"His eyelashes were the first thing you'd notice about him, even from a distance. One time I asked him what he had done to his eyelashes, and he had cut them with a pair of scissors. They kept bumping against his eyebrows, you know." I didn't know, but I could certainly imagine as my friend, a former international student, held up her hands and pointed to her own eye lashes then to her eyebrows as she spoke.
"Our city was ambushed. Each village has a government outpost. It's supported by the foreign authorities, and there to protect the village. The Talib. know that the civilians support it so they ambushed the town and decimated the outpost. My cousin was a police officer in another location and he and some others were coming to help. But the Talib. had put a bomb in the car, and it killed them.
My family wasn't going to tell me. They were trying to hide it from me. But my mother looked awful when we were talking. She said nothing when I asked her what was wrong, but I could hear her asking my sister in the background if she should tell me what had happened. I told her that I could hear them talking and she better tell me or I'd be worried. So she told me my cousin had been killed. I started to cry.
'When people die here they are going home,' my mother said to me. 'This is a living hell, and they are going home... It is good he didn't get captured and tortured.'
I noticed as my friend spoke with me that the chunk of hair that normally missed her ponytail and framed the side of her face instead on her most casual days, was today seemingly tinted with grey. Dare I think of how much my friend has lost? Her mother's words, sounded like a hollow hope in the face of utter destruction. It reminded of the brave souls in the Holocaust concentration camps trying to find joy in a space of squalor.
My friend continued.
"My mom tried to arrange someone for my cousin up to be married to, but he said he felt unsettled and didn't want to. And I think it's good that he didn't. Because then his wife would be a widow, like my sister-in-law.
My sister-in-law's raising four kids by herself. Two sets of twins. Her mother took her to Pakistan with her on a visit and there tried to marry her off while they were there, but she escaped and came back to her children. But she can't do anything for work, she has no skills, can't read or write. And kids wake up from their nap calling for their daddy."
My gut tumbled as I thought of these young children without their father, inncocent victims. Knowing he needed the money to provide for his family, their father, my friend's older brother, had refused to pay money to the Talib. when they had tried to take money from his small store. So, they beat him and killed him. He had left behind his pregnant wife, and their two children.
"I just don't know what the **** is going on?" My friend expressed, and I felt no need to pardon her language. "It's a living Hell. And I feel so helpless."
"You're not, you've done so much ... " I said sincerely. "You've supported your family," (singlehandedly supporting more than 10 family members), and you've supported a school," I said referring to the school for children her other brother had started in the wake of his brother being killed by the Talib."
"I'm think of closing the school... it's too dangerous. If it were elsewhere it would be okay, but if they ever trace it back to my family ... Let's go outside and walk ... "
I wonder if my friend is purposefully changing the subject. I wouldn't be surprised. I soon let my mind become distracted as she spies a consignment shop and I follow her into it. But I as I flip through the items, I see my friends families' faces. Their weathered faces of desperation, be they the young nieces of my friend who stubbornly want to wear nail polish against Taliban rules, or my friend's friend who was killed for choosing to be educated and take a full ride scholarship to a college in India, or my friend's father who taught his many children to read though he had to remain hidden at home and could not go out to work, or my friend's sister-in-law choosing her children and poverty over a life of being provided for. These normal men and women, who choose not to side with evil, but keep fighting for the good, even when they have nothing left to fight with.
"They will keep fighting, even if one son dies ... they will send the other," my friend's voice from a few minutes before echos inside my head as she describes the brave civilians in her town.
They, like my friends cousin, a young man in his 20s without an education, who gave his life responding to the call to aid others in imminent danger, are my unknown heros. Please pray for them!