Memories of Kabul
By Chris Oliver
Advertiser Staff Writer
From the windows of their living room, Raofa and Ariya Ahrary have an unobstructed view across Manoa Valley toward Diamond Head. In the early morning, the sun-washed street is quiet, birdsong and the distant hum of nearby schools settling down to morning routine, the only sounds you hear.
Eugene Tanner • The Honolulu Adveritser
But outside their home, which is above O'ahu's only mosque, is a 24-hour security guard and on the other side of the world their homeland, Afghanistan, grows increasingly isolated as it endures wave after wave of allied bombs. As far as they know, the Ahrarys are one of just four Afghan families who live in the Islands.
Ariya Ahrary, standing, was 6 years old when her mother, Raofa Ahrary, seated, fled Afghanistan, taking her children with her out of the country and eventually to the United States.
It has been almost 20 years since the Ahrarys fled Kabul, following the Soviet occupation in 1979. Ariya Ahrary, who is 26 now, was 6 when she left at night with her mother, Raofa, and two brothers on the three-day journey, first by donkey and then by truck, to the Iranian border.
Their flight from the Afghan capital was difficult and dangerous, and they traveled without Raofa's husband, Fazul Ahmad, who had vanished three years earlier.
"One night he just did not come home," said Raofa Ahrary, 59. "He was seen early afternoon that day, and then he was never seen again."
In the days following his disappearance, Raofa went from prison to prison trying to find him.
Weeks turned into months, then years. "Some people came back having been beaten, tortured, broken, but no one had seen my husband," Raofa said.
Fazul Ahmad was dean of the Department of Pharmacy at the University of Kabul. Even as people they knew began disappearing in the early 1980s, Raofa Ahrary did not imagine her husband would be one of them.
Eugene Tanner • The Honolulu Adveritser
"He was not political, not a threat to anyone," Raofa said.
Ariya Ahrary and her mother, Raofa Ahrary, enjoy afternoon tea at their Manoa home.
But Ahmad, 35 at the time, taught chemistry. His family thinks the Soviet invaders may have thought he was a bomb maker.
His disappearance in 1980 came at a time of mounting paranoia in the streets of Kabul.
Raofa, a teacher who had been editor for "Mehry," the first women's magazine to be published in Afghanistan, grew increasingly anxious for herself and her five children. Though the family lived in Kabul, she and her husband came from Herat, a then-beautiful city in western Afghanistan, where thousands already had died under the Soviet occupation. Herat was known for its strong resistance to the invaders and its people suffered terribly as a result, Raofa said.
In Kabul, prison guards refused to tell her where her husband was or even if he was alive. Afghan officials urged her to leave.
"They looked at my teenage sons as possible army recruits," Raofa said. "I tell myself I am everything for my children now, and I knew that I must be strong and do something."
She used what money she had to send her eldest and youngest sons to her sister in Germany, and traded the family home in Herat, with its grape vines, almond trees and pasture, for money to pay smugglers for a safe passage for herself, Ariya and her brothers, so they could cross into Iran.
Taking only a few pieces of jewelry and a photograph of her husband, they left Kabul. "It was a very dangerous time, and we were all scared," Raofa said. "The worst thing was trying to keep our destination secret. When we reached the border, our driver was beaten and we had to bribe the guards to let us through."
The Ahrarys joined thousands of others fleeing Afghanistan, spending months in refugee camps in Iran and Pakistan before they could leave to join relatives in Virginia. With the help of her four sons who found jobs in America, Raofa and Ariya began a new life. Raofa became an American citizen, and Ariya, who holds a green card, is about to become one.
They count themselves lucky. More than 250,000 Afghans live in poverty along border areas of Pakistan and Iran in temporary mud-brick villages or tents, with little subsistence. Another 1.5 million Afghans are thought to be trying to leave the country.
Eugene Tanner • The Honolulu Adveritser
After their 1991 arrival in Hawai'i, where the family moved after one of Raofa's brothers attended college here, Ariya Ahrary attended McKinley High School and went on to graduate with a bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of Hawai'i.
Ariya Ahrary points to Chapter 96 of the Islamic holy book, the Quran, which she says favors educating all men, women and children. The Taliban’s interpretation of Islamic law prohibits education of women.
Ariya now is an unclassified graduate student in communications but also has a mission to help others learn about what is going on in Afghanistan.
"Many of the Taliban (the Islamic fundamentalist group that now controls 90 percent of the country) are not even Afghans," she said. "Many were orphans, raised in Pakistani terrorist camps on the border where they were brainwashed. Many are Arabs from Saudi Arabia who came to fight the Russians and never left.
"They have no idea of the history of the country, and although they call themselves mullahs, they have no idea of Islam. Nowhere does it say men must have beards or women cannot be educated; in fact, the Quran says people must seek education."
As Ariya and Raofa Ahrary watch events unfold in Afghanistan, both say they want to return someday. "I feel guilty being here in paradise. They are in hell," Ariya said.
"I hope to go back," said Raofa. "It will never be the same, of course; everything is broken, damaged. But I can help, when the time is right, with education."
