A Thousand Splendid Suns

I have never really sat and thought about how great America is.

I was so excited to get back to the United States after Israel, but not because I was so grateful for the freedoms I enjoyed at home or anything. It was just because I missed it.

image via

"And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion. And whenever those twin poisonous flowers began to sprout in the parched land of that field, Mariam uprooted them." 

 -Khaled Hosseini

This past week I finished A Thousand Splendid Suns,

a book centered on the fall of the beautiful Kabul and the people within it.

As the war began within the city and within the home of one family I cried inside. 

But when the Taliban took over I screamed inside. I yelled at them. I cried for those women and I sobbed for those children. It was so difficult to read of a mother being beaten by the Taliban on a daily basis because her husband refused to accompany her outside of the home.

What kind of a society could allow that? 

What kind of a world exists where an entire nation of people could be oppressed? 

What world is this that sees men, women and children suffering and hasn't stopped it?

I can’t describe to you how sorry I am that I haven’t been more grateful 

for the life and freedoms I enjoy in this land.

But I am so thankful that I now can say that I truly do understand the greatness

 of this nation that I call home.

How hard it would be to live in a city

 where you risk losing your hand because it is better than dying of hunger.

 where breaking society's norms results in a loss of everything you know.

 where a woman can’t remember the last time her body was whole and healed.

  where a woman's face cannot be seen outside the home.

 where a woman has no opportunities to miss 

because there are no opportunities for anything other than submission.

How hard it is to live with no rights, to regret being born a girl, to regret birthing a girl.

I am happy to be a woman in a place where I hold my own power and

 I weep for women in places where they do not.