Humanism 2009 - Western University of Health Sciences

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Anticipation
To this day I am amazed that I still have memories of
my home country of Afghanistan during its prewar
days in the late 1970s. I was only five years old in
1979, when my family fled the communist juggernaut,
that had established itself there and taken the lives of
many friends and relatives. While growing up in
Germany, the U.K., and America, I took on a dual
Western-Afghan identity so that I could make sense of
my world inside and outside the house. Maintaining my
Afghan heritage had always been important to me in the
face of becoming yet another worshipper of Western
values. I was filled with anticipation when I embarked in
January 2006 on my first trip to my birthplace of
Kabul, the capital city of Afghanistan. I joined my uncle,
Waheed, who also left around the same time I did and
hadn’t been back since. Nowadays we both live in
California, on the opposite side of the globe from
Afghanistan. Getting there took two days: a flight to
Amsterdam, then on to Dubai, and then to Lahore in
northeastern Pakistan. We had originally envisioned
traveling by vehicle via the famed Khyber Pass to Kabul.
Traveling overland in Afghanistan back in the 1960s
and ’70s used to be no big deal. You would just jump
into a car and drive on any one of the then-newly
asphalted roads that lead in every direction. Nowadays,
after 30 years of war, that is not necessarily the case.
The road to Kabul from the Pakistani town of Peshawar,
we found out, was under heavy reconstruction, and it
would take a major detour and an extra three days of
muddy slogging to get there. So for the sake of saving
precious time, we flew from Pakistan into Afghanistan.
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Flying over the Roof of the World
Once the plane rose from the haze-choked plains of
the Indus River in the Indian subcontinent, the sky
became sparkling clear blue again. To the north, I could
see the distant peaks of the lofty Himalaya and
Karakoram ranges. This is nothing less than the roof of
the world, where, flying at 30,000 feet, I looked straight
out of the plane window toward the summits, rather than
looking down on them. At this wintry time of year, the
entire mountain range glistened with the whitest of
white. The narrow bands of glaciers curved away from
the feet of the jagged peaks toward silty jade-colored
lakes and rivers deep down in the valleys. One majestic,
brilliantly white, and shark-tooth-shaped mountain stood
above all others, not too far from our flight path.
Judging by its topography and the maps that I have
pored over, it had to be Nanga Parbat. At a height of
26,668 feet, it ranks among the 10 highest in the
world, and it’s the westernmost peak in the Himalayas.
What an overpowering sight its vast snowy face was.
And a deadly mountain, too. I once met a famous Italian
climber named Reinhold Messner who had lost his
brother to this lethal peak. His body is still there,
mummified and frozen.
Soon the lofty Himalaya range merged with the mighty
Hindukush range, into which our Airbus descended.
Now the snowy peaks looked even larger and more
impressive as the plane flew between them into ever
narrowing corridors. Below, I watched the wildly
churning Kabul river cut its way east through a deep
gorge. Here the opaque silty water irrigated nothing, not
until Jalalabad, an agricultural haven of Afghanistan
further to the east, not far from the Afghan side of the
Khyber Pass. As the jagged mountains edged closer and
closer to the wing tips of the airplane I started
wondering where exactly Kabul was in this mess of
HUMANISM IN THE HEALTH SCIENCES 2009 • VOL. 12 | 29