A Dream Deferred
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore —
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over —
like a syrupy sweet?
One of the happiest days in my life was when I was admitted to the American University of Afghanistan (AUAF), one of my dream universities.
It had been 3 months since I started my first semester at AUAF. I was sitting in the class next to Bilal and Sitaesh, the two classmates I liked the most. In this class we had a tradition of sitting in a circle to be able to see each other during lectures, which I enjoyed. Khujesta and Atefa were sitting across from me on the other side of the room.
The professor was giving a lecture on normative ethics and we were all attentive and focused, listening to every word he speaks. I particularly loved the class on ethics and I was engrossed in the lecture when a loud noise from outside the class suddenly shattered our concentration.
The sound was so strong that it made the marker fall from the professor’s hand.
What is happening — we had no idea at the moment — but the deafening sound definitely meant something horrifying happened.
The sound of a big bomb explosion came right from outside the door, shaking and breaking our windows and shattering glass.
Sitaesh runs outside the class, but I hesitate to follow her. I am unsure what to do. Should we run outside or stay in? We are all confused.
In a second, more of the deafening sound of explosions along with gun fire filled the air. Now we know running outside is not a good idea. The screams of students I hear from other classes makes me more frightened.
The Professor closes the door and asks us to remain calm and quiet. Bilal runs under a table.
“Samimah! Hide yourself under a chair or something,” he calls me.
I want to run outside to see what is happening, but I know it is happening right next door.
I peek outside the window, and my fears are confirmed. Many students from the upper floors are trying to jump from the window; many are already smashed on the street.
I close the window and my hands and legs start shaking even more. My heart starts pounding hard and I realize hiding under a table would not help. But running outside is also not an option.
My professor pulls me down by a hand and asks me to sit down. “Lower your head,” he says “If the bullet comes from the window it should not hit you at least.”
I sit near him, my eyes wide open in shock, resting my head on a wall. At this moment I feel numb and hopeless, as if I can’t do anything to save myself. It’s as if I’m waiting for everything to go to black and I’ll be no longer. I’m sure there is no way to save myself.
We all are panicking. Some of us are hiding under chairs and tables; some others are sitting in a corner on the ground, while others can’t sit due to panic. Everyone is shaking in fear and their faces are red while some look pale.
Suddenly someone kicks the door from the outside and opens it. Three men enter the class, their faces covered with black balaclava masks, long kalashnikovs in their hands and bullet-chain belts strapped over their shoulders.
I instantly know that they are here prepared to shoot each and everyone of us. I close my eyes and fall near the Professor.
Without thinking twice, they start shooting as many of us as they can. With one shot, a splash of blood hits my face and chest and the voice of my professor — “ Oh God!” — paralyzes me.
I still do not open my eyes to see what is happening. I do not know if I am shot, but I am still on the ground and not able to move. After the first bullet they shot at the professor, everything goes blank and dark. I do not hear, I do not see, I do not feel anything anymore.
I do not know how many hours have passed. I try to open my eyes and everything seems blurry. Yet, with my eyes half opened, I can see a policeman and two nurses standing above my head. One nurse is holding the professor by two arms, and trying to pull him towards a stretcher. I look around the room. Everything is blurry. All I see is something I don’t know if I want to believe.
My Professor is on the ground with his head shot, Bilal is in the other corner shot in the chest, and Khujesta`s and Atefa`s bodies are on the ground next to each other.
I do not recognize many more bodies as their faces are smashed and some are fully covered in blood.
“She is alive,” the policeman shouts, holding my head on his lap.
Now I remember what happened before I went unconscious. I remember it was an assault by the Taliban.
I try to stand but I do not have enough energy. I am still not sure if I am shot, but I do not feel pain anywhere. The two nurses put me on the stretcher and carry me to the car.
“Please let me stay here until Setaesh`s family comes to find her body,” I cry. “Someone please call her parents,” I say to them.
“Her parents are coming soon. You rest,” the nurse tells me.
They keep me inside the ambulance for about an hour until we move to the hospital.
A crowd of families are running to each class. Brothers looking for sisters, parents looking for their kids, sisters looking for their siblings — everyone is crying and searching for their loved ones.
I remember that many of my classmates’ faces were not even recognizable. I hope they find the bodies they are looking for.
I have a bad headache now and at the same time I feel like vomiting. I have a blood phobia and I’ve already seen too much blood and wounded bodies everywhere. I vomit, then the nurse helps me lie down and rest.
The next day I wake up and find myself in the hospital. All around me are the injured bodies — students, staff, and faculties and I recognize most of them. I was a very social person and had a lot of friends all over the university.
I feel a lot better than yesterday. I am not wounded. The splash of blood on my face when the professor was shot made the attacker think that I was shot and killed too. They were in such a hurry to get into as many classes as possible, to shoot as many students and faculty as they could that they did not carefully check if one or two remained not shot.
The nurse checks on me and says that I am fine enough to go home. “We have so many patients coming every minute. We need the space. Your sister is fine and can go home,” the nurse tells my brother who stays with me in the hospital.
My family lives in Laghman province, about three hours from Kabul where I study. They did not come to see me because my brother had told them I was fine.
I lived in the dormitory of my high school, SOLA for the internship that I was doing with them. I went to AUAF during the day and at night I helped the students of SOLA along with taking some online english classes.
My brother takes me back to SOLA. “You stay in your dorm until we know whether to take you home or not,” he says, leaving me in front of the main gate of SOLA.
I enter the dormitory and go to my room without talking to anyone. I try to rest on my bed for a while, but I am very tense and unrested. Where is Sitaesh? The thought about my close friend and classmate does not allow me to rest. Is she alive? Did her parents find her? Is anyone else from my class alive? I am lost in these thoughts, staring at the ceiling for a minute. Then I take my phone and call Sitaesh. Her phone is switched off.
I call her sister to ask how Sitaesh is doing.
“Samimah! we cannot find Sitaesh’s body,” she cries over the phone. “We looked for her everywhere but she is nowhere among the dead bodies, nor in the hospital among the wounded ones,” she explains. “We are going to check the mortuary today to see if her body is there,” she says crying.
Her family lived in Takhar, north of Afghanistan, about 9 hours away from Kabul. Only her sister was in Kabul and her father was supposed to arrive on this day.
“Can I please come with you to the mortuary?” I beg.
“Yes, come to the hospital now and I will be there in a while,” she says.
Sitaesh`s sister arrives in the hospital and says that her father won’t arrive in Kabul for a few more hours.
The doctor guides us to the mortuary. I enter the room, although frightening but I have to look at each body carefully enough to see if Sitaesh is there.
I walk pass bodies and I know most of them. They pull the sheet from the face of a body, “Oh this is Kaka Ghulam, the guard in front of the main gate,” I recognize.
We move to another one, and I see he is Mahdi, a friend I knew from another class. I almost do not recognize him. He looks pale with his mouth half open. He is shot in the eye; his eye is completely gone.
I move to the next body, it is Kaka Mustafa, the cleaner and gardener who took care of plants in the yard of the university. “Oh god,” I sigh in regret. I do not know if his family can afford the funeral. I knew how poor he was. Most of the time, when I sat on the grass in front of my class, he came with a watering pump in his hand. He sat on the stone across from me and he would chat with me for as long as I could stay outside the class. He was the only breadwinner of his family. His father was killed in another attack in Kabul. He had to feed his family and the family that was left behind by his father.
“You are very lucky to have the opportunity to study here,” he said once, sitting next to me on the edge of the seat, holding one of my books and skimming the lines. “My son wishes to go to a school like this one day, but I cannot afford it. He goes to a public school in the morning and when he is back, he sells plastic bags on the street to help us have some food for the night,” he explained. “You know?” he said, nodding his head as if helpless. “ It hurts to let my little child work on the street in cold winters and hot summers, but we have no choice,” he sighed.
“How old is your son?” I asked him.
“He is 11,” he said.
I walk by many more bodies and I do not recognize most of them. Some have their faces completely burned. Some have half of their body missing.
I check each one and Sitaesh is not there.
We walk outside the mortuary with disappointment. Sitaesh`s sister calls home and lets the family know that we could not find the body.
When I return home from the mortuary, I try to take a short nap. Sleeping is probably the only way I can forget what I saw in the mortuary — all those dead, innocent people, now mere bodies, all disfigured.
I probably slept for about a few minutes when I was awakened with a call from Taiba`s sister — another friend of mine who was killed in the attack. “We are having a funeral for Taiba tonight if you want to join,” she says.
“Of course,” I reply.
I immediately get ready and take permission from the school principal to allow me to go for the funeral. After she made sure I was safe in Taiba`s house, she gave me permission to go.
I arrive at Taiba`s house in an hour. A crowd of people are there for the funeral, crying and weeping. Taiba`s mother is sitting beside the coffin, staring, not crying, nor there are tears in her eyes. She is numb, not moving, not saying anything, and not looking at anyone, only staring at the ground.
Taiba`s two sisters are sitting on the other side of the coffin across from the mother. The two sisters’ eyes are red and full of tears. One is putting her face down on the coffin and crying out loud.
When I walk closer, one of the sisters runs to me and puts her arms around me. “Taiba is gone, Samimah!” she cries. “You see this?” she cries pointing at the coffin. “They killed her in a way that even her dead body was gone. We only have pieces of her,” she explains as if helpless.
I hug her tight and try to console her.
Taiba`s body was gone in the explosion. The family was given some pieces of flesh from her body that were found after the explosions. Her body was not in the coffin. There were only pieces of her to mourn and bury.
But Taiba`s family was lucky that at least some pieces of her were found. I heard from Sitaesh’s sister that they did the funeral without the body. Sitaish`s body was fully gone in the explosions.
Like Sitaesh`s and Taiba`s, many families did the funeral of their loved ones either with some pieces of the body they found or nothing at all.
I cannot imagine how it feels to lose a loved one and not even receive the dead body for a funeral.
The attack on the American University was not the first and the last attack that killed hundreds of people in this brutal way. Attacks like this and explosions ignited by the Taliban were our normal life. It happened weekly, monthly and yearly.
AUAF was closed until further notice. I collected my belongings from SOLA and returned home, but my body was still not used to not going to the university. Everyday when I woke up to my phone alarm in the morning, for a moment I thought it was my alarm to wake up and get ready for university, but then I would remember that everything was gone and burned to ash with the attack. Almost all my classmates and friends were killed, including many professors and staff.
I thought I would not recover from the pain of losing friends, classmates, professors and my dream institution. I thought I would not forget this day in my life. It would last forever. But this was not true. A horrific explosion would always happen and I thought I would never forget it. But the next day or next week another more horrifying one would occur that made me forget the previous one.
My father was afraid that if I returned to AUAF I would be killed in the next attack. He asked me to apply somewhere else and forget about AUAF. My dream of studying at AUAF was burned to ash. I applied to many other colleges and I got accepted to a few. I continued my education in another university.
Those attacks did not stop us from continuing to go to school. Those explosions could not stop us from dreaming. We kept going to school; if one was attacked we went to another one.
Now, however, the Taliban has put an end to all dreaming, all schooling.
In December 2022, my sister had final exams of her first semester in college when the Taliban ordered a ban on girls education — an end to her dream of schooling. No more classes on ethics, or science and engineering.
