Why I Spent My Summer in Afghanistan and Not the Maldives

Afghans - A Colorful People, Deeply Misunderstood

AK-47s, Tank Wrecks, Blue Shuttlecock Burqas, A Series of Lethal

Earthquakes and A Shut Down of the Internet...

...Afghanistan has always been associated with warfare rather than with welfare, with coercion rather than with cooperation, with terrorism rather than with hospitality. No wonder the first question I received after coming back from my summer trip was, "Why did you go there?"– initially, this question evoked inexpressible anger in me. Why would I have to justify myself going to Afghanistan instead of the Maldives or any other fancy place that is trending on Tiktok?! But I guess at this point I have to thank those raising this question and I ask you, dear readers, to sit down, lean back and let me take you on a journey that gets you out of your EC dorm - a bubble of opaqueness and unimaginable limitation - and into a place that has served as terrestrial chessboard over the last decades. Have you ever played table games with your grandparents? Well, I did and when I used to visit my grandma, she always had her black case full of different table games readily available, next to her big, wooden dining table. As a child not knowing what was inside the black case frightened me. I never wanted to open it and had no further interest in any playful exploration. For doing so, I would have needed courage and strength to open the heavy buckle. I would have needed commitment to read the instructions of those games. That would have taken time and I would have needed patience - a virtue I didn't have at that time. So how did I end up playing with my grandma? Actually, I have never independently overcome my fear of this black, dark, mysterious case. Even more so I am grateful that my grandma stretched out her hand and made me open the black box with her together. She made me acquainted with and I started embracing all those little tokens in iridescent colors. I would have never looked at them without opening the seemingly frightening black box. More important than the mere look at the interior was the experience to actually interact with it, to animate the seemingly dead, to get to know the unknown. Especially Ludo - my grandma's favorite - invited me to try out every unthinkable strategy. I used to have a very big dice that, other than my grandma's, incessantly supplied me with the highest number of points. But anyway - the point is we opened the black box and what I originally expected - namely unwrapping dark unpleasantness - turned into the discovery of hour-long game nights and competitive strategizing between my grandma and me. Unfortunately, the games in the case had seen many hands running over their elderly paperback. Apparently, the ravages of time gnawed away their pieces - but who was responsible for the advanced depreciation? Was it actually time, or was it the players? Many people were involved - and singling out even one was hopeless. Now we go back to Afghanistan - a chessboard depreciated by foreign powers. Nobody knows who did what, but it is apparent that Afghanistan has been abused as a war zone to carry out proxy wars. After having been exploited as a "gold mine" for natural riches, it has been abandoned by the international community. Truly a black box to me, my hand being taken by a girl I had never spoken to before was the beginning of a friendship - a friendship that would teach me the beauty of the unknown, the different shades of black and the goodness in the needy. Zeinab, a young ambitious woman, slipped into the role of my grandma and showed me places that would have been global tourist hotspots - if they weren't in Afghanistan. Band-e-Amir was such a place in which I saw water as blue as the bluest sky, mountains as green as the German forests, and waterfalls splashing as loudly as a strong winter rain in cloudy Western Europe. The national park was surrounded by sound and unexpectedly well developed infrastructure that attracted many Afghan tourists from all over the country. This was probably the only time they had travelled this year and even for Zeinab it would remain her only annual escape from busy city life in Kabul. While taking a video of the highway that leads to the city of Bamiyan, I couldn't believe my eyes. Lifting my eyes from my screen I had to blink twice, look back at my phone and then realized "that's not a filter, that the raw, real Afghanistan, with its sun beautifully embracing the green mountain tips that seem to pierce the sky just as much as to scratch its surface. Well nevertheless, Afghanistan remains a prison not only because of misogynistic internal politics, but because of the way our international community abandons Afghan civilians. While it is nearly impossible to get a visa with an Afghan passport –at least without being professionally or genetically related to their destination –still many dream of escaping the war-torn oasis. 

At the same time, being a holder of a European passport it was a true adventure for me just going through the application for the Afghan visa. How then, if nothing gets in or out, can we integrate Afghan civilians into global society? Being cut off from the world, abandoned and sanctioned, Afghan civilians can only hope; hope for us to care. Thus, can't we say that the longer the light is turned off the more expansive the black? After four years of negligence it does not suffice to communicate via Taliban officers with the Afghan population. The scenes of people being thrown off of airplanes can still happen today but missing media coverage and social ousting leave Afghan civilians unheard, unseen, forgotten. It is up to us to give them a voice, a face, a platform.

I hope this article contributes to correct deterred pictures of Afghan culture and, most importantly, to bring Afghans back to global society.