A very special brief encounter    by S.

It was in the summer of 1977 when I went on holiday to Afghanistan, together with a group of young people. We hired a bus for six weeks and as we were self sufficient, we often bought food at local markets and cooked in the open in front of the bus. At nights we unrolled a kind of tarp on which we laid out our air mattresses and sleeping bags and night by night we enjoyed falling asleep under a starlit sky. The local people were very kind and quite often we were offered to set up our camp for the night in a meadow next to a house.

One day we stopped in a town to stay there for some hours. It was a weekend and when we were strolling along the streets we were fascinated by a lot of local people having picnics on the small green areas between lanes and pavements, despite all the traffic. We slowed down a bit to watch a family unpack their stuff and sit down in two groups, divided by gender.

Suddenly some of the people waved at us, inviting us to sit down beside them. They pointed out to the young men of my group to join the group of men and to the young girls to join the women and children. A woman offered us some ‘chai’ and the young men were invited to smoke a water pipe. One of the local women was holding a sleeping baby in her arms. She must have noticed my emotions while I was watching her and when she “asked” me if I wanted to hold her baby, she didn’t say a word, we were just having eye contact and she was holding her baby out to me. I enjoyed rocking the sweet little baby in my arms for some time and one of my friends was allowed to take a photo. Being unable to speak a single word of each other’s language our communication was just non-verbal. Until then I had not known how much we can express using just body language.

1977 – 2012………. a long time has passed since then. Sometimes I think of the baby, an adult now, 35 years of age, much older than I was back in the 1970s and I wonder what he might have gone through, growing up in a former beautiful country, now destroyed by endless war and terrorism and I still remember the peaceful scenery at the roadside. Isn’t it what is meant for all of us, for all people around the globe, to live together in peace? Learning about other people’s countries and cultures and learning foreign languages is an important step towards more mutual understanding.

written by S., Austria