Seeds for Peace

Last week I went to speak with a group of school children in Winchester, near Ottawa. I had to talk with the students about peace. All was well except that the audiences were between the ages of 3 and 12, so extremely tough crowd.

The students were exploring the concept of peace as part of an amazingly innovative project called Seeds of Peace, which intends to sow seeds of peace in young minds. The students listened to representatives from Yemen, Iran, USA, South Africa and myself from Afghanistan. Later I taught students how to write peace in Dari and Pashto. Later students drew on and wrote messages of peace on envelops filled with sunflower seeds and gave them to me so I can send it to Afghanistan where school children could sow it in their schools.

Such beautiful way of teaching something essential to children and what a good time to start.

I will update you on the seeds' travel to Afghanistan.

Private Kevin McKay

Last week I attended the repatriation ceremony for a Canadian fallen soldier, Private Kevin McKay, 144^th Canadian soldier to have been killed in Afghanistan. Nothing, not even sense of ease with death that comes with being an Afghan of my generation, could have prepared me for the sad occasion.

With an overwhelming and awkward sense of gratitude, marred with guilt, to Kevin I joined his family, comrades and friends.  We watched on as Kevin’s body was lowered onto the Canadian soil from a plane that came from Kandahar.  Neither pomp and ceremony nor the high office of those in attendance could distract from the brutal fact that a precious life was lost.  

For a moment I forgot the NATO mission and Afghanistan. I just felt the grief thick in the air.

It was not until later that day that I remembered something I had long forgotten, which put things back into perspective.

It was 1997 and the Taliban had attacked the Northern Afghanistan city of Mazar e Sharif. As rockets were flying around my neighbourhood we hid in our basement. It was late at night and when I felt a break in the fighting, not sure imaginary or real, I went into my bedroom upstairs. There was small window high up on my bedroom wall that looked on to the street. Hearing a commotion in the street, I climbed up on mattresses and looked out from the small window.  I saw a man pushing a wheelbarrow full of dead and injured people. He was weeping. That night I could not sleep. 

What links the goriness of that night in 1997 and Kevin is that Kevin is part of the force that has transformed Afghanistan from what it was then to what it is now. Let us not be bogged down by petty politics and thank Kevin and others like him for making Afghanistan an unimaginably better place.  Let us also learn from Kevin’s belief and his resolve and continue to develop Afghanistan.