First-year follows unusual route to Middlebury

Author: Joseph Bergan

"My mother says I was 'born to the sound of gunfire'," explains an Afghani man sitting across from me in a corner room in Ross Commons. Moments earlier this man, Bilal Sarwary '10, had brewed green tea and poured it into a porcelain cup he had provided me before showing me a seat on his bed. Adorning the walls over his bed are pictures of his past. I am sweating, because I am late for the interview and a bit nervous. I have 10 minutes to interview Sarwary before a friend is to arrive to take him to dinner.

"I'm with a journalist," he yells out the window. "I will probably be 45 minutes late."

My voice rises in a weak response. "Oh, no…don't do.." I grasp for the polite words so that I do not ruin his evening. He will hear none of it.

As he sits down, I tell him it should not be long, just a few questions, just a 'Q and A' type of interview. I ask him how he came to Middlebury College, and he says it would be easier if he just read his personal statement; my cursory glance at the heading reveals the words, "About Me," typed in boldface.

Bilal begins with a recount of his childhood, how he was a "cheeky boy," always talkative and intelligent, a natural speech giver who attended the government school in Kabul.

"I was an ordinary boy, just like yourself," he explains. "I had a warm breakfast in the morning, I was just like you."

One morning, the nine-year-old "cheeky boy" bounced outside with his friends and ran like so many children did, out to the fields to play soccer. During the game, he heard loud noises and dark gray smoke began to fill the skyline of Kabul. The mujahideen had attacked Kabul, the jewel of Afghanistan, beginning a bloody civil war that would go largely unnoticed by the United States media until an early September morning in 2001.

Sarwary ran home to find his mother and sister on the floor covered in blood. The ambulance came but it was no use. There were so many dead civilians that his mother and sister were laid to rest at a mass funeral in Kabul. Days later, Sarwary was in a "scorching hot tent" in Pakistan, selling cold water for a little money, just to survive.

As he recounts this, he stares at the paper, concentrating on the words, scratching his head nervously. He is eager to share the precise details but not to relive those memories again.

The months and years that follow were difficult, as he worked as an apprentice painter, "which I discovered later was child labor," he says.

"Aghanistan was a hotel with no reception," he explains.

He made this keen observation while at his low-level job in the Intercontinental Hotel in Afghanistan where he was working on Sept. 11, 2001. In the following months America's eye turned back to this city of "no hope." The "cheeky boy" from Kabul now found a grand opportunity.

"I started as a BBC translator," a post from which he climbed the ranks all the way to the Kabul producer for that news agency. Since then he has appeared on NPR and briefly worked with the late Peter Jennings at ABC News. In those years, he saw more than your average first-year may see in his or her entire life.

"I am an ambassador," he explains, and his rhetoric brings to mind those great leaders of the civil rights era, "I am interested in weapons of mass construction, not weapons of mass destruction." Later he adds that, "They [the older generations] solved problems with bullets, we will solve them with ballots."

Today Sarwary has enrolled at Middlebury, to finally finish something he put on hold that day his world was so significantly altered. This new mission is far away from the BBC producer's desk in Kabul.

"The United States is a different planet," he explains. "I just came from a place where I had three hours of electricity a day and no warm shower in the morning."

By this time I have sufficiently bothered Sarwary's evening, but he does not care; this is what he is here for.

"I am on a mission to knock on as many doors as I can," he explains as the shouts of other Midd-kids fill the afternoon day. "We have a saying in Afghanistan, "The mountain may be high, but there is always a route."

I understood then that this was not a disruption for Sarwary. He wants nothing more than to sacrifice himself so that others may understand a little more about his country, so that they will not ignore it ever again. Sarwary says "I have accomplished so much under such different circumstances, and no one can take that away from me."