1960s Afghanistan explored through letters from a grandmother
What began as a small presentation in a little room in Old Main ended with an audience knowing a little more about a country America has recently been at war with.
Thursday, Terry Gifford flew to Utah from the Seattle area and introduced Afghanistan to Utah State University in a way unlike news coverage and magazines have portrayed the last several of years.
Her small audience of about 25 didn’t see clips of Osama bin Laden or our troops. They instead saw the smiling faces of Afghan people in the 1960s when Lucy Shook, Gifford’s grandmother, lived there.
“She loved the people and she looked at them without judgment,” Gifford said. “She accepted the strange culture, the very different religion, and she tried to look for all that was good in it.”
Shook moved to Afghanistan in 1965 because her husband worked there for a time. She sent letters to her children, telling them about the people she had grown to love, the dry desert land and the country that was home for four years.
These letters stayed in the hands of her children, were recently edited by Shook’s daughter and are now published in a book called “Letters from Afghanistan.”
Gifford, in a dimly lit room, sat beneath a screen and portrayed a glimpse of the letters and what her grandmother had experienced living in Afghanistan. The screen showed clippings of the people, the animals and the culture, all of which were filmed by Shook and her husband while living there.
Piano music accompanied the voice of Gifford as the audience watched the video that portrayed the women covered from head to toe, sickness, mountains and happiness.
“The people all seem happy; they pray often and I’m sure our Heavenly Father is mindful of them,” Gifford read from one of Shook’s letters.
Gifford read, “The men wear baggy pants, turbans and toga-like things; and then to make it more fantastic they will put on an American or European coat.”
Then spectators were reminded that in the 1960s, the Afghan world was strictly a man’s world; the women weren’t counted.
The video also depicted trees, children, sheep and camels.
The audience watched the people garden beneath the hot, dry sun while Gifford read, “The Afghans found a way in my heart.”
Gifford read Shook quoting an Afghan man who said, “The Afghan is happy because he does not have money.”
Erica Jackson, an undeclared freshman, said the presentation was touching because “the people have so little, but are so happy.”
Jackson wanted to attend after she received an e-mail about it.
“It looked interesting and with the war, I wanted to get a perspective of what it’s really like there,” Jackson said.
Georgiana Banellis, the special events coordinator of the USU Museum of Anthropology, heard about Gifford by listening to KUSU the day before. She said watching and listening to Gifford gave her an opportunity to think about the world and see a different culture.
“I have traveled in the military and I appreciated culture,” Banellis said. “I was pleased with the opportunity for the community to learn about Afghanistan.”
“Letters from Afghanistan” is available in the Utah State University Bookstore for those who want to hear first-hand what the country was like 40 years ago. All money received from the book will be donated to help women and children in developing countries.
-mnewbold@cc.usu.edu