The Magic Carpet
A signed copy of National Geographic photographer Steve McCurry’s 1985 portrait of a 12-year-old Afghan girl hangs in our living room here in the Sierra Foothills. Her haunting green eyes follow me as I pass by, a reminder of the harsh life she has endured as a refugee ever on the move—tragically, a journey she is still on at the age of 40.
My thoughts travel back to Kabul in February 1970. I’d just arrived in Afghanistan after three years in Southeast Asia and was desperately in need of a warm coat. Looking back half a century later, I see myself enter an Afghan tailor shop no larger than my study in our Nevada City home. The French woman who took me there explains to the bearded tailor sitting cross-legged on a raised platform that I am in the market for a long sheepskin coat lined with black fur and a pair of matching suede boots.
1970 was the 37th year of King Mohammad Zahir Shah’s golden age of constitutional reform in Afghanistan. During that peaceful window of time, I was free to explore Kabul alone and wander along stalls in the city’s covered city market filled with hand-crafted copper pots, turquoise glass, and piles of beautiful wool carpets. Women dressed in western fashions then and record shops were enormously popular. Three years later, Zahir Shah’s 40-year reign, one of the most peaceful periods in Afghanistan’s history, ended in a coup. The King lived in exile in Italy for the next 29 years.
I wore that magnificent Afghan coat for the remainder of my month-long journey home—a solo adventure that took me across SW Asia from Afghanistan to Iran, Lebanon, Greece, Germany, the UK and ultimately NYC, Vermont and finally Omaha, NE in the dead of winter. In the years following that trip, Afghanistan would pass through one dark period after another, tragically falling apart just as my beautiful coat eventually did.
In 1985, a twelve-year old Afghan girl was photographed by Steve McCurry in a refugee camp in western Pakistan. Her haunting portrait was published on the cover of the June 1985 issue of NG. Overnight, she became an international symbol of the tragic human cost of the years of war the Afghan people had suffered. For the next 17 years, her identity and personal story remained unknown.
In the summer of 2001, I was hired by National Geographic to write a story about the historic Missouri River of Lewis and Clark. Shortly before my article was scheduled to appear in the magazine’s April 2002 issue, my editor, Oliver Payne, let me know that something enormously important had been discovered that would be revealed in that issue. On the cover, an Afghan woman—hidden shroud-like under a purple burka—is embracing McCurry’s iconic 1985 photograph, known round the world as “the girl with the green eyes.”
Following his 17-year-long search, the photographer had at last found Sharbat Gula in the mountains of Afghanistan and verified her identity. In that issue, the photographer described the adult Ms. Gula: “Time and hardship had erased her youth. Her skin looks like leather. The geometry of her jaw has softened. The eyes still glare; that has not softened.”
A New York Times article by Jenny Gross—“Afghan Girl’ From 1985 National Geographic Cover Takes Refuge in Italy” (11/26/2021)—brought Ms. Gula’s story up to date. The August 2021 takeover by the Taliban has “once again displaced hundreds of thousands of Afghans. Pakistan braced for as many as 700,000 refugees. Italy has evacuated more than 5,000 people from Kabul. In the United States, more than 22,500 …have been resettled as of November 19, 2021, and about 42,500 more remain in temporary housing on eight military bases around the country while they wait for housing.” In London, Kit’s niece Kashya works tirelessly with interpreters, Army doctors and UN support teams—unsung heroes helping newly arrived Afghan families with little more than a knapsack on their backs negotiate their new terrain.
Prior to the Taliban takeover in August, Afghan women had been going to school, getting college degrees, and participating in sports as well as civic and professional life. “The Taliban,” Gross reports, “have severely restricted education for women.” and women and girls are not being allowed to play sports. The Afghan women’s national soccer team recently managed to escape the country and are currently living in Portugal. And, as feared, “Taliban gunmen,” Gross says, “have gone door-to-door…looking for anyone who supported the American efforts in the country.”
“Ever since the U.S. pulled out of Afghanistan in August,” Gross notes, “non-profit organizations had appealed for help in evacuating Ms. Gula. The Taliban don’t want women to be visible, and she (Ms. Gula) is an extremely visible Afghan woman.” A week ago, the Italian government revealed that she has been evacuated to Rome—not surprisingly, the city where the last king of Afghanistan found haven following the takeover of Afghanistan by Taliban forces in 1973.
After moving to Nevada City, I wandered into The Magic Carpet, a shop in town’s historic district that is owned by Paul and Eileen Jorgensen. The couple view their collection of over 1,600 hand-knotted oriental rugs—woven with hand-carded wool, hand-spun and vegetable dyed—as a celebration of the skills of rural weavers who historically have enhanced homes and drawn people together for centuries. Every purchase at The Magic Carpet helps support communities in both the rug weaving world and here as well. The shop currently supports several charitable organizations and community projects including Free Schools for Children in Rural India and Afghanistan. Locally they are supporting the work of Sierra Harvest, Hospitality House, and Interfaith Food Ministry.
Last week, a radiant wool carpet woven by a rural Afghan weaver found a new home by our hearth. It’s a symbol of the plight of thousands of refugees around the world, desperately seeking warm haven and security as winter rapidly approaches. Its beauty and durability will forever connect me to Afghan women and girls with green eyes who dream of moving about freely and feeling the warmth of unexpected light on their faces.