Where the Road Ended In Nuristan, Humanity Began— The Winter That Changed Me

Strangers, Lack Of Kindness And America’s Most Profound Shame

You know that long skinny sliver of land that juts out of northeast Afghanistan to separate Pakistan, Tajikistan, India and China? Probably not but it’s easy to see on any map and when I was hanging around Kabul in 1971 it looked like a challenging place to explore— except there were no roads. So a couple of fellow travelers and I got some horses and off we went to Nuristan, formerly Kafiristan, “land of unbelievers” (the last part of Afghanistan to convert to the Muslim faith). Anyway, long story short, I fell off my horse, badly hurt my ankle, couldn’t ride and got left by my friends before winter in a tiny hamlet (2 families). One of the families took me in and treated me like a member of their family ’til spring when I could ride back to Kabul.

By the time I had gotten there, I was more or less able communicate in Dari, an ancient form of Farsi which I had picked up in Iran and then Kabul. But no one in the family spoke or even understood Dari. They spoke their own language but were able to communicate with me in Pashto, which I was able to understand a little. They were great to me, shared everything they had and treated me like a revered guest. The son of the family— around my own age— was my best freind, my brother. No one there had ever heard of the U.S. and no one had ever experienced electricity.

My love for the Afghan people stems from those months and that experience. By the time spring softened the snowpack and I could ride back to Kabul, I realized I was carrying something I hadn’t arrived with— something harder to name than a healed ankle or a new dialect. I had grown to love not just the people who had taken me in, but the very idea of kindness untethered from obligation. You know what I mean?

I had come to know a form of grace that asked for nothing and gave everything. It was a love for strangers, yes, but also a reverence for the invisible threads that bind us across language, belief and geography. What I found in that season of stillness was a kind of sacred ordinariness— the quiet miracle of being cared for by those who owed me nothing, and did so anyway, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, an almost sacred sense of connection that goes beyond language, beyond culture. It’s not just love for the Afghan people; I thought of it as a love for humanity, maybe, but rooted in something more intimate and lived. It was a kind of reverence, maybe, for human decency stripped of pretense. A deep, abiding respect for the generosity of strangers, a quiet, unspoken ethic of care— of community— not because of shared beliefs or blood ties, but because that’s just what they did. It was hospitality not as performance, but as principle. And it left me with this enduring love for the beauty of human connection in its purest form: unasked for, unadorned, and utterly transformative. 

Now I can better understand it as the polar opposite of MAGA, the polar opposite of Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, Russ Vought… Yesterday Kristi Noem decided to deport the Afghans who have taken refuge in America. You can probably imagine how I felt reading about that. Lying, she said the Taliban is no longer a threat and they can go home, including many who will be killed for having helped U.S. forces during the occupation and war. She is withdrawing Temporary Protected Status from them. It is the opposite of how they treated me when I was in Afghanistan— inhospitable and cruel... and at the exact same time as right-wing Afrikaners are being flown to the U.S. and welcomed for resettlement. Noem claims the Afs no longer merit any protections, even though conditions in Afghanistan are worse now, especially for women, than they were when those people were given refuge by the Biden administration.

Joseph Azam, the chairman of the Afghan-American Foundation called it a betrayal of those who assisted the U.S. during its 20 years in the country. “The sacrifices Afghan allies made in service of the American mission in Afghanistan were not temporary, the protection we offer them must also be permanent. Any instance of that protection being pulled is not only a betrayal of these allies but of the 800,000 Americans who served alongside them in Afghanistan and the countless Americans who have worked to evacuate them to safety since 2021.” 

As you can probably guess, I have zero patience for monsters like Trump and Noem— people who’ve built their entire identities around cruelty, around the glorification of indifference and the performance of power. People who would sneer at the very villagers who took me in, who would call them backward or expendable, who’ve never known what it means to rely on the kindness of strangers because they’ve never offered it themselves. They peddle the lie that empathy is weakness, that borders make people dangerous, that anyone who needs help must be suspect. But I lived through a winter that proved the opposite. I was at my most vulnerable— injured, foreign, helpless— and it wasn’t “greatness” or “toughness” that saved me. It was humility. Generosity. A quiet kind of love.

I'd bet Trump couldn’t find Nuristan on a map, maybe not even Afghanistan. Noem would probably shoot at it from a helicopter. But I lived among people there who showed more humanity in a single snow-covered day than those two have mustered in their entire lives.