by Fr. John Dear, SJ
Pax Christi USA Ambassador of Peace
Before leaving this week for Afghanistan, I was able to interview some of the young peacemakers with whom I will be staying in Kabul. They are dedicated to nonviolence and serve the needy in their neighborhood. I asked them about their situation and their hopes. Here is what they wrote:
“We hope this war will end soon.”
From Abdulhai, a teenager originally from Bamiyan, now studying in Kabul:
War has had many negative effects on me. I cannot study very well, and because of warfare over the last 30 years, my family members are not very happy. Every family has lost loved ones. They are always thinking about death, remembering their losses.
We do not want this war to continue. We hope that this war will end soon and that all people will live together and share their humanity together, regarding each other as a human being. Our country has had warfare for over 30 years. In our mind, we are always thinking about war; our memories of war never leave us. If I could describe my mother’s feeling to you, it is 100 times stronger than my feelings against war. My mother is afraid that I will die because of the war, and she has always been afraid of this. Her husband was killed by the Taliban, and she is worried about how she will find bread to feed the family.
In Kandahar, the people cannot go to school. The U.S. built a school, and then some group destroyed it because they are not happy that the U.S. is here. In Kandahar, where there has been fighting, they seem to build more schools than in Bamiyan, where there hasn’t been fighting. Why?…