Bearing Witness
Sarah Warren '94
By Steve Manning '96

A visit to a Kabul hospital last year opened Sarah Warren's eyes to one of the pernicious side effects of the years of conflict in Afghanistan. She met four boys in the dismal ward, all of whom had been injured by land mines or other discarded and forgotten explosives. "There was a boy who was really sweet, and very happy to see our staff," she recalls, "and we gave him a piece of paper and a pen because he had nothing to do. This little boy was anemic, and his family was incredibly poor. He was injured by a UXO (unexploded ordnance) that he was hitting with a rock, which exploded, killing one of his sisters and injuring another. He lost his leg. The doctors told his family that he needed fruit, but they couldn't afford to buy him any, so he was getting by on rice and water."

Afghanistan is littered with millions of unexploded shells, land mines and rockets, the remnants of near-continuous fighting over the past decades. many are left over from the war with the Soviets, but new mines are being laid each day by forces from the current conflict between the Taliban and Northern Alliance. Children collect live shells and bullets to sell to scrap metal dealers, but the dealers won't accept any explosives, so it is left to the children to remove the caps. The boy in the Kabul hospital is proof that this can be a deadly practice. One of the major groups of land mine and UXO victims are children, a trend that Sarah Warren is working to change.

Sarah has spent the past two years in Pakistan and Afghanistan, working for the Kabul office of Save the Children. She has developed a land mine education program for Afghan children, with a curriculum aimed at making kids aware of the dangers of land mines and unexploded ordinances, and teaching ways to avoid them. For a typical session, the facilitators gather local children together at a mosque or hospital, and ask them what they know about land mines. The facilitators then introduce them to the land mine education program through games and activities. For example, a memory game with cards helps children identify and remember important symbols and understand their significance, such as markers for minefields and clearing teams. Children also discuss pictures depicting either positive or negative behavior regarding land mines and UXOs. The facilitators ask how the scenes relate to their lives, and if the scenes are negative, what the kids can do to change it. "Land mines are not the friendliest of topics," Sarah notes, "but you can make the teaching fun. My motto is land mine education should be fun, but not funny. It needs to be something that children can grasp because it is very much a part of their reality."

Unfortunately, Save the Children's efforts have been seriously hampered by the 1996 Taliban takeover of the capital and the majority of Afghanistan. A southern Pashtun ethnic group, the Taliban adheres to a strict interpretation of Islamic law, which they imposed in the wake of their victory. Women in the formerly cosmopolitan Kabul were purged from the workplace, schools, and public life, and can only appear outside the house with a male relative. The effect on the educational system was near ruinous: seventy percent of the teachers were women before the Taliban regime. "If these women can't go to work, even the boys who are allowed to attend school aren't getting an education," Sarah explains.

These severe restrictions put Save the Children in a difficult position. The group originally used the schools as their vehicle of communication, going into classrooms to spread their message. By the time of the Taliban invasion, Save the Children had established a comprehensive and effective program in the Kabul school system. The restrictions the Taliban enacted eliminated half the children when girls were forbidden to attend class, and forced the group to decide whether they should stay in the schools or find some other way to educate children. Statistics show that the majority of children injured by UXOs and land mines are boys, so if the group stayed in the schools they would still be reaching the largest number of potential victims. However, Save the Children was concerned that this would be giving tacit approval to the Taliban's policies, an argument that eventually won out. The group now runs their programs through hospitals and clinics, the only areas where female facilitators are able to work.

The gender policies of the Taliban have affected Sarah personally as well as professionally. She is more wary about entirely covering her head in public and has been harassed on occasion by the Taliban police. However, as a Westerner, Sarah is given more freedom than her Afghan colleagues and friends, who must adhere to the strict rules. She once tried on a burqa, the facial covering that all women are now required to wear in public. "There is a small amount of mesh-like fabric across the eyes so that you can see a little bit. If the sunlight is shining directly on this grill covering your eyes, you can't see a thing. My Afghan friends put a bag over my shoulder and handed me a bundle to pretend it was my baby, and then they turned me towards the window where the sun was shining and asked, 'Can you see anything?' I couldn't see a thing." The wearing of a burqa is a cultural practice of the ethnic Pashtuns, and is not required by Islam. "My work for the non-political Save the Children and my Quaker upbringing make me hesitant to be critical, but the fact of the matter is that the Taliban and their policies have had an enormous detrimental effect on the Afghan people," she says.

Sarah's Quaker upbringing is a large part of why she is in Kabul. After graduating from Haverford in 1994, she took a Capitol Hill internship with the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL), where part of here work was on anti-land mine legislation. While coordinating a group discussion on the issue, she was able to speak with Save the Children's field office director from Afghanistan, who eventually invited her to work in Kabul. Working for the FCNL met her desire for service work, but Sarah felt that she needed to go into the field to actually see the policies she had been lobbying for. She was initially based in Islamabad, Pakistan, but moved to Kabul in the spring of 1997.

Finding other Quakers has been difficult for Sarah during her time in Pakistan and Afghanistan. "I've been challenged a lot during the past few years, and there aren't many Quakers over here," she comments. "I haven't had much support in a spiritual way, and that's been tough for me." However, her experiences have also been spiritually strengthening. "Sometimes when some of these bigger ethical issues arise, I'm challenged to look at them from a Quaker perspective. For example, when the Taliban first came to Kabul, there was the question of whether Save the Children was going to stay and work there. If we stayed, were we indirectly approving of their policies? Furthermore, are we allowing the war to be perpetuated? Are we going in and paying for their social services and taking care of their people, freeing the Taliban to go off and fight and pour their resources into the war? I don't know if I have answered these questions for myself yet?"

Although she might not be able to provide answers to these larger questions, Sarah has resolved that her presence as an individual and a Quaker can only be beneficial. "I feel like someone needs to be there to bear witness to what is happening to these people, especially the women, to let them know that somebody cares, that somebody is paying attention," she asserts. "I think that is a lot of what Quakers have done in many conflicts and difficult situations, even where they couldn't completely change the situation, they could at least bear witness to what is going on and raise the voice of the people who don't have much power."

Sarah will continue bearing witness for at least the rest of 1997, and possibly into the next year. She signed a contract to remain in Kabul through December, but the civil war with front lines that often include the Afghan capital could force her to return to Pakistan. She also has tentative plans to go to graduate school in the fall of 1998, for a masters in education with a concentration in human development, to be followed by a masters in religion, emphasizing human moral development in conflict situations. In December of 1997, she will travel to Ottawa for an international conference on land mines. Save the Children is pressuring the U.S. to join the proposed ban that will be discussed in Ottawa, and Sarah and some children from the program pitched in. "We made a huge postcard that we plan to send to President Clinton, saying 'Join the Ban-dwagon'. The children made pictures on one side of the postcard about their own impressions of living with land mines." Sarah also has been living with land mines throughout her two years in Pakistan and Afghanistan. And although her work is difficult, she is enjoying her experiences. "I'm really lucky to have a job where I am rarely doing the same thing from one day to the next," she says, pauses, and comes out with what really keeps her going. "I just love the children."