Three Meals In Afghanistan...

Home is the one place in all this world where hearts are sure of each other. It is the place of confidence. It is the place where we tear off that mask of guarded and suspicious coldness which the world forces us to wear in self-defense, and where we pour out the unreserved communications of full and confiding hearts. It is the spot where expressions of tenderness gush out without any sensation of awkwardness and without any dread of ridicule.
~~~~~Frederick W. Robertson



It seems I've had this article open in a page for a while now. Finally clicking a link on one of the blogs I follow in reader, I read the article below in a Canadian magazine; The Walrus. It was written by Naheed Mustafa, whose heritage begins in Afghanistan. Her family forced to migrate to other countries due to one reason or another. Sad, yes. But then again, weren't most of our own ancestors immigrants as well? Be it for whatever reason.


Anyway, read how she views things in her ancestors homeland below.

Three Meals in Afghanistan

In the days after the Taliban was toppled, the Bibi Mahro Road from Kabul’s airport was an obstacle course of snipers, roadside bombs, and grenades. But by July 2008, Afghan soldiers flanked the now-glass-smooth pavement, their bodies hidden behind monstrous guns. Some sat casually on white plastic patio chairs. As a first look at Afghanistan, this summery scene was a surprising and incongruous image — one that spoke, perhaps, to the war-as-usual mindset I would encounter in many of the country’s inhabitants.

I share an ethnicity with half of Afghanistan’s people, but my ancestral connection to this place is tenuous. In the subcontinent’s post-colonial era (begun in Afghanistan after World War I, and elsewhere with the end of the British Raj after World War II) allegiances, like homelands, were determined by imposed borders. My ancestors belonged ethnically to Afghanistan; emotionally to India; and then, officially, to Pakistan. My family’s looping narrative of migration — mostly willing, occasionally forced — thus began here. At its root is a legend, dating back more than a millennium, that all Pashtuns have a common ancestor who lived and died in Afghanistan.

This shared heritage ensured that I would rarely be treated as a khariji, a foreigner, as I roamed the country. I looked like people on the street and shared their faith, and often had to devote the first ten minutes of conversations to asserting that I wasn’t actually Afghan. I received numerous invitations to visit, and spent hours sitting for meals with families, talking about the country, its past, and its future.
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And so it goes......