A Doctor’s Healing Journey

All that Abdul Bashir Mansoor held dear--his family, his every possession--was stuffed inside a dust-coated bus that chugged through a rocky pass in the foothills of the Hindu Kush. He was leaving his comfortable home in Pakistan for a new life in the ruins of his old home in Afghanistan.

Now, as the bus cleared the pass and thundered down toward Kabul, Mansoor felt a sense of elation. He was bone-weary and filthy after two days on the road, but he was certain that coming home after 12 years in exile was what Allah had planned for him. For the first time in those 12 years, he had found a reason to believe in Afghanistan again.

Even as the bus pulled onto the desert floor amid dozens more buses crammed with thousands of other returning refugees, and even as he was overwhelmed by the stench of open latrines and rotting meat, Mansoor was smiling and raising his arms in joy.

“I am happy from here to the sky,” he said, and he threw back his sweaty head to feel the warm Afghan sun on his face.

Since March, 1.7 million Afghans have returned home as part of the world’s largest repatriation in 30 years. They are returning to a country where security is tenuous at best, where the economy is a shambles and where most of the population lives a medieval existence. They have overwhelmed a fragile government that cannot provide jobs, electricity, clean water or passable roads.

And still they come. After peaking at 412,000 returning refugees in May, 196,000 returned in August, and thousands more came in September. About 88% have come from Pakistan, 11% from Iran and the rest from Central Asian nations. About 600,000 internally displaced Afghans also have returned to their homes.

Like other refugees who have chosen to return so late in the year, Mansoor faces a deadline. With the brutal Afghan winter closing in, he has to scramble to find food, heat and shelter. The United Nations is planning to shut down its repatriation program to concentrate on helping returnees prepare for subfreezing temperatures.

A dust storm was howling and the sun was baking the desert as Mansoor and his family tumbled off their bus. Mansoor had gambled on his family’s future, and the lives of 10 people were in his hands. He had brought his wife and three children, two brothers, a sister-in-law, a nephew, a niece and his sickly mother.

They had fled Afghanistan in 1990, part of a wave of 6.2 million people who gave up on the country and left that year to escape fierce fighting among warlords. The bulk of those now returning are illiterate peasants who survive on subsistence farming. Fewer than 5% are professionals.

Mansoor, 40, is a physician, and he stood out among the waves of ragged paupers at the U.N.’s “encashment center” 20 miles east of Kabul, the capital. He is university-educated, speaks English and lived a middle-class life in Pakistan. He ran a small medical clinic there and worked for two Western aid agencies.

One brother, Nazir, 36, is a civil engineer. The other, Abdul, 34, is an anesthesiology technician. The Mansoor brothers knew they would probably be reduced to working menial jobs in Afghanistan, if they could find jobs at all.

And they knew through relatives in Kabul that the family home had been ransacked and wrecked over the years.

In the Pushtun tradition, Dr. Mansoor, as the eldest, was entrusted with making the decision to return. He weighed the odds and calculated that the time had come, that the security level, though marginal, was acceptable.

His three children were born in Pakistan; he wanted them to grow up at home, in Afghanistan.

He hopes eventually to find work with a Western aid agency and, inshallah--Allah willing--to open a clinic. Afghanistan is desperate for doctors. The country has just one physician for every 50,000 people, compared with 140 per 50,000 people in the United States. But for now, Mansoor was just another refugee waiting in the sun to be processed under the U.N.’s “voluntary repatriation program.” He carried a creased paper, a VRF, or Voluntary Repatriation Form, that bore a faded photo of his family and the sum of their lives expressed in vital statistics such as date and place of birth and father’s name.

The Mansoors seemed dazed as they waited in endless lines, answering questions and pressing their thumbs onto inked pads. They listened to a lecture on the dangers of land mines, complete with the visual aid of a miniature minefield studded with defused mines, rockets and grenades. The children wailed and squirmed as they were given oral polio vaccine and injections of measles vaccine.

Mansoor, as the head of the extended family, was handed five crisp $20 bills to defray transportation costs. He owed 8,500 Pakistani rupees ($145) to the driver who had brought them from Pakistan.

Finally, the family was handed three bags of wheat marked “U.S.A.,” two wool blankets, four sections of heavy plastic sheeting and four thick bars of coarse laundry soap.

Now it was time to go home.

The family piled back into the rickety bus for the trip to Kabul. The vehicle lurched away in a storm of dust, piled so high with chairs and bicycles and wood planks that it seemed ready to topple over as it rocked and pitched across the potholed highway into town.

As Kabul came into view, Mansoor stared out the bus window. “Oh, what a destroyed city,” he said. “Nothing left. I have such deep sorrow.”

Mansoor tried to direct the driver, a Pakistani, but they got hopelessly lost. The doctor had lost his bearings. Nothing was the same. After several wrong turns, they finally found their way south of the capital to Mansoor’s old neighborhood of Chehel Sotoon.

At last Mansoor recognized Police Station No. 7, the old Turkish park, the chaotic bazaar and the bombed-out shell of his old high school. The bus lurched into a dirt alley, and everyone aboard fell silent. They were home.

They got out and stared in silence at the old family home. It was a mess. Thieves had stolen the electrical wiring and water pipes. There was no glass in the windows. The roof was studded with holes. The well was dry. The stucco walls were cracked and smeared with grime. The grape arbor was shriveled.

“It looks so different. It’s so badly damaged,” Mansoor said, holding back tears.

But then he gathered himself and told his brothers to unload the bus. They were moving in. They unloaded the doctor’s computer--useless without electricity--his medical texts and a blue metal sign from his clinic in Pakistan that read “Dr. Abdul Bashir Mansoor, M.D.”

Mansoor inspected the house. He found what he called his “bachelor room,” where he had lived as a young man.

His father had built the house 40 years ago. Now he was dead, killed by liver cancer three months ago while in exile in Pakistan. It pained Mansoor that his father had not died at home, and that he himself had married in Pakistan and not at the family homestead.

He sighed deeply. “Life is unstable,” he said. “Everything changes, and I believe almighty Allah has made this change for me.”

Suddenly there was a loud cry and Mansoor’s uncle appeared, shouting with joy. He embraced the doctor and showered his whiskered face with kisses.

“Oh, you came back! Now my life is complete!” said Mohammed Zarif.

Mansoor asked about the security situation.

“OK, I think. Not so bad,” the uncle said.

Neighbors and relatives emerged from their adobe homes and hugged the doctor. They began rounding up buckets, paint, plaster, brushes and tools for cleaning and repairing the house. They helped stack planks and timbers that the Mansoors had brought from Pakistan for rebuilding. They told Mansoor where to buy glass for the windows and wood stoves for heating.

Mansoor thanked them and said, “My new life starts today.”

But the house was not yet a home. “A home is where the father has a job and the children are in school and there is heat and food,” he said. “Soon, this will be a house.”

The doctor was exhausted. His wife and sister-in-law cleaned a bedroom and spread the U.N. plastic sheeting on the floor. Mansoor sat down wearily and sipped at a cup of hot green tea.

“I am never going back to Pakistan again--never,” he announced.

Out the bare window frames, he could see that some things had not changed. His neighbor was still raising pigeons, and they fluttered and swooped in formation against the darkening sky. Beyond them were the familiar mountains, serene and eternal, painted scarlet by the setting sun.

There was so much to do. The doctor had to repair the house, buy food, find a school for his children, jobs for himself and his brothers, medical treatment for his ailing mother. He needed to go to the mosque and pray. Somehow, he believed, Allah would provide.

The doctor closed his eyes. His spectacles were askew on his round face. He longed to sleep the deep sleep of a man in his own bed.

He put down his tea. “I am home at last,” he said wearily. “My heart is healed.”