Spirit in Action
Making Friends Among the Taliban - Jonathan P. Larson
Dan Terry did things that are unbelievable in many Western eyes - being welcomed among diverse peoples of Afghanistan, including some among the Taliban. After a life of aid, friendship, and living on the edge in the region, Dan was killed in 2010, and his story and stories are captured in Making Friends Among the Taliban: A Peacemaker's Journey in Afghanistan, written by Jonathan P. Larson.
- Broadcast on:
- 06 Jul 2013
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- other
(upbeat guitar music) ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And my lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ - Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark helps me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ - I feel truly privileged in doing this spirit in action program to come up on so many wonderful, inspiring, but little known heroes doing great work, sometimes at great cost themselves. The subject of today's program is Dan Terry, Dan Trie, as he was called by his numerous friends among the Afghan people. Dan lived and worked there for decades, simply and passionately in the midst of the Afghans until he was killed in 2010. We'll be speaking today with Jonathan Larson, lifelong friend of Dan's, who gathered stories on the ground in Afghanistan for a book about Dan Terry, called Making Friends Among the Taliban, a peacemaker's journey in Afghanistan. Jonathan Larson joins us today by phone to talk about Dan Terry and his work and witness in Afghanistan. Jonathan, I'm so pleased to have you here today for Spirit in Action. - I'm really glad to be joining you Mark. I'm very thankful for your book and the introduction that you gave me to Dan Terry via your book, Making Friends Among the Taliban, a peacemaker's journey in Afghanistan. And of course, the book is by and large about Dan and his exploits, his adventures, his living in Afghanistan. But in some ways, I sense that you and he have perhaps parallel paths or at least overlapping paths. You start out at the beginning, you mentioned that Dan was your best man at your wedding, which was the weekend of Woodstock. And somehow the two of you missed Woodstock. - How ever did we contrive to do that? I have no idea. But yes, there is this curious kind of alternative feel, even to that little bit of a narrative, that while a lot of friends were flocking to upstate New York on that weekend in 1969, he consented to be at our wedding in downstate Indiana there. And of course, that was a sign too of who Dan was and also of our friendship, which dates back for many years into our childhood. - I take it that both of you grew up Mennonite, or maybe that wasn't the case, were there a lot of Mennonites at Woodstock? - There were quite a number, though neither Dan nor I had grown up in Mennonite communities. He was a lifelong Methodist, though he was not sectarian, at all, in his faith. And I grew up in a Swedish Baptist family. And of course, that means something quite different than it might say in Europe or America, both Dan and I growing up in India, where the perspective on all these things is entirely different, growing up in a Hindu majority country, and being acquainted with all the various faiths of India, whether that be Islam or Sikhism or the Giants or the Parsis, there were many groups of Buddhists. These were on display, everywhere around us. And so being Christian in that setting required that we have this broad horizon. - Well, let's talk a little bit about post-wedding for you, evidently Dan gave you rucksacks, you and your wife, so that you could go traipsing around in Africa. And he very soon went off to the Hindu Kush. - Yes, our paths were parallel in the sense that we were both committed to doing volunteer service in a place of need. Dan's path in pursuit of that led him happily for him to Central Asia, to Afghanistan. For Mary Kay and me, the path led rather to Africa, where we were volunteer teachers in a Bush teacher training college. And that was our first acquaintance with Central Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa. Gorgeously beautiful, exquisitely beautiful, from an aesthetic point of view, the grandeur of Africa, the risk of valley, those great oleks that lie there, the mountains, the ruinsories, the volcanoes. I mean, it just went on and on the tropical rainforest. Incredible, that encounter, that experience in Central Africa. But of course, we were a long way from Dan, who was in the harsh, rugged beauty of the Hindu Kush, as you say. And over those years, we didn't have much opportunity for interaction or conversation. But occasionally, our paths would cross here in North America, where we would happen to run into each other. And then of course, we would have this swoon of endless story swapping that would keep us up all night. In laughter, as well as sometimes shedding tears. Now again, we're really talking mostly here about Dan, but I need to understand you a bit, Jonathan, in order to understand this story that you bring of Dan. How much did you live overseas? It sounds like Dan did, I don't know, a majority of his life. Yes, for Dan, after he left university, say from the early '70s on, his narrative was set with what are two interruptions, almost entirely, in Afghanistan, or one of the adjoining countries. For Mary Kay and me, our initial experience in Central Africa then led us to long-term engagement in Southern Africa. After some further training, we returned to Africa, Mary Kay and I. She, to work in public health. And I worked as an adult leadership trainer. So, my job was going around from town to community, to settlement, sometimes very remote places. Meeting with local leaders, chiefs, elders, leaders of congregations, men and women who were eager for conversation with a kind of larger horizon, who wanted to benefit from the larger experiences that we had had. And of course, they were enormously intriguing to me, the depth of their own culture, the amazing languages of Southern Africa, with these cliques. And fast friendship grew up in the course of those years and always spent 15 years then in the Kalahari, in the country of Botswana. And became acquainted not just with the struggle for dignity and justice at this time of apartheid in South Africa, which was right next door and of course, which affected all the surrounding countries. In fact, we partnered during those years with Quakers in providing hospitality to refugees who were screaming out of the townships back in the '80s, where there were occasional disturbances and where there was brutal oppression in the schools and in the streets. And frequently then these people in flight from those encounters fled into Botswana and surrounding countries. And of course, they needed a place to get sorted out, to find their feet and then make decisions about where they would go next. In addition to that drama that unfolded during those years, then we also came face to face with this great scourge of HIV/AIDS that came to afflict Southern Africa, Botswana, South Africa, Los Lutu, and the joining countries of Zimbabwe and Malawi and Mozambique. They have all suffered terrific blows. And of course, being present in these societies that have been drugged to their knees by this unremitting plague was a drama that we never anticipated or expected but that of course touched us deeply. - So let's talk a little bit more about the kind of work that you did or specifically that Dan did. How much of it was missionary work and in what sense was it missionary work? Was it converting people to Jesus kind of work or was it other kinds of missionary work? - The term missionary has come to attract all kinds of negative associations for people and I fully understand why that is. At base, what that word means is being outward bound. And so in that broader sense, it was all about being outward bound. It was all about going out to engage the communities and the people, the difficulties, troubles, as well as the joys. Specifically for Dan, of course, in a Muslim country like Afghanistan, even in the best of times, it would have been to boom actually for Dan to be conducting anything like proselytizing. And so any activity of that nature was strictly a foreboding. And so the work essentially was to live out in deed and action, a witness of compassion and love and did not have that usual dimension that we sometimes think of as missionary culture. - Well, what work was Dan doing? - Broad-based community development, he helped them establish schools or education and it was lacking. He particularly focused on public health that is addressing conditions in the community that often resulted in poor health or even disease. So the provision of clean water at a building of primary care clinics where people could come for vaccination or other kind of preventive care, even the construction of roads and bridges, many of these communities are terribly isolated and connections to the outside world were few and far between. Dan was fascinated with machines, airplanes, cars, trucks, anything that moved, bicycles, motorcycles. So he kind of had a personal stake in any infrastructure that permitted the coming and going of these machines. And there are places where, if you go to Afghanistan today, they will tell you that Dan Terry was the one who organized the opening of this airstrip or helped to lay out the root of a new road or perhaps put a bridge over some dry wash. Those are all things that Dan turned his hand to. And in that sense, he was a fabulous generalist who had common sense and was handy at most anything. In that sense, these communities had full benefit from Dan whenever he was available to them. And he was able to engage with them on conversation about all these things. And I also understand he built a few of his own contraptions that were something, you mentioned that in the book. Could you describe some of his handiwork? Sure, sure. Dan was an inventorate tinkerer. And in a place like Afghanistan, you have machines left over from the time of the Soviets, including tanks and trucks and jeeps and other things. You have, of course, all these Japanese and even some American models of vehicles on the roads. There are Chinese vehicles that have turned up. And Dan's particular penchant was to crib the best of these various machines. And he would marry them up so that he'd have this hybrid contraption, which of course had great capacity to take those mountains on. He knew how to breed machines that would go after those conditions. And of course, people took great delight in Dan's creative flair. And that applied to bicycles. He was famous for a hybrid bicycle that he had put together, which he rode all over, not just the streets of the towns, Kabul and Mazari Sharif, but that he took sometimes in the dead of winter across swatches of rugged mountain country. There was hardly anything. Snow ice, blistering heat, floods. There was hardly anything that Dan wouldn't take on with his bicycle, which he loved dearly. He actually named this bicycle precious. - After having read "Lord of the Rings"? - Yes. (laughs) Dan actually did have a flair for that sort of story or tale, the fantasies of it. I suspect he may actually have cribbed it from a place like that. Yes. (laughs) - Well, and you have at least one picture in the book of some of his handiwork there. Again, we're talking about making friends among the Taliban. It's written by Jonathan Larson, and it's about his friend Dan Terry, who was killed in Afghanistan in August of 2010 after having spent most of his life working in that area. You are listening to "Spirit in Action", which is a Northern spirit radio production. I'm your host. We're on the web at northernspiritradio.org. On that site, you'll find about 10 years of our programs for listening and download. There's a place to leave comments, and we do love to have your comments, because we love two-way conversation. You can also make a donation on our site, and I wanna mention that you should also remember to always support your local community radio station. While so much of the media in this country is tilted in this way or that, I think you get a clearer view of the sky via community radio, both news and music. So remember to support your local station. Again, we're talking with Jonathan Larson, author of "Making Friends Among the Taliban". - And I would just say amen to what you just said there, Mark. - Which part of it? (laughing) - About the community supporting these independent voices, making them viable. - Yes, they're so important. Again, we're talking about Dan Terry, his work there in Afghanistan. I have a feeling that I haven't done a very good job yet of bringing out the character of Dan Terry that made him so important, not only to those of us back here who witnessed his work, but to the people in Afghanistan. He had an unusually deep friendship and connection with that country. How did he do that? - As a young person out of university, Dan made his way to Afghanistan simply because he found the history, the mountains, the people. He found the skies, the 15,000 foot passives and the deep valleys and the rivers. He found all of that just completely inebriating. This is a part of the world that Alexander the Great marched through on his way to India and left all kinds of stories behind. Many have come afterward, the Persians, the Mongols, Genghis Khan, later of course, the Persians, the Russians and many others. March through Afghanistan, the British, probably last of all here, before the Americans and their allies came through. All this history is coiled up in these mountains and valleys. Dan founded the irresistible and the people. So of course, in time he mastered language. He formed these fast friendships. He came to know all sorts of improbable people. He had a knack for forging these friendships that other Westerners rarely had opportunity to build. And his natural concern for people, his compassion, his love of peace, these traits and qualities that were breathed out through Dan made a lasting impression on the communities and the people that he encountered and came to know, and that made him unforgettable to them. So when Dan, along with his colleagues, humanitarian workers, were shot, it'll be soon three years now, the stories were focusing on this unhurried life of Dan's. What the Afghans remember were all these improbable adventures. His moral courage, his creativity, his humor, his great love of people, his capacity to relate to most anybody. And so when I went to Kabul, thinking that I might stumble on some of this narrative that was lost there in the mountains, in the memories of people, well, people came pouring out of the side streets and the alleys and the bazaars. When they heard that there was someone there who was interested in hearing the stories about Dan's extraordinary life there. And there they sat, pouring out these experiences. And of course, I was trying to catch them on my digital recorder and filly my notebooks with these hardly imaginable stories. And when my week or 10 days there in Kabul came to an end, I realized that there was a story really that begged to be told and made accessible to a larger audience. - You mentioned, Jonathan, that Dan was a man of peace. You said he was a lifelong Methodist. I know you as being Mennonite. I don't normally think of Methodist as peace church. So certainly I know that there's people of peace everywhere. How much of this came out of his Methodist training or just his experience living in India or in the Kush or wherever? - Well, the interesting thing about many of these groups, of course, the Quakers and the Mennonite and Anabaptists, but going back in church history, many of the groups of renewal, the Methodists, the Pentecostals, the Serged, Forward in 20th century, many of these groups, when you look at their origins, have in them a very strong inclination toward peaceable living, toward kind of a radical gospel calling. Many of them recognized, for example, the evil of excluding women. Many of them identified issues of bias and prejudice racially. But then what happens often in time is, history clouds, these early inspirations and insights that these groups had. So I don't know if Dan had read early Methodist history carefully and from the Westleans, whether he had drawn this, but even his father had been a conscientious objector during World War II. And that, of course, was an influence on Dan. But Dan read the gospels. He was acquainted with the life and teaching of Jesus. And of course, we lived in a country that had not so long before been led in this great movement struggle for independence with Mahatma Gandhi. And just across the border in the '60s, there was this struggle in Tibet. The Dalai Lama was part of our experience, actually came to visit our school. We had a chance to meet him in those years after he fled Lhasa. These are all figures that challenged conventional thinking about how we pursue our interests as nations, as families, as communities, and calling into question the use of the sword or of coercion and violence as a way of obtaining what we want. So Dan set out, the earlier even than I did, he set out in pursuit of this gospel conviction. The way that expressed itself, enough gun, it's done, of course, many people pack guns that the experience of people has taught them, but it's a rough and tumble place and for personal protection, you'd be wise to carry something. Well, in the face of that, Dan absolutely had nothing to do with conventional thinking of that sort. His great defense or his protection across these decades in Afghanistan, as an American and as a Christian, which would have made him a target. I mean, somewhere along the way, but his protection in all these years was that he was a transparent and open person. Those who met Dan could tell that there was no manipulation going on here. There was no hidden agenda going down. There was no attempt to squeeze or force or oblige the people. And because of that diallessness, because of that openness, Dan ended up having relationships with the ethnic variety of people across the board. The Tajiks and the Uzbeks and the Hazars and the Pashtuns. I mean, there was hardly any ethnic group in which he was not a welcome friend. He was not a partisan, ideologically or otherwise. He counted many of the Taliban commanders as his friends and he didn't think there was anything unusual about that. In fact, when he came back here to North America and visited in churches, he would really tell people that he counted among his best friends. In fact, on occasion, those who had saved his hide in really tricky, dicey situations where he was at risk were sometimes the Taliban. And people were incredulous to hear Dan say this because a picture of the Taliban, of course, is that they are irredeemably cruel and lacking in all humanity, that they are ruthless and capable only of outrage. But Dan would say, absolutely not. You have been sold a bill of goods by the media and the sort of popular purveyors of distortions that while the Taliban were difficult and where their rule was sometimes even cruel, that did not preclude having partnership even with them in the pursuit of the good of the people and that the Taliban had given Dan great freedom to work in his communities unhindered because he had earned their trust and because they believed that he was there to seek the welfare and good of people. - Absolutely, there's a number of people listening and I imagine say this is pretty stunning. Could you get to be an example of how he actually approached someone who might be a threat to him or a threat to a party he's traveling with? - Sure. - Of course, the book is filled with stories of that vein. Yeah, at roadblocks. That's a point where violence can frequently flare and whether it's Taliban or a warlord or some other truculent person who's using this roadblock to rip off people and threaten and cajole and sometimes to shed blood in pursuit of power. Dan would approach in great humility. His tactic was not to match threats by menace or a threat on his side, which is frequently what happens. Especially foreigners who go into these places. You know, they can say, look, I can pick up a phone and talk to the UN. I can talk to some powerful person. I can, you know, I've got power on my side that I can use if you mess with me. Dan laid all of that down. He was completely vulnerable in that way and frequently is known to have walked into the business end of rifles fearlessly and to the astonishment of those whose fingers were on the triggers. If you and I were standing sort of at some removal from one of these roadblocks and Dan gets out of his vehicle while people have trained their rifles on him, we would watch as Dan in his cordial and non-threatening way would disarm the nervousness and the fear of others with his quiet for demeanor and his speech, insisting that he is there to serve. And then, of course, inquiring after the welfare of people and wanting to know about their families, Dan would engage them at this human level and show his capacity to be humane, even under threat. And because all of the surprised people, I think that was a key element in Dan's conduct, that his response always surprised people. They knew how Americans conduct themselves. - Unfortunately. - Yeah, they know the swagger, but that wasn't Dan and people were intrigued, really? Who is this guy? And where does this come from? And it was a lifetime of that kind of quiet, non-threatening, open, transparent engagement that caused people around him to lower their rifles, to set aside their suspicion. And then Dan would soon find himself building friendships with these improbable gunmen or commanders. He had them all over. And of course, all of that is just a world away, from what's unfolding in these other scenes, where there are night raids and people kicking down doors from families and where airstrikes are being called in, the siege being laid to communities, the huge human gulf that separates so many of these off-gun communities from this foreign presence. To me, this is the power of Dan's story. The great pity of it, of course, is that this story never sees the light. That's why I love to tell the story. - Wow, it's a powerful story. Again, it's captured in the book making friends among the Taliban, a peacemaker's journey in Afghanistan, written by Jonathan Larson. It is about Dan Terry, who was killed in Afghanistan. After spending a lifetime, really, in that area, he was killed in August, 2010. I was wondering, in your opinion, Jonathan, and I don't know, except for that visit that you had, where you captured these stories, where you recorded them and included them in the book, I don't know how much time you actually spent in Afghanistan. I might not work out so well there in terms of accepting the hospitality. I meet people all over the world, and I make friends everywhere. I was a Peace Corps volunteer in West Africa, and I've traveled there several times since. So I have that ability, but there's one thing that I lack that I think might be a serious problem. I don't like tea. (laughing) Well, perhaps not quite a fatal flaw, but I think even someone like Dan could have overcome that. Dan had the good fortune of loving tea, and it was a vehicle for greasing many of these relationships and the camaraderie over cups of steaming, sweet, milky tea. That was so often the channel for Dan's work and friendship and the encounters that he had. It would be pretty hard. You know, to make your way in that society, if you found tea really just tasteful. (laughing) But not impossible, I think. Yeah, Dan, we grew up in Aya, hiking in the mountains in Northern India where we were children together. Stopping at tea shops was, I mean, it was survival stuff. I mean, it completely spent in the mountains, exhausted from hours and hours of laboring in rugged country. Then you come on a tea shop. The refreshment and energy and encouragement available there really was the key to going on without that. Wow, I don't know. Or we would have dropped in our tracks somewhere way back there never to tell the rest of the story. It sounds as you talk about Dan Terry, who you've written this book about. It sounds like he's a pretty amazing and personable person. Still, you point out in the book, he has very human clay feet. How is it possible that a person who could work things out with warlords here and there couldn't seem to get along with the organizations that employed him, funded him? Right, well, I think Dan probably departed from the premise that his purpose had been, his call, his work in life was to serve the people of Afghanistan. And he would not be deflected or distracted from that by the shenanigans. What he would think of as the shenanigans of Western aid agencies or even individuals. You know, I think what I heard people say about Dan is that he was a terrific friend, one of a kind, at that personal level, but he was a terrible colleague. That is, if you were enmeshed with Dan in some kind of larger plan or program, that's where frequently trouble would arise. And it would arise because so many of these programs are based on Western understanding of what's best for Afghanistan. And Dan was so deep into the truth of Afghanistan, the reality of Afghan life, that he could see the folly of what so many others who were well-intentioned, but misguided. He could see the folly of those things. And he did not suffer such things gladly and refused to bend himself to what he thought of as less than noble, less than good plans and approaches. One thing that Dan really didn't like and had little patience for was providing goods and services, goodies for Afghan communities. He recognized this as a kind of drug that those who administer these things feel good in giving. And Afghan communities are eager to snatch them up. They're hungry for the trinkets from the last store. Free things. There's hardly any community that isn't glad for that. But what Dan realized while observing such things over years and years of work is that Afghan communities in the end were demeaned, disempowered, left dependent and often helpless by that way of doing development work. It didn't do Afghan communities any great favors to back up a container load of some stuff and pass it out. When it was over, there was the inevitable crash, and the drug wears off. And then all sorts of odd feelings sort of swarm in, anger that it's gone, resentment that there isn't more. So Dan committed himself, having observed this, to working for the empowerment and the building of resources within Afghan communities. So he would work with the community to say, "What is it you really want? What is it that would make a lasting contribution to the future generations of this village or of this settlement?" After endless cups of tea, after long conversations, sometimes over weeks and months, it would emerge what that is. And so then Dan would work with them to achieve that end. And he could provide some technical assistance, but in the end, the village or the community would have to invest what it had to make this happen. And when it was all over, of course, there was a feeling of great pride and a sense of accomplishment, as communities began to recognize that their destinies, you know, the change of the yearn for, these things were actually within their grasp. Now you have a completely different dynamic than what happens when a container load of some goods are backed up and distributed to people. And that's what Dan committed to doing. So when he was partnered with people who wanted to do other things, he found that extremely difficult. And his relationships with those people, those organizations, would quickly fray and come undone. And that was painful, really painful for Dan. He wasn't good at paperwork, he wasn't good at humoring, you know, foreigners who were maybe powerful and who wanted to be schmoozed, you know. (laughs) He very quickly ran out of patience with that. And so there was, there's this pattern in the story where the bridges between Dan and these Western organizations, one by one, these bridges go down, he loses their support. Even though they all agree, when you talk with them now, they all agreed that the deepest understanding of Afghanistan was there with Dan. He was the one who really understood things. But they didn't have the patience, they didn't have the time or the vision perhaps. - You're talking about the cons there, the potential downside or the maybe failures of Dan. What would you give as the example of his enduring good that he did there? - Actually, that's a fascinating question to ask because Dan's vision, the deepest impulses that Dan had were to join himself to seek the welfare and good of others. He would allow them to define what it was and to some extent how to get there. So there aren't any grand buildings that have Dan's name on them. There aren't any splashy projects that have Dan Terry on the sign board out front because that wasn't Dan's way. Dan was actually doing things that belonged to others. When I asked someone, one of the off guns who came to tell me the stories about Dan, I asked him, well, when someone dies, they leave an inheritance, they leave a legacy. And what would that be with Dan's death? What was that legacy for you? He thought for quite a long time, actually. And this is what he said, finally. He said, Dan's legacy is that I am sitting here telling his story to you. What he was saying was that there was some intangible depth of friendship that had profoundly affected him as a person. And well, he couldn't take my hand and show me some great farm or a freeway or a hospital or an irrigation system that Dan had devised. What he was saying is, do you see me? I am here, and I am here as a sign of what Dan's great treasure was that he left to us. I found that both deep, this man's witness, I found it deep, I found it also authentic. In fact, it reminded me a little bit of the story of Jesus, who at the end of the story is taken away and the disciples are sort of left looking at each other. They don't have a checkbook, they don't have a bank account, they don't have so much as a signature on a piece of paper. But there is left to them something so profoundly human that they are transformed to the community by recalling that and by exercising the presence of that. I think Dan worked sort of in that way. - And those stories are in the book, making friends among the Taliban and peacemakers journey in Afghanistan. Jonathan Larson wrote it, although it's the story of Dan Terry, all that you were just talking about, Jonathan, misses out on some of the stories that are in the book. And I think that's a good thing, because otherwise they might be tempted just to listen to this interview and forget to read the book. (laughing) The stories are in there. One of them that struck me was a story about what happened at, I think it's pronounced tazara. - Yes, yes. - Could you lay out that story and how Jonathan's participation, and what he led the people to do, how that changed that area of Afghanistan? - Well, actually, I would say better than half of the years that Dan spent the most of the Afghans. Was spent amongst this minority group, the Hazaras, who live in the central highlands, an extremely rugged country. According to tradition, they would have been the defendants of Genghis Khan. So in Genghis Khan and his hordes of phony mounted warriors, swept into these mountains, some of his warriors were left in Afghanistan. The people who have descended from that moment in Afghanistan's history are called the Hazaras. Half of Dan's years were spent amongst the Hazaras, and he went there in part because they are a sort of disfavored minority. They are thought of as second class. But Dan's experiences among the Hazaras early on were sort of characterized by a great famine. There was a drought that descended on the central highlands. This would be the late '90s and early 2000s. When winter finally came and the food had been exhausted, Dan realized that in these scattered settlements and towns, as the snow and ice possessed the highlands there, that thousands of people were at risk here. Not many others had taken notice of the desperation of the Hazaras, certainly not the rich in the powerful and Kabul or others. But Dan took notice, and he raised the alarm, and he went out to explain the plight and make it real to those who he felt might respond. So he persuaded the UN and various other agencies, the economic, European Union and others, to provide wheat. The provision of the wheat was only the first of the obstacles, because the roads leading back into these starving communities were locked up in snow and ice. And all roads traffic ended after the snow's fall. So people in those communities didn't see vehicles for three, four months of the year. Part of the question was, how could the wheat be taken back into those isolated communities? Well, Dan believed that those roads could be passable. So he organized teams of Hazaras with picks and troubles. And he went into the bazaars and asked the welders to make chains for trucks, truck wheels. And then he lined up some of his most intrepid, off-gun driver acquaintances with their trucks. And these bags of wheat were loaded into these trucks. And they went winding out of cobble, back up into the central highlands, across those icy rivers and through the snow and ice. And Dan was like those who observed him, that he was like a whirling gervish. Here he was struggling to get a truck out of an icy river or under the hood of some blocky diesel engine, trying to get it to run. Or perhaps arguing with some Taliban official about the right to pass with the grain. On all these fronts, Dan is battling to secure the grain so that it would arrive in time before it was too late. So over a period of weeks, the grain arrived. First by truck, and then it was loaded sometimes onto the backs of donkeys that would go deeper into the mountains, and then beyond that, of course, people would carry it on their backs. When the winter was over, there was a great realization. Amongst these starving Hazaras, that it was the passion and the genius of Dan Terri that spared their lives. There's hardly any Hazar community. There are thousands of these towns and villages in that central highlands. There's hardly any of those communities where breathing the name Dan Terri or Dan Kree, as they called him, will not elicit warmth and reverence. And sometimes kind of exuberant joy. That's the kind of person he has become to the Hazaras. And of course, Dan lived and worked. Amongst them traveled widely in these towns, so it's not just that he was known as the one who contrived to bring grain to them, but he was frequently seen in their elders council. These things are called shuras where the elders sit down and meet and discuss community affairs. You know, there would be Dan sitting cross-legged, often in a mosque or some other meeting place. So he's a well-known figure. I suspect there may even be children who bear his name. I don't know that for a fact, but it wouldn't be surprising me at all. (laughing) - You're saying he's bearing his name, but are you not talking, no, okay, you're not talking about his genetics, okay, go ahead. - Yeah, no, not his genetics. - Okay. (laughing) Or in some way, you know, recalling him. I mean, in many of these communities, I mean, you would know this from West Africa. The passing of such a person who would have befriended a community might result not just in a child being called Dantri. I mean, that has been known to happen where that person's name is entirely appropriated, but where a family would give a child the name Rafiki, you know, which means friends or blessing, Mubarak, or some similar thing as a way of memorializing that individual. - There's a Peace Corps volunteer who served in one of the villages in Togo, and he was completely dedicated to the village and he lived there nine years. - Wow. - So he was-- - Beautiful. - He was definitely part of the people, but when he decided to leave when that came about, the village was so moved by him. They wanted him, of course, to stay. They brought him a young woman. They said, "We'd like her to be your wife. "We'd like you to leave us a child, please." (laughing) - I'm not sure everybody can do that, but you know, it's-- - Well, we would find that, you know, in the West, you know, people might find that fallacious, but in fact, in these communities, as you know, that's a completely appropriate way to express depth of feeling, you know, and attachment. In fact, there was a story in the book. You may remember where Dan is in a new community, they're meeting in the mosque and the elders are gathered there, and the elder turns the imam to one of Dan's companions and says, "Is this man not a Muslim?" Because everything about his conduct and manner tells the imam that this is a culturally kind of assimilated person, and the companion says to him, "No, he's actually an American and he's a Christian." The imam refuses to believe this. He says, "No, that's not possible. I've never seen such behavior from Americans and Christians." You know, this is, he must somehow be very close or something. So he turned-- the imam turns to Dan and says, "Sir, I will give you a wife and a house and a sheep if you will declare yourself a Muslim tonight." (laughing) And then, of course, it was flattered at this, it recognized it for the great compliment that it was, and then responded by saying, you know, that God in his mercy has granted me a wife, and I have a home, and in fact, I have a sheep too. But he said, "What is lacking to me is that there should be a clinic here in your community for the care of you and your neighbors. If you will grant me that, I will be completely contempt." (laughing) So the business of the meeting was accomplished in this sort of unusual way. - And so there is a clinic that one could go and see in Afghanistan and know that Dan Terry was part of making this happen. And just so significantly, in the way that he could meet people individually, I'm so grateful to you that you've captured his story in making friends among the Taliban, a peacemaker's journey in Afghanistan. You know, Jonathan, I really would like to hear more of your stories, but that'll have to come with the next book. Is it underway? (laughing) - Yes, okay. (laughing) - Is it underway? Are you already working on that? - I do have several book projects in hand. None of them directly taking up the story that Mary Kay and I have sort of laid down over the course of our years, and I've sort of felt this way about this. If that story is worthy of telling, then I should leave it to someone else to tell. And that would be the sort of guarantee that there was actually something of worth in the story to remember and share. So while I do share personal experiences when traveling and meeting with people, there are rarely stories in which I have any heroic or important role. There are generally stories in which I'm hapless. (laughing) In some way, clueless. So there are several book projects in hand. I will leave actually in a week to spend a month in Africa, in Southern Africa, collecting materials for a book. There is actually a second project which is connected with Dan's story. I'm interested in the accounts of ordinary people of faith, often in context of suffering or conflict, who have lived out some creative expression of peace and compassion. Dan's story is full of that, and it's a kind of extended collection of one person's experiences that embody this theme of grace and peace making in the context of trouble and bloodshed. But as I have traveled elsewhere, I have encountered stories about people of faith who at risk to themselves have reached out for the well-being and the good, not just of others, but often their enemies. Those stories fascinate me. I think there is a whole fund. There's a motherload of those stories out there in seldom-visited places, among people who are not important, who do not figure on the register of who's who or you know, I've come to notice in any way to outsiders, but who have done astonishing things for love and faith. And I would love to be the occasion for those stories to be told. I will see if the wherewithal and the opportunity come along to do that. - So people can go out and get making friends among the Taliban. There's a link from my site where they can get it from menomedia.org. Of course they can find it out in Amazon, other places too. Are there other resources they should be looking for? - Yes, actually there is a one-hour documentary film about the Dan Terry story. The name of this documentary is Weaving Life. It was produced by Paulette Moore and experienced documentary filmmaker. This film played on I think 130 ABC TV stations last year, last October, November. A really great film that has won several awards for its creative animation. There's great humor, such a great touch. Anyway, this film Weaving Life includes interviews with Dan's family, as well as a variety of friends. There's also an Afghanistan expert who speaks on the film. And I'm included in the telling of some of these stories. So that DVD is also available from Menomedia or also Amazon and elsewhere. There is of course the additional concern about how the US is going to conclude its campaign in Afghanistan. That is to be closed down by the end of 2014. That's what our leaders are saying. But for that to happen in any orderly way, there will have to be a conversation between us and the Taliban. Everyone of course is asking, how will these conversations happen? Are they not strung with landmines and difficulties and obstacles? How will we ever come to some common ground with an implacable enemy? I discovered some amazing things from the experts who follow the background of those things closely. And some of that is told in the epilogue and afterward at the end of the book. But there is a saying pertaining to this improbable scene where Americans and Taliban are sitting down together somewhere to talk about how to arrange the future. It is the saying of Dan's. The saying which he used frequently is this. In the end, we are all knotted into the same carpet. So Dan would wander these Afghan settlements where particularly the women and girls are knotting these carpets, amazing carpets. Dan was completely familiar with that side of Afghan life. So he used this as a figure to express something he believed deeply. That in our work, in our relationships and our communities, we work best, we work most fruitfully. When we work from the point of view that there will not be losers and winners at the end of the day. But that we will all sit down together and have to share a common outcome when this chapter is over. Dan believed that. So there is a kind of vindication for Dan's wisdom here. Here at the end of the day, they're gonna have to sit at a some of our, maybe drinking tea, who knows? And they will have to come to some meeting of the minds. - Well, you did your work in this by sharing all the stories from Dan Terry in the book, Making Friends Among the Taliban. You, Jonathan P. Larson, have taken a step towards helping us toward that wisdom. Dan left behind. I wanna remind our listeners that besides getting the book, Making Friends Among the Taliban, they can watch the movie Weaving Life. There's links on it at northernspiritradio.org. Thank you so much, Jonathan, for the witness of your life and but for capturing Dan's life and witness for us. And thank you so much for joining me for Spirit in Action. - It was a great pleasure. Thank you, Mark. And thank you to all your listeners out there who have been patient in listening to this conversation between us. And I hope that I've been successful in devoking something of the story that would stir the heart and set people out looking not just for the book and the film, but for those greater things, the possibilities of friendship, even in improbable circumstances. Wow, that I think is the great gift of the story. Thanks again, Jonathan. - Thank you, Mark. - The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. ♪ With every voice ♪ ♪ With every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ With every voice ♪ ♪ With every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ ♪ Feeling ♪