noosphere

drymouth:

The Merman Girls’ Orphanage is a small, unimposing little house a little way up into the foothills of Kabul. Here 29 girls share 26 beds in cramped rooms and range in age from 3 to 18. I first met them last month at a lunch arranged by a friend. After initially being shy, the 300 balloons we took with us soon turned the tidy restaurant into a littering of rubber fragments and a bunch of giggling wrecks. Adults included.

These girls are not all orphans. Some have been abandoned by their families, some have widowed mothers who can’t afford to keep them. 3 year old Nazaneen was found severely malnourished, while her best friend Fawzia, also 3, lost her parents in an airstrike. Shellshocked, she has only recently begun talking.

After lunch we piled onto a 70s bus left over from the hippie trail. Stumbling to communicate through my awful Dari and their much better, but shy, English, I passed the time by teaching everyone thumb wars and the ‘Johnny, johnny, johnny, johnny whoops’ finger game most famously used by Lennon on the Magical Mystery Tour bus. I suppose it was the aesthetics of the bus that brought it to mind.

At Kabul Zoo, the girls lit up a sad series of cages and lingering dodgy men by their enthusiasm, delight and their determination to teach me the Dari names for each animal. An ostrich is a ‘shetor-morgh’ literally a ‘camel-chicken’. Then we visited the ferris wheel, sadly stationary due to Kabul’s electricity problems, and had a ride on the swing boat.Naturally, the operator tried to rip us off, but he hadn’t counted on the fearsome director of the orphanage.

This was the same tough lady who had denied the father of three girls at the orphanage access to them after he forcibly reclaimed his daughters to pay off gambling debts.

A week after the zoo, I went back to visit the girls at their home. The tiny space they have is brightened by stickers and posters of Bollywood actresses. Sitting round, I was struck at how politely, but deeply, hungry they all were for affection. As two teenagers did my hair, two 9 year olds blew on my recently painted nails and a 6 year old ran around with the orgami crane I’d made her out of an old newspaper, the 3 year old on my lap turned to me. Looking sincerely into my eyes she whispered ‘Johnny, johnny, johnny, johnny, whoops, johnny, johnny, johnny’.