Everyone I meet in my life makes an impact on me in some way. Some people make huge impacts, impacts the size of the meteor that wiped the dinosaurs off of the Earth. Some people make very small, grain of salt impacts. Some people I will remember forever, some I will forget in years.

In the 9th grade I went to two different schools. The high school I was zoned for was in a VERY bad part of town and naturally my mom didnt want me going there. So, I got a special transfer to a high school in a good part of town. My special transfer was for a psychology class that wasnt offered at my zoned school. Needless to say, within months of being a member at my new special transfer school I was kicked out for threatening a teacher. I was subsequently sent to the school that was in my school zone. In the middle of the worst neighborhood on my side of town. About 50 white kids went to this school, a few Latinos, even fewer Asians, and the rest were black. I didnt have a problem with this at all and felt extremely comfortable in this environment because it was what I had been used to throughout my whole school career. Not to mention, my best friend Kathryn went to this school and I was super excited to be back with her.
Well, I ended up skipping all of my classes at this school..hanging out in the hallways, gyms, and bathrooms with my friends, talking on my cellphone. There wasnt a lot of authority in this school so it was pretty easy to get away with this kinda stuff.

One day I was walking through the hallways when I was supposed to be in one of my classes and I saw a very beautiful man. He was definitely not a Freshman. He was probably a Sophomore.  He was tall, olive skinned, blonde haired and had eyes that were as green as emeralds. He really was unlike any male I had ever seen before and I was instantly very attracted. I walked up to him and I said..”Hey…are you Puerto Rican?” (lol, really funny now that I look back on it). And he said, “No. I am Afghani. Im from Afghanistan.” I was a little taken aback because I had NO idea where Afghanistan was. At that point I was thinking maybe somewhere in Africa? Anyhow, he gave me his screen name and said he spent most of his time online (cha ching! I did too!) and told me to hit him up. Cool!

I wanted to learn more about this guy. He said his name was JT. I knew this had to be short for something. I thought about him for the rest of the day and wondered where Afghanistan could possibly be. So I came home, and looked it up. It was next to Iran, China, and Pakistan. I started to learn about his country. I started to talk to him and get to know him, we became close friends. We played “Empire Earth” together for hours and became close.
Over the course of our friendship I would ask him questions about where he was from. What was it like?
He told me he didnt remember a lot about his country. He was born in 1985 and Afghanistan was in the middle of a war. His family were driven out of their homes after he was born and they took refuge in the neighboring country of Pakistan. My friends name was Mussa. That means Moses in Arabic. I soon learned that Mussa had an older brother, equally beautiful although very contrasting in his looks, named Eisa, which means Jesus.
Mussa would not talk about his country or where he came from very often. I believe that maybe he felt his identity had been stolen by those Soviet Tanks that moved through the streets of his home town as a child.  Mussa never had a lot to say about his home land. Despite this, he was deeply proud of where he was from, deeply proud of his family and everything they had overcome. Deeply saddened by what years of war, and ravaging had done to his homeland. Deeply saddened by what it had become.

I met Eisa a little while later. He was not as tall as Mussa. He was darker skinned, like chocolate, with deep brown eyes, midnight colored hair,equally beautiful, and three years older. He remembered where he was from. He remembered his white house, his yard full of bright green grass, the bright red flowers planted underneath the windowsill. He remembered everything before they had to leave to seek refuge in Pakistan. The picture he painted of his home was not a reflection of the pictures I was now seeing on the news. No longer were there Soviet Tanks invading the beautiful streets of my beautiful friends home land, they were now American Tanks, American troops, and American missiles destroying the ruins of what the Soviets left behind, stirring up the dust from the previous wars. By this time our country had invaded their country. We were imperializing them, just like the Soviets did before us, the Europeans before them, and the Moslems before them.

I asked Eisa to send me pictures of him and Mussa when they were little boys. I wanted to see a glimpse into their childhood. The first picture he sent me, I will never forget, and I wish I still had it.
Standing outside of their childhood home in Afghanistan, beautiful green mountains in the background. A white fence lined with colorful red and purple flowers directly behind two gorgeous little boys. A barely standing Mussa, smiling with his hand to his mouth, his blonde hair blowing with the wind. A taller Eisa, with a very stern face, sadness and confusion in his eyes, and an AK-47 in his hands. That picture really answered a lot of questions for me, but asked even more.

I started thinking about them the night before last because I watched a documentary about Afghanistan and amidst all of the dust, the sand, the rocks, the ruins, the guns…I saw those beautiful people again. The same beauty I saw in my two friends who I will always remember.  That show made me think about them, and mostly the plight of the beautiful Afghan people who have been oppressed for hundreds of years and who have survived and persevered throughout hundreds of years of imperialization, oppression and pain.

I  miss my friends. I still talk to them from time to time, and I think about them often. I always check in to make sure that they have maintained their sense of identity living in a place that wants so badly to rip it away from them. They are two people who I will never forget. I will never forget their beautiful family, the stories they told me and the music they exposed me too…I felt very privileged to be taken in and shown so much of their culture, a culture that is so misconstrued here in the west but that I find endless beauty in.

Just a story of two people I have encountered in my life that I will remember forever.