In Kabul

When I was in Afghanistan, I was searching for my home. Yet, the Afghan community took me in. It was during the early 1970s and I was in my first decade.

It was a different time in history, both for Afghans and Americans, yet, some similarities seem to shine through. The Khyber Pass is still fraught with danger. My family which is here in America and American, they showed a picture of an Afghani with bullets wrapped around his chest giving me a safe passage.

This may be the only path for many Americans today. While there is indeed much suffering in the world, especially in the United States, which people do not tend to realize. I believe here is where conflict is most often managed in the streets everyday due to cultural bias and misunderstandings. We accept people of all kinds, based on our traditions of interacting in a new world, we maintain dignity and respect for all peoples to come and experience what this means to them here.

But in Afghanistan, we see Americans who want to come back to the shores of the U.S. The record shows this is as difficult as it ever could be, across the entire region The portrayal of the people needing basic humanity and humanitarian aid has never been clearer.

For me, this aid came not through the Blood and Fire of Australian members of the Salvation Army, but through the auspices of the Columbus, Ohio community - they were able to respond when I needed help most, not overseas, but here at home in the U.S.A.

I had become a party to activities too foreign to me here to recount, I had cut myself off from those who had shown me the way of simplicity and repentant suffering. The wants had overcome the needs, and eventually, I began to realize what that meant in the lives of those who were able to respond in a professional and compassionate method; those who were responsible for maintaining positivity and decency in the face of dispassionate and manipulative contortion, what had become my confessional, my recognition of the need for others to show me compassion. The need for others to show me their strength, and for them to continue to aid me in order that I may be safe.

Lately, I have been feeling more apt at my abilities to contribute in the service of others' needs, indeed through the capitalist system, though benefiting from a public housing arrangement. It has been a struggle, but here is a gesture that the Afghans will show a similar compassion towards those presently in Afghanistan as they did me in the 1970s.

For now, that sentiment calls into question a host of difficult choices and encounters which remain to be accounted.