Kite Runner Author Khaled Hosseini responds to OJTS Youth Letter to UN Hague Conference
April 16, 2009 by
Filed under Journey Updates
Kite Runner is a bestseller book and film written by Khaled Hosseini. It tells a poignant story of the friendship between Amir, a Pushtoon boy, and Hassan, a Hazara boy through the tumultuous periods of the Soviet occupation and the Taliban in Afghanistan.
http://www.khaledhosseini.com/
http://www.kiterunnermovie.com/
Dear Our Journey to Smile:
Thank you for sharing your Letter of Humanity’s Love from Afghan youth to the UN Hague Conference. It was very moving and I am grateful you have included me in your distribution of it. I wish your organization the best of luck with its goals.
Best,
Khaled Hosseini
Dear Khaled,
Thanks to you too!
Thanks so much for your personal reply; it encouraged us deeply, particularly Abdulai and Raziq who have watched The Kite Runner 5 times!
Do stay in touch and join us on the 21st of September 2009 at the Bamiyan Buddhas if your schedule allows you.
Every human heart wonders about the 1000-times-over sort of friendship. Thanks for increasing our hope and our imagination!
( Be at peace! )
Our Journey to Smile
Will Humanity Forget, Constantly, constantly?
April 12, 2009 by
Filed under Journey Updates
Laith filmed this family attempting to flee Fallujah – ten minutes later they were dead
Will we forget, constantly, constantly?
Or will we forever brush the discomfort aside because that corpse was not our mother’s or our child’s?
Or will we join Laith Mushtaq in saying, “Fallujah ( in-humane, senseless death ) never leaves my mind.”
Don’t we realize what ANY ‘army does on the ground’ and if we do, what do we choose to do or say about such a realization?
Dear Laith,
Thanks for your work and your article, because media, like everything else, should help us understand ourselves.
We, Afghan youth, understand those images that never leave your mind. We have to learn to cope somehow and we need to be strong.
And to hope that human civilization can change. If it doesn’t ?? ?????” What can we do? “
Sincerely,
Our Journey to Smile
Al Jazeera ‘Fallujah never leaves my mind’
By Laith Mushtaq, cameraman
http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2009/04/200948132212418175.html
Laith Mushtaq was one of only two non-embedded cameramen working throughout the April 2004 ‘battle for Fallujah’ in which 600 civilians died.
When I think of Fallujah, I think of the smell. The smell was driving me crazy. In a dead body, there is a kind of liquid. Yellow liquid. The smell is disgusting, really. It sticks in your nose. You cannot eat anymore.
And you can’t get the pictures off your mind, because every day you see the same: Explosion, death, explosion, death, death.
After work, you sit down and notice there are pieces of flesh on your shoes and blood on your trousers. But you don’t have time to ask why.
I had to show the truth to people outside of Iraq.
I still remember the nurses couldn’t carry the woman because she was in too many pieces, people were jumping back when they saw it. Then, one nurse shouted: “Hey, she looks like your mother.”
In the Iraqi language that means: “She could be your mother, so treat her like you’d treat your mom.”
At some point, I couldn’t move anymore. I sat down on the street and kept smoking. I couldn’t move. I see what’s happening around me, but I can’t move. Khallas [enough]. I didn’t have any energy left.
The Americans said our pictures stirred up hatred against them. But what I did was only showing what their army did on the ground.
I don’t hate them, I don’t want vengeance, I just wish they had understood what they were doing.
US military admits killing mother, children
Afghan News Network 9/4/09
The US military in Afghanistan admitted Thursday that four people its troops killed in a raid were not “combatants”, after Afghans said they included a mother and her children, with a baby dying afterwards.
Letter of Humanity’s Love from Afghan Youth to the UN Hague Conference 31/03/2009
March 30, 2009 by
Filed under Journey Updates
The Afghan youth’s dream of a kinder humanity
As it has been in the hesitant development of human civilization and history, the hearts of ordinary human beings may be ignored once again.
How long more?
How long more will Man accuse Man of being ‘evil’?
How long more will Man look at War and call it ‘good’?
How long more will Man pretend to uphold ideals he is un-true to?
How long more will we think ourselves to be ‘better’ humans?
How long more will humanity quench her conscience in defending eye-for-an-eye , power-hungry, and money-driven killing industries, while untenably holding on to her inhumane disguises of democracy and religion?
How long more will we justify self-importance and greed while marginalizing the ‘forgotten’ individuals just ‘off the map’?
How long more would we chase Names and Forms, knowing intuitively their impotence in addressing the disparity of justice within our own souls and walls?
How long more would we dictate every decision based on the gain of Money when we are losing the more noble and dignified responsibilities to the wider community and humanity?
How long more would we deceive ourselves by dreaming of peace while harboring hate and killing our ‘enemies’ while claiming love for them?
We, the youth of Afghanistan, having lived through some of the worst scenarios of the human condition, refuse to believe that humanity’s love, once given voice and shape, however minuscule and wherever practiced, cannot add dignity and magnanimity to Mankind.
So, we express humanity’s love today, not a love we own, but a love that causes humanity to smile, sing and dream, even in the darkest moments.
We express humanity’s love when we ask forgiveness on behalf of generations past and present, for the wrong we have done. We express humanity’s love by clearly saying that we forgive you too, whoever you may be, for the inadvertent or deliberate mistakes which you have made because of us and for your indifference to Mankind’s lives and Mankind’s deaths.
We express humanity’s love when we ask to be held accountable to treat all men and women alike and when we ask to be treated as humans, as you would treat yourselves.
We express humanity’s love when we grieve over every act of violence on any infant, child, youth or adult of any race, because we believe that God created all and that belief is powerful only when it leads us to grieve. In death, there is no distinction of civilian or military, intention or faith.
We express humanity’s love when, though you think it natural for us to hate or to be bitter, we choose kindness to the best of our hearts and take firm hold of the freedom which compassion gives us.
We express humanity’s love by thanking every individual who has worked to raise the possibility of peace. We know there are many who seek peace and believe that these make the majority and are deeply grateful to their labour of love and truth. Yak jahan tashakur!A w orld of thanks!
We express humanity’s love when we ask Man for creativity and courage to learn from history’s errors and to rise above the mundane and expected solutions to humanity’s problems today.
It may seem strange and insignificant that we, the youth of Afghanistan, have these thoughts and feelings.
But then you shouldn’t be too surprised; you have them too. Any human being does.
We wish to show you, in a flash of un-remembered history, that a humane love IS possible.
We wish for humanity to relate humanely though we cannot expect or demand it.
And even if you insist on thinking badly of us and wish to hurt us still, we will hold our smiles with confidence and hope that PEACE is the peacemaker’s eventual destiny, even if it were just a well-intentioned tale.
Stop. Please stop.
Listen. Please listen.
And journeying along with us, stand firm in a love that captures empathy, sorrow and joy with equal resolve and strength.
We are no longer willing for any one of you, any of us or any one of humanity to perish at Man’s hand, at our own hands.
We are no longer willing for ourselves or our elders to forget what Man could be and to remain self-absorbed in primitive motivations.
Because that hand which kills is shriveled and feeble and needs an artistic and thoughtful transformation into a hand of friendship.
We choose to smile at every child and person.
We choose to act with compassion.
We choose to deny the rough, proud, violent and resentful suggestions that haunt our corners and weaknesses.
For we all die and wish that when our time comes to leave our families and our world, we can witness a gentler world of civilities, of brotherhood, of friendship, of joy, of love and all those tender virtues lauded by the sages of our time, the valued men and women who would put themselves and their self-interests aside to imagine another universe.
A world not of the fables, but a world that is present, real and free.
To borrow the life of John Donne, ‘any Man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in Mankind, And therefore never send to know, for whom we smile…….we smile for Thee.’
Our Journey to Smile
http://ourjourneytosmile.com/blog/
Obama’s Iran appeal
March 27, 2009 by
Filed under Journey Updates
- Al Jazeera News Network published our view 23/3/2009
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Your views: Obama’s Iran appeal |
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| Your views: Obama’s Iran appeal | |
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| Published: Friday, 20 March 2009, 01:14 PM Mecca time, 10:14 AM GMT |
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Added: Monday, 23 March 2009, 09:25 AM Mecca time, 06:25 AM GMT |
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Dear Obama and Khamenei, |
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Our Journey to Smile, Bamiyan, Afghanistan http://english.aljazeera.net/your_views/americas/200932010147240822.html |
Letter to Obama and Khamenei from Afghan youth
March 27, 2009 by
Filed under Journey Updates
A youthful Afghan dream?
Obama and Khamenei overtures
Al Jazeera 21/3/2009 and 23/3/2009
In his video appeal to Iran on the 21st Of March 2009, Obama said: “This process will not be advanced by threats. We seek instead engagement that is honest and grounded in mutual respect.”
The press adviser to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, urged Obama to back his words with concrete action to repair what he called past mistakes.
“They chant the slogan of change but no change is seen in practice. We haven’t seen any change,” Khamenei said.
Dear Obama and Khamenei,
We address both of you respectfully as humans, fellow human beings who will, like all of us in Afghanistan, die with dignity some day.
We request forgiveness as the way forward, hoping that whatever the words we use, our trembling actions will be courageous in love; we request of the quiet and concrete peace and vision that both you, Obama and Khamenei, and the rest of humanity, have been expressing since our hearts and imaginations have allowed us to.
We must no longer live meagerly in fear of the human instincts to claim right-ness and revenge. All of civilization now recognizes the value of our shared frailties and the dream of a kinder humanity.
This dream has no borders and as we retire for another night, hopefully to a brighter day, we will pray in both Persian and English that our children and youth would not be confined to or disappointed by your and our limitations.
This is Our Journey to Smile.
With sincerity,
Our Journey to Smile
http://ourjourneytosmile.com/blog/