Gathering Strength:. Peggy Kelsey
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by religious mullahs as it is today. Swiss-educated Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi2 sat on the "Peacock Throne," continuing his father’s policy of modernization and secularization. Iran sided with the US in the Cold War and, because it was producing and selling huge amounts of oil, was the second-largest buyer of American weapons. Socially conservative Muslims, the majority, were generally invisible to Americans. A semi-Westernized middle class was emerging in the cities. Blue jeans were all the rage.
Pahlavi University, the site of our program, was in Shiraz, the provincial "City of Roses." Elaborate rose gardens enhanced the beautiful architecture of centuries-old shrines. Roses lined modern boulevards. I loved Vakil, the cool, musty, multi-vaulted bazaar. It was built in the mid-1700s, but to my small-town eyes it seemed ancient. Small shops lined the bustling streets. Sheep quarters hung in butcher shops next to photo studios covered with movie-star-style portraits next to vegetable sellers whose produce spilled out onto the sidewalks.
We lived in ‘60s-style dorms, concrete boxes not much different from those at Kent State. The Iranian girls – in the Middle East and in Afghanistan, a girl is not called a woman until she marries – in my dorm were friendly but cliquish and I was an object of their curiosity. We’d sometimes sip tea while they asked me questions and practiced their English. I didn’t become close to any of them. In part, I found it hard to relate to girls so sheltered they had never even spoken with the boys with whom they were "in love." They reminded me of American pre-teens "in love" with pop singers. I’m sure I was just as alien to them.
A professor and I visited a nearby village during one school break. Strolling down a street lined with mud-brick walls, we came upon a store so small that the shopkeeper could reach any item without taking a step. The open upper portion of a Dutch door let customers view his goods. The elderly proprietor asked what we wanted from the half-dozen dusty cans on his shelves.
"How do you survive with so few items to sell?" my professor asked.
The man looked to the ceiling for a moment and replied, "I survive by the grace of Allah."
That hit me hard. Growing up, we commonly prayed for good test grades or to thank God for our not-fully-appreciated abundance. This was the first time I’d encountered anyone who depended on God for his very subsistence. This man appeared so simple and pure in his deeply held beliefs; how, I thought, could he be consigned to Hell, as the religion in which I was raised professed? This experience led me to believe that all religions lead to God and that we are not judged by what we believe, but how we lovingly live whatever beliefs we have.
The school year neared its end and the question of what to do for the summer arose. Should I go back to Ohio? I was already in the Middle East; when, if ever, would I be able to return? I’d earned enough teaching English during the school year to fund an on-the-cheap excursion. I’d traveled with friends in different parts of Iran and knew enough Farsi to get around. India beckoned. I preferred to travel alone, so I wrapped myself in a chador and headed out.
The decrepit, rickety bus chugged through the dusty mud-brick villages and rocky deserts of southern Iran. Despite my blue eyes and blue jeans, I was treated respectfully throughout the journey across Iran and Pakistan; I’m sure in large part because of the chador. No one knew what to make of me; with my Islamic covering, I didn’t fit any stereotypes.
I rode trains from the Pakistani border at Zahedan and I vividly recall Quetta, a city in the Pashtun heartland approximately 75 miles (121 k) south of the Afghan border. Rough wooden houses perched on cement blocks lined the tracks. Men wearing large turbans and baggy shalwar kameez, with rifles slung over their shoulders, stood around chatting. The place had the feel of the American "Wild West."
Northern India was a blur of colorful saris, fantastical architecture, and bearded, turbaned men who smelled of ghee. I was enthralled. I rode trains around the edges of India for a month-and-a-half until I reached Bombay (now Mumbai), where I was to meet my new boyfriend, Jamshid, an Indian medical student on summer break from his college in Iran.
After I’d been at my boyfriend’s house for two weeks, his brother arrived from a trip with his buddies to Afghanistan. The brother was the only one to return; the rest had been brutally murdered right in front of him. I didn’t feel it appropriate to ask what exactly had led to that fate. I had already bought my train ticket and was scheduled to depart two days later for that suddenly-scary country. Everyone tried to talk me out of going, but I refused to change my plan. I hadn’t yet seen Afghanistan, and I’d heard from other travelers that it was a whole different world.
But their pleadings had an effect. I stayed in Kabul less than a week and didn’t venture far from the beaten path. Kabuli women’s dress surprised me, especially having just come from India, where female legs were always covered. In Kabul, women walked down the street in fashionable, knee-length, Western-style dresses. Bare-headed women strolled tree-lined sidewalks in high heels and fancy hairstyles. Others cloaked themselves in huge scarves, concealing the knee-length dresses they wore over baggy pants, but leaving their faces bare.
Here and there, goldenrod yellow, olive green, or medium brown phantoms floated among the women. I’d never seen nor heard of burqas before and found it hard to imagine that a person walked beneath each flowing tent. These were traditional burqas, made of heavy cotton, not the nylon used today. They went to the ground all the way around, unlike their modern counterparts that have a shorter panel in front. When they went out, traditional women wore high-waisted homespun pants called duloq over the pants worn at home. I learned later that during this period, some Kabuli women held parliamentary and ministerial positions, worked as scientists, pharmacists, and teachers and ran their own businesses.3
When I left Kabul, I took the direct bus to Herat traveling through the desert via Kandahar rather than the three-day mountain route through the north. I generally felt safe the entire time.
Herat lies on an ancient trade route near Afghanistan’s border with Iran. Centuries-old elegant mosques, shrines, and a citadel dating back to Alexander the Great are well-visited even now by Heratis as well as a sprinkling of Afghan and foreign tourists. Queen Goharshad,4 an artist in her own right, established the Musalla Complex, a 15th century mosque and university whose ruined columns tower over Herat today. A lover of knowledge, she commissioned the educational center’s construction.
Legend has it that because the university she created was only for men and she also wanted women to study, she decreed that 200 women of her court should each marry a student, so that they, too, would have access to the extensive libraries.
A few years after that first foray to Afghanistan, degrees in hand, I left Ohio to seek my destiny in Washington, DC. I found it in the form of Bill Kelsey, a missionary kid who’d grown up in Jordan. Within nine months of meeting, we became engaged and set off on our around-the-world-on-the-cheap pre-wedding honeymoon.
In Japan, we marveled that a five-foot stack of beer cases in the alley behind our hostel was still intact upon our return later that night. In lively night markets in Taiwan we saw aphrodisiac salesmen cut the gall bladders out of living snakes, pour the bile into shot-glasses of sorghum whisky, and offer the concoction to passers-by. Electricity was just being installed in the Philippine village where we stayed, and I considered the life changes and unintended consequences it would bring. Bali was the "exotic east" on steroids. I pondered the wealth of a society that charred dozens of ducks to accompany a funeral procession. The snake temple in Malaysia hypnotized me, as well as the many snakes lounging around, and I delighted in being able to safely photograph them at close range.
Thailand