring all that love and devotion to every one in front of us. My prayer is that in our schools particularly, we in the society can look at the children in Afghanistan and try to claim them as our own.”