an afghan story

I've wanted to be a writer since I was very young. I went to college to major in English, but serving in the US Army National Guard to pay for my education, I was dismayed to be sent to Afghanistan in 2004. Of course I was nervous, but I was further disheartened because it felt to me like a setback to the writing career that I was trying to launch. In the end, however, it turned out that my war experiences led to my first novel, Words in the Dust.

Since my unit was assigned to providing security for the reconstruction effort, I was able to interact closely with the Afghan people. When we first arrived in the western Afghan province of Farah, our base was not yet built and my fellow soldiers and I lived in a rented mud-brick Afghan house in an average residential neighbourhood, so we gained some sense of how regular Afghan families lived. We were there to help build schools and to assess the reconstruction needed in the towns and villages. Decades of war had taken their toll, and so it was great to work to put right things that had gone very wrong.

I came to care deeply for our mission in Afghanistan. In particular, I wanted to do all I could to help Afghan children who had been deprived of those basics in education that I had been blessed with. It saddened me to see young children whose school was nothing more than a tent and who had no books, pens or paper. I saw little kids in the freezing cold, walking around barefoot on the rocky ground. I wanted to do all I could to help make things better, so my favourite missions involved helping to improve or better supply schools or to hand out sweaters, footballs, toys or candy. Maybe these missions didn't win the whole war or change the entire world, but it was rewarding to help as much as I could - to see Afghan children smile.

On one of our missions, my fellow soldiers and I encountered a young Afghan girl who had suffered from birth from a deformity called cleft lip. The two halves of her upper lip had never been joined, and her front teeth stuck out straight forward. As soon as we saw her, we knew we had to help. We pooled our money together to pay for her transportation to our main airbase where a wonderful army doctor conducted the corrective surgery. When she came back to us, I was amazed at her transformation. Only the smallest scar hinted that anything had ever been different about her. Throughout her time with us, I remained impressed by her quiet courage and dignity. For me, she became a symbol of the struggle all Afghans, particularly women and girls, face in working toward a better and more peaceful Afghanistan. The last time I saw this girl I promised I would tell her story.

That promise compelled me to write my novel - but it wasn't easy to keep. I knew from the beginning that Zulaikha, the protagonist in Words in the Dust, would have to be an Afghan girl, as I believe that the true hope of Afghanistan is in improving opportunities for Afghan women and girls. Of course, I have never been an Afghan or a girl and so I spent a lot of time researching Afghanistan and learning all I could about the Afghan people. In order to make Zulaikha as convincing as possible, I spent a great deal of time and effort in coming to understand her and her entire family. Beyond that, my quest to understand my protagonist was a matter of thinking about how I would feel if I had been in her situation.

In the course of my research I was delighted to learn about Afghanistan's rich literary heritage. I was thrilled to read all of these wonderful old Afghan poems by Abdullah Ansari and Jami. I knew immediately that I wanted to find a way to include some of this literature in Words in the Dust because that is an aspect of Afghanistan too few hear about. And through the character of Meena, a woman who was once a professor of Persian literature in the Afghan city of Herat, I could introduce the poems, and the idea that women in Afghanistan once had many more opportunities, working in many different professional positions. I want my readers to know about these good things in Afghanistan, to see what that country is working to regain.

Words in the Dust is set during the war in Afghanistan. Zulaikha and her family face many challenges, some of which seem insurmountable. Yet, despite Zulaikha's pain and hardship, I trust readers will find that her story is ultimately one of hope. Maybe through Zulaikha's example, readers will be able hold on to that sense of hope for Afghanistan. Despite that country's many problems, I believe that the Afghan people are closer than ever before to finding a real, meaningful, lasting peace.

Words in the Dust by Trent Reedy is published by Frances Lincoln