About A Boy: An an Afghan youth and a journalist’s shared journey amidst the horrors of bitter conflict

Published on Wednesday 23 November 2011 00:00

From Helmand to the Home Counties, that’s the journey made by an Afghan teen after a rocket attack killed his brother and blinded him. Our correspondent Jerome Starkey has also come a long way – he’s become Najib’s guardian

THE rocket sounded like screeching tyres as it hurtled over our heads and erupted at the crossroads. I scrambled for cover in an open field, but Najib didn’t have time to think. He was pedalling along the empty streets of Lashkar Gah with his little brother Hamid balanced on the back of their bicycle when the rocket hit the road right next to them. It was 7:24am on 20 August, 2009. Polling day in Helmand. Hamid, 13, was decapitated by a piece of shrapnel and died instantly. His beige robes were drenched in blood, his sandals and skullcap strewn across the road, where the mangled remains of the rocket lay smouldering.

Najib, just a few inches further forward, was thrown off the bike and knocked unconscious, but miraculously, he survived. A 2mm shard of metal had punctured deep into his left eyeball and his left foot was riddled with gravel from the blast. He came round to the sound of debris falling out of the sky as a plume of dark smoke rose silently in its place.

By the time I had found the courage to sprint over from the polling station – tents in a football field 60 metres from the crossroads – Najib was just finding the breath to wail. It was a terrifying, painful wail. Four men lifted Hamid’s lifeless body into an ambulance and Najib stood there screaming, staggering, in shock. When he turned away from me I saw blood and bone on his back and in his hair.

That day was supposed to be a landmark moment on Afghanistan’s path towards self-governance and democracy. It was, without doubt, the worst day of Najib’s life. Neither of us knew it then, but that rocket was to entwine our lives. It would propel Najib – an illiterate cobbler’s son – towards unimaginable opportunities that would change his life forever.

The day after the attack, I went to Najib’s house. Hamid had already been buried and Najib’s eye was bandaged. The sparse, mud-walled house was full of relatives. Najib’s father could barely speak for grief, and his uncle was planning a trip to Kabul – along one of the most dangerous roads in the world – to try to find a doctor who might save the injured eye.

Najib spoke a handful of English words and, despite the pain of his injuries and the trauma of his loss, was eager to use them. Barely two years later we are sat side-by-side on an aeroplane bound for Heathrow. Najib has won a full-fees scholarship to Stowe, my old boarding school, and somewhere along the lines I have become his guardian (and, by proximity, his banker). Remarkably, Najib takes British boarding school in his stride.

“Najib has drive, determination and a wonderful work ethic as well as a very calm and positive outlook,” says his first assessment. “Najib could not have made a better start or a greater impression.”

He is studying Physics, Maths and Biology (and taking acting and guitar classes!) and wants to be a doctor.Yet back in 2009 there was more tragedy to come. There wasn’t a hospital in Afghanistan which could remove the metal from his eye. General Jim Dutton, the most senior British officer in Afghanistan at the time, asked the French Nato hospital in Kabul to help, but even their surgeons couldn’t get it out – and this tiny shard of shrapnel was scratching his retina to death.

Soldiers with similar injuries are airlifted home, the surgeon Bernard Swalduz explained, because every hour counts when it comes to saving someone’s sight. Time for Najib was running out fast. It was another two weeks before an American charity, Solace, managed to get Najib to Carolina, where an expert opthamolagist, Dr Nasrollah Samiy, removed the offending piece of metal. Najib stayed in America so the medics could monitor his recovery over a couple of months, but he never regained sight in the injured eye.

Instead, he gained an insatiable appetite for learning English and (despite my best efforts) an unshakeable American accent. Solace and Dr Samiy have remained bulwarks of support.

Back in Afghanistan, Najib enrolled at one of the best high school’s in Kabul, because he knew it offered a much better education than he could ever hope for in Helmand, and he moved into a dormitory run by the nearby School of Leadership Afghanistan (SOLA) – an international charity specialising in getting talented Afghan students scholarships to schools and universities in America. “SOLA helps those who help themselves,” is one of founder Ted Achilles’ favourite mantras, and Najib has clearly learnt it well.

Najib quickly roped me into teaching a weekly English class at the SOLA dorm. Then, almost 18 months after he moved to Kabul, he knocked on my door in Kabul and asked for help. SOLA had been forced to stop teaching boys, he explained, because their conservative Afghan neighbours had complained that boys and girls were being taught together under one roof.

“Help me find a scholarship,” he said.

“But I’ve got no idea,” I protested. We were sitting in my garden and the local mosque’s loudspeakers filled the evening air with urgent prayers.

“E-mail your old school,” he suggested.

“It’s not like America,” I said. “British schools don’t have the same culture of scholarships and endowments.” From what I remembered, Stowe was broke.

“Can’t you just ask them?” he persisted.

I agreed to e-mail Stowe’s headmaster, Anthony Wallersteiner. “Dear Dr Wallersteiner, I am so sorry I never made it back to Stowe to give a talk.” I hadn’t even replied to the invitation and I cringed at such an awkward start. “Today though, I am writing on a very different matter and I hope you may be able to help … As unlikely as it might be, I am asking because I promised I would.” That was the Wednesday night before the new school year started. On Thursday Dr Wallersteiner replied, asking if we could arrange a telephone interview for the following afternoon.

Headmasters are always headmasters, whether you are 13 or 30. (I am the latter). The first 30 minutes of smalltalk – when my phone rang after a frantic day of mock interviews which saw Human Rights lawyers and political officers role-playing headmasters – were nerve-wracking. Yet when Najib took the handset he performed something close to a miracle. He explained how he used to sell juice in a bazaar, how he was the first person in his family to visit America, the only one who could speak English and how he dreamed of being a doctor, because doctors had helped him and he wanted to help others. If he didn’t continue his education he would probably have to work as a mechanic’s apprentice for less than 40p a day, in a garage in Lashkar Gah – one of the most dangerous cities in Afghanistan.

“I will work 24 hours if I have to. I won’t sleep, so I can catch up,” he promised. An hour later he had been offered a full-fees sixth-form scholarship worth £28,000 a year. “It’s not every day we get the opportunity to change someone’s life like this,” Dr Wallersteiner said. “He’s clearly very bright.”

Now all we had to do was get a visa, but if you’re Afghan and in Afghanistan it’s harder and more expensive than almost anywhere else in the world because the British Embassy in Kabul doesn’t have a consular section, so applicants have to fly to Delhi and do it all from there.

As a minor, Najib also needed his parents’ consent – their signatures on all the application forms and his original birth certificate. This was an even bigger problem because both his parents were in Helmand, both are illiterate, and no-one born in Afghanistan (that I have ever met) has a birth certificate. Yet we were determined not to lose out to a pesky administrative error and I e-mailed every single contact I could think of who might possibly be able to help. Afghanistan can be a bleak place to live and work but the overwhelming response to my appeals for help was a welcome reminder that the world is full of good people.

A German lawyer drafted a letter for Najib’s parents, which also made me his guardian, so that I could sign his visa forms. Najib e-mailed it to an internet cafe in Lashkar Gah, where the shop assistant printed it and gave it to his mother. She took the letter, along with Najib’s father, to the department of women’s affairs, so that they could sign it with their thumb-prints in the presence of a local government official. The official then signed and stamped a separate letter, testifying Najib’s parents were who they said they were, and that the contents of the letter, written in English, had been verbally translated and explained in her presence.

Still, it wasn’t a birth certificate, so his mum and dad had to pose for a photograph holding up the consent form (albeit upside down) so officials could compare it with earlier family photos which showed Najib with the self-same parents. The British ambassador in Kabul was on holiday at the time, but he alerted his staff, who in turn alerted Delhi that Najib was on his way. Instead of taking three weeks, he got his visa in two days.

“You need a letter from the school,” said a gruff customs official in Bahrain, where we had to change planes on our way to London. “Otherwise we have to call embassy to verify visa.” It was past midnight. “You’ll have to stay another day,” he added, apparently oblivious to how unpleasant Bahrain’s airport is. Najib was crouched on the floor, rifling through his papers. In desperation, he looked up and asked me, “Don’t you know anyone in the airport?” In the end he found the right piece of paper, and we were in Heathrow for breakfast.

We stopped at a shopping mall on the way to Stowe, where Najib did a remarkably good job of picking out designer suits and shoes – despite claiming never to have heard of Hugo Boss. The headmaster was waiting on the steps of the school as we rolled up the drive and Najib had his first glimpse of the stately house that was about to be his home. After a tour, it was time for evensong. Out came the suit. His housemaster, Anthony Macpherson, leant him a tie, there was a fellow pupil on hand to show him how to tie it and the prefects showed him the way to chapel. As a devout Muslim, his attendance was optional, but he was clearly intrigued to see what happened. Islam had taught him to respect other peoples’ religions, he said, as though evensong at a public school was the most normal thing in the world.

On his first free weekend the Tube was almost as exciting as the London Eye (there are no working passenger trains in Afghanistan) and at the Natural History Museum he said his teachers told him dinosaurs weren’t real. “I thought they were only in cartoons,” he said, transfixed by the fossils.

“Najib’s progress has been quite astonishing and he volunteers for everything,” the head wrote in a recent e-mail. “The way he has overcome overwhelming adversity and embraced this opportunity is a great testament to the resilience of the human spirit. He is determined not to let us down and, although it is still early days, I am much more optimistic that this experiment will succeed and that we will witness a remarkable transformation over the coming years.”

My progress, unfortunately, has been much slower. I am still getting used to behaving like a parent and I try not to laugh every time a teacher calls me Mr Starkey. I am also muddling along as his banker, I have learnt that museums are free, the London Eye is very expensive and my mum probably had a point when she insisted on dressing me at Marks & Spencer.

I am also happy when I see his friends increase on Facebook, thrilled when I hear how well he’s doing in class, and I could almost cry when I think about how far he has come.

As every soldier will tell you, Helmand to the Home Counties is a very long way indeed.

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BLOCKEM

Wednesday, November 23, 2011 at 11:49 AM

What a load of sanctimonious garbage - cuckoo land drivel. Another freeloader finds a way to enter the UK to live off the UK taxpayers. Another “superchild” who couldn’t speak, read or write English is now supposedly out-performancing our own children. And what is the set departure date (return to his own country) for the Afghan teen. When that date arrives, all hell will break loose. Contact local MP, local councillor, set up a Facebook, contact schoolteachers, asylum and refugee support groups “charities” newspapers, local church, media et al - all screaming to let the Afghan teen stay. And don’t forget his right to a family life - so bring his family over from Afghanistan - more expense for the British taxpayer. Strange how Najib doesn’t come over as being sad to leave his parents. When oh when is it all going to end?

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