By Dr Hakim
I’m so often caught up in the daily concerns of work and the wars raging across Afghanistan and many parts of the world that I forget how remarkable it is that at the Borderfree Nonviolence Community Centre in Kabul, 19 small teams with more than 70 active Afghan Peace Volunteers are putting nonviolence into microscopic but concrete practice.
There’s also the pulsating energy from 100 eager street kids ready to change themselves.
All these ‘small people’ with ‘big souls’ touch me. They move my days and nights.
Night after day in Afghanistan
Night after day,
while many are stressed sick
providing for their mud shelters and dented aluminum plates,
and a few are unhappy despite excess cash,
I’m tired of all popular news.
I’m irritated by the stale showiness
of stiffly-dressed politicians and business sharks
sweet-talking the world.
I’d rather spend time with the unglamorous millions,
like with boot-polishing street kids, Mahdi and Inham.
They never claim to be smarter or better,
like when Mahdi offered his meek, non-digital sound byte,
“No human is above another”.
In their discarded voices,
they nurse gratitude rather than greed.
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