Bibi Ayesha Credit: Jodi Biebe
BY MIMI WELLS
Ayesha was thirteen years old when her parents gave her to a forty-year old man to settle a blood debt between their families in accordance with a Pashtun custom known as “baad.”
The man soon returned to his first wife in Peshawar, leaving Ayesha with his in-laws in southern Afghanistan where, she said in an interview earlier this year, they beat her mercilessly and forced her to live outside, locked up with the animals. For years she was the compound’s illiterate slave; maintaining the household under threat of violence. Twice she ran away. The first time local police imprisoned her. The second time her husband returned from Pakistan and sliced her nose and both ears off. Afterwards he left her for dead on hillside in rural Oruzgan province.
The group Women for Afghan Women helped Ayesha get to Kabul, where she spent nearly a year in their care and eventually obtained a divorce. Now they have rented her a ground floor apartment in Flushing, Queens where she lives with a middle-aged Afghan woman and is cared for by volunteers from the organization.
She is depressed and easily angered; melting into hysterical fits of rage that make it difficult for people to help her. Exhausted volunteers have quit. Roommates cycle in and out. For the past few months Ayesha’s neighbor Yalda A., who asked that her full name not be revealed for fear of her safety, has ferried her to doctor appointments and consultations with the Imam at the local Mosque. Born two years apart and some 500 miles away from one another in Afghanistan, the two girls make an unlikely pair: Ayesha is Pashtun and has never set foot in a classroom; A. is Tajik, raised in Kabul, where she ranked first in her class at Kabul University. Ayesha cannot speak English; A. is fluent. But in Queens their lives are not so different. They are in limbo, waiting and praying—Ayesha for a chance to marry, and A. for a chance to return to her studies. Both dream of the day they can return to Afghanistan.
According to census data there are now some 20,000 Afghans living in New York City. The highest concentration is in Queens. Many, especially women like Ayesha and A., come not because they want to live in America, but because staying in Afghanistan means certain death.
“There is so much pain, especially in Afghanistan,” said Naheed Bahram, the program coordinator for the Queens community center. Bahram arrived in the US from Peshawar, Pakistan where she lived with her father and her siblings as refugees from the Soviet invasion. In 1990 a bomb explosion at a bus shelter killed her mother, and a year later a Mujahedin rocket destroyed their Kabul home. Given away in marriage to a man she had never met—a halal food vendor already living in the United States—Bahram arrived in New York petrified and alone. Now she runs the day-to-day operations of Women for Afghan Women in Queens—counseling Afghan women on domestic violence, immigration and their basic rights.
In Bahram’s office, A. sat at a computer, clicking through an excel spreadsheet that contained Ayesha’s monthly budget, which is provided by private donations. Ayesha’s story has been publicized around the world; she appeared on the cover of Time magazine last summer under the headline, “What Happens If We leave Afghanistan,” and her portrait won the World Press Photo of the year award. American doctors had planned to perform reconstructive plastic surgery on her nose and ears, but decided she is too emotionally unstable to undergo the procedure. Instead they constructed her a prosthetic nose, which she does not always wear when A. takes her out.
A. came to the United States last February to compete on the Afghan team in the Jessup International Moot Court Competition, the largest mock court competition in the world.
In Afghanistan A. was something of an anomaly; she had no desire to marry and ignored the proposals of potential suitors. Her father, a doctor who she described as “very open-minded,” and her mother, a teacher, encouraged her to devote herself to her studies, and she did—ranking first in her class at the Sharia Law School three years in a row.
She did not win favor with all of her professors, some openly despised her outspokenness. One instructor, a one-eyed former jihadist whose skin was badly burnt from fighting in Logar province, refused to look at A. and the other female students. He thought girls should be barred from attending school.
“I used to talk a lot against him,” A. said. “I’d have debates with him, heated debates. He was always talking about the deficiency of woman. He said ‘woman are deficient from the moment they are born.’”
But younger members of the faculty recognized her talents, and encouraged her to try out for the mock court team. A. was one of two girls who qualified.
Preparing for the national rounds was a huge undertaking; her team staged mock debates for months. At 6am February 24, 2010—the morning of the national competition—A. was going over last minute preparations when five suicide bombers attacked the hotel where her team had rented rooms. The hotel was frequented by Indians, and it is believed that Pakistani Taliban targeted them specifically. In the ensuing chaos 17 people were killed, and over 30 wounded.
“I was in shock,” she said, “my binder was in my hand and I was studying. The explosion made me fall from the sofa.” A. and her roommate drew the blinds and barricaded the door with a heavy sofa. For the next six hours, until US forces rescued them, they huddled in a corner and prayed.
“They were killing and shouting. Two times someone came and he was pulling,” she said, motioning a door handle, “he wanted to open our room—they knew that there were two girls in the room,” she said.
A week later the US embassy sponsored a make-up competition, and A. spoke for 22 minutes to an audience of hundreds of male Sharia scholars and won. The next day International Security Assistance Force photographers published her name and picture in the local newspaper.
Within days stalkers were waiting outside her classroom, sending menacing text messages to her father, and harassing her as she traveled to and from school. They threatened to kill her if she traveled to the finals in the United States, and sent unsigned letters to her family home. It was not the first time she had been harassed, for a year before two men—who she suspects knew her conservative professor—followed her around Kabul for months, and tried to use a strange woman to deliver threatening letters to her.
“They tried to kidnap her. She was so smart—I think God made her to learn. She is a beautiful, smart girl, but her beauty and her knowledge became enemies for her—it’s really sad,” one of her professors said in a telephone interview from Washington State where he traveled to study comparative law and is now preparing to return to Kabul.
In the days before they departed for Washington DC A. did not dare leave her house, studying in her room and getting updates from her teammates. She packed a single red carry-on suitcase and filled it with long black dresses and head scarves. At the airport she covered herself and sat in a corner away from the group, scanning the crowds for potential kidnappers and attackers.
A few days after she landed in the United States her mother called crying that they had received more threatening messages. She begged her daughter not to return to Afghanistan.
“I told my mom, ‘how can you do this to me?’ I have studied for 3 years, I have one year until I take my degree, I have the first position award, and everything,” she said quietly. “And I really had expectations for myself, to graduate and get my masters and everything.”
Her mother would have none of it: “You’re life is more important than your studies—you can study again,” she told A..
For the next five months, A. says, she cried continuously. She cried when she thought about her education, her family and her ruined reputation. With her asylum application pending, she is unable to work or apply for programs. Months passed, until she heard about Women for Afghan Women, and began volunteering there.
Now she spends most of her days helping Ayesha; taking her to appointments, tutoring her in English, bringing her to the mosque which is perched above a Korean disco in Flushing for consultations with Imam Sherzad, who came to Afghanistan from Panshir, in the north, in the 1980s. Sherzad has been counseling Ayesha for months.
“I tell Ayesha whatever happened, it happened,” he said. “When her nose and ears were cut off, it was Ayesha’s destiny, and the people who did this to her will be punished in doomsday. She must have patience; she is a young woman, she must make her life—and there are many women in Afghanistan who also suffer.”
A. says she hopes that one day Ayesha, “can learn somehow how to live—like a human. That she can learn to study, to make a life.”
But she is not sure what will happen to her. For now she waits for her case to be decided and lives with her grandmother—a widow who arrived as a refugee seven years ago. She searches for scholarships, and wonders how she will get her professors to give her transcripts so she does not have to start her education from the beginning. At night she logs onto Facebook to chat with her sisters and twin brother in Afghanistan, and watches Youtube videos of Afghan pop stars like Farhad Darya, whose songs she knows by heart.
“We all can hear the voice of love and peace coming towards us,” he sings in Dari.
A. watches Darya dance in front of pictures of Afghan people in his music video for her favorite song, “Attan,” which means together, and sighs.
“I’m the girl who ran away from Afghanistan, who ran away from the faculty,” she says. “My professors mostly hate me. My dream is to do something for Afghanistan, but even if I study here and I return the people will always say bad things about me, I don’t think they’ll every respect me there.”