KABUL
Back in 1964, Frank Hartung left Seattle to teach biology and math in Afghanistan, bringing along his wife, Ross, and their three daughters.
Marnie Gustavson was the eldest daughter, 9, when the family took up residence in Kabul, then a quieter and far more peaceful city of some 500,000 people. She spent five years in Afghanistan as her father worked at a K-12 international school. She could bicycle around the city, and piled into the family car, a black Peugeot, to explore the vast land that lay beyond the capital city.
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The Hartung family in Jalalabad Afghanistan back in the 1960s (Marnie is the oldest girl on the left)
Photo courtesy of Marnie Gustavson
Marnie recalls square dancing at the palace for the Afghan king, and Christmas dinners at a U.S. embassy, where you entered by knocking on the door, rather than making your way past blast walls and metal detectors.
In 1969, the family left Afghanistan, heading to Illinois and then back to Seattle, where her father took a job teaching at Lakeside School. In the decades that followed, Afghanistan faded into childhood memories as Marnie, married, raised two children and fashioned a career that involved teaching, and later a contract job with the state of Washington helping women on welfare find work.
Then came 9/11, the overthrow of the Taliban and all the upheaval in Afghanistan. By 2003 — 34 years after her last glimpse of Kabul — Marnie decided it was time to return.
She found her old school to be a bombed-out shell with a Soviet tank flipped over outside the front gate.
But this was still very much a homecoming. She was struck by the resilience of the Afghan people, and after several trips back and forth between Kabul and Seattle she decided to settle in Afghanistan.
“When you grow up in a place as a child, you soak things in,” Marnie said. “The people who grew up here, they want to come back. I think there is a comfort level that really sustains my enthusiasm.”
Since moving back, she has helped train women parliamentarians, and ended up as executive director of PARSA, an an organization that assists widows and orphans, and trains teachers how to help students scarred by war and other trauma. Her work extends to Bamiyan, the mountainous valley where the Taliban destroyed giant Buddha statues. There, with money launched by Seattle school teachers, she has helped launch community schools that offer literacy classes and other courses.
I had the chance to meet Marnie on Friday night, when she invited me for a pizza dinner. I called a cab just as dusk was setting, and we drove out of the city and up into the hills. There, she lives in an old house on some 20 acres that also is the site of an orphanage, and homes for the deaf and for the blind.
After a long week of Kabul politics and reporting on the suicide bomb attacks, this was a welcome break. Marnie lives here with her husband, Norm and her son, Reese. She also has recruited her cousin, Amy Woodruff, of Seattle, to assist PARSA as well as Dawn Erickson, a close childhood friend from the international school who shared a passion to return to Kabul.
Marni and her family also share the acreage with two donkeys, five goats and 10 rescue dogs. Their most pampered pet is Sherak, a large, young and very frisky dog from the Ghor Province in western Afghanistan, where his breed — known as wolf killers — help protect sheep.
Marnie and Sherak
Marnie remains an optimist about Afghanistan, She hopes that President Obama can move things in the right direction after what she says has been a dismal run of American foreign policy here under the Bush Administration.
But she views this as a long-term effort, and Americans are an impatient people. Most professionals work here on contracts that run for six months, one or two years. Marnie, working with a staff of some 80 Afghans, says she has no plans to leave.
Marnie also is frustrated by the bubble that surrounds U.S. government aid and contract workers as security emerges as a huge issue.
So many Americans live behind fortified compounds, and face serious restrictions in moving about Kabul and other parts of Afghanistan. It’s often difficult for these to mingle with the people they’re trying to help, and Marnie thinks that such isolation breeds questionable decisions as aid dollars are spent, and wrote a commentary for CNN this past summer about those concerns.
Working for a private aid group with a much lower profile, Marnie takes a different approach to security. She gets around Kabul in old Toyotas, While she uses an Afghan driver, she occasionally takes to the wheel herself, which does draw some attention in a citywhere women drivers are a rarity.
When Marnie was a child, mullahs and Islam played a much less dominant role in shaping Afghan society. In the struggle for the future of Afghanistan, she thinks that schools can play a big role in helping to challenge the idealogy that leads to suicide bombers in the name of Islam.
That’s what happened this past month as her staff taught a university course about how to help teachers assist disturbed children. Two of the young men had been indoctrinated in Pakistan with militant ideology. They declared that the teaching techniques they learned at the Kabul university could also be useful in helping to train young Muslims to kill themselves on behalf of a jihad.
In the days that followed, there was intense discussion about Islam, and the importance of trying to heal rather than harm.
Marnie says that message got across.
“These are the young men whose minds we have to change,” Marnie said. “This is where the work is.”
One final note. The old international school has been rebuilt, and reopened as the American University of Afghanistan.