During those periods I experienced something that I can only describe as not being alone in the cell.

Not in a visual way.

I did not see anyone but a sense of presence.

Felt the same quality of presence I had felt in my bedroom that first night years ago, but much stronger and much more sustained.

A warmth that the physical temperature of the cell did not account for.

A sense of something steady next to me in the dark.

I know how this sounds to someone approaching it skeptically.

I also know what I experienced and I am describing it as plainly as I can.

I also had what I can only describe as a deep settled peace during some of those periods.

An absence of fear that was not the same as the absence of fear you have when nothing is threatening you.

But the absence of fear you have when something is absolutely threatening you and you are somehow not afraid of it anyway.

I cannot manufacture that.

It was not something I talked myself into.

It was simply there and I was simply in it.

By approximately day 40 I could no longer stand unaded.

I moved from a sitting position to lying down and staying mostly lying down because the effort of changing position was significant.

My prayers at this point were almost nonverbal.

I was not sure I was forming full sentences in my own mind.

I was mostly just directing myself toward God.

The way you face toward a light source even when you cannot see clearly just facing just turning toward at some point in those final days I cannot tell you the precise timing.

I stopped praying for rescue.

I had not consciously decided to stop.

I had simply run out of the structure that request required.

And what replaced it was something much simpler which was let me not be alone when this ends.

Whatever this ends into, let me not be alone in it.

And I was not I was not alone in it.

That is all I can tell you.

I I was not alone.

I was lying on the floor of the cell.

I did not know what day it was.

I did not know very clearly what was happening around me.

I was not afraid.

And then the door opened.

The door opened and I did not respond to it.

I was aware of it.

Aware that the door was open.

That light was coming in that was different from the usual small amount of light.

But I did not have the the capacity to respond to it.

My body had reduced itself to the most basic functions.

moving toward something, responding to something.

Those were not things I could do.

I heard voices, more than one person.

I heard the particular quality in a voice when a person is surprised by something.

Not alarm exactly, but the vocal register of someone confronting something unexpected.

I understand now that what surprised them was that I appeared to be dead.

from my stillness, my physical state, my color.

I have been told since by people who have worked with severe starvation cases that a person in the final stages looks a particular way, that the body has been communicating death even before actual death arrives.

One of the men came closer.

I was aware of him closer to me.

And then I made some kind of sound.

I do not know what kind.

I have no clear memory of what I produced.

But it was enough.

It was enough to change the atmosphere in that room very quickly.

The voices became louder.

Different voices.

It seemed like more people came to the doorway.

But there was a quality to what was happening around me that I can only describe as confusion.

Not the practiced confusion of a procedure being followed, but the genuine confusion of people who did not know what they were looking at or what to do about it.

I want to be careful about what I claim here and what I don’t.

I am not going to tell you that I saw an angel standing in the cell or that a voice from the sky spoke to the guards and they were struck with awe.

I do not know exactly what each person in that room saw or experienced.

What I know is what happened next and that what happened next was not what should have happened next by any logic of the system I was inside.

There was a prisoner in the cell next to mine.

I will call him Rosam.

He was not a Christian.

He was there for reasons having nothing to do with faith.

I lost some connection to the to the previous government.

I think though I never knew the details.

We had spoken occasionally through the wall in brief exchanges and whispered Dari just enough to know we existed on either side of the same concrete.

He was eventually released sometime after I was and through a chain of people that I will not trace in detail, we eventually communicated once I was outside the country.

what Rosam told me from what he had been able to observe.

And here in the adjacent cell during the final days of my imprisonment was that by the last few days the guards had stopped going in.

They would check through the door panel, see no movement, and leave.

He said that on at least one day he heard the guards talking to each other outside and the gist of what they said was that the man in that cell was finished.

Find that they were discussing what would be done with the body.

There was discussion about timing about who would be responsible for the removal about keeping it quiet.

Rostam also told me something else.

He said that during those last days, the other prisoners in the cells nearby, there were three or four people in that section of the facility.

All noticed something that none of them could account for.

He said there was a quality to the air in that section of the building, particularly near my cell that was different.

He described it as warm.

He said that several of the other prisoners, men of different backgrounds, at least one of whom was, he said, a fairly harsh and unscentimental person, remarked on it.

One of them asked a guard about it.

The guard had no explanation.

I do not know what to do with this information except to share it as it was shared with me exactly as plainly as Rostam told it to me.

I am not claiming a scientific explanation.

I am not claiming to know exactly what occurred.

I am only telling you what was witnessed by other human beings who had no reason to report it in the direction of the miraculous and who did report it.

What I know is that when the guards came that morning expecting to remove a body and found instead a living man barely living but living that it created a problem they were not equipped to handle.

The days that followed the morning they found me alive.

I am going to tell you this period honestly which means admitting that my memory of it is fragmentaryary and not entirely reliable.

I was in a very compromised state.

What I am about to describe is a reconstruction built from my fragments and from what I was later told by people who were part of what happened.

Sometime after the morning, the guards found me alive.

I began receiving water.

Small amounts brought to the cell.

Then after a day or more, something like food, watery, minimal, but something.

I was not able to eat much at first.

The body after prolonged starvation cannot simply receive food and process it normally.

The refeeding has to be slow or it causes its own serious harm.

Whoever made the decision to give me something must not have known or cared about that particular medical nuance.

But the amounts were small enough that it did not make things worse.

My consciousness became more consistent over the following days.

Uh not normal, not anything close to what I would have called normal 2 months before, but more present, more continuous.

I was aware of where I was.

I was aware of time passing in a more order way.

I was aware that something had shifted in the situation around me.

Though I could not have told you what or why, the guards who interacted with me during the period were noticeably different in their manner from what I remembered of the weeks before.

Not kind, I would not use that word, but less certain of themselves.

the way people act when they are not sure of the rule anymore.

When the situation has moved outside the procedures they understood, there was a weariness in how they approached the cell door that had not been there before.

I was aware of it even in my compromised state.

I heard conversations outside the cell, not clearly then not completely but fragments.

There seemed to be disagreement about what to do with me.

This is consistent with what I learned later, which was that my continued existence had become a complication within the facility.

The intention had been that I would not survive.

That I had survived created a question of what happened next.

And the question was not a simple one because doing anything overt at that point carried risks of attention that the people running the facility did not want.

I need to explain something about how Afghan Christian prisoners have been released in documented cases because how I was released is consistent with patterns that are real.

And I want you to understand it is not a miraculous escape in any cinematic sense.

It is in its own way something on almost more interesting than that.

It is the story of how networks of ordinary people on the outside work quietly to bring someone out.

the diaspora of Afghan Christians, people who had left Afghanistan and were now in various countries in Europe at in North America, in Australia, constituted a community that was small but connected.

They maintained and in the awareness of what was happening on the ground in Afghanistan as best they could through family members still inside, through trusted contacts, through organizations that worked specifically on the issue of religious persecution in Afghanistan.

open doors, voice of the martyrs, smaller, less public organizations that worked in ways that required discretion.

These networks operated in the background of the visible world.

When someone was arrested, when a believer disappeared, neither community noticed.

Word traveled through the networks encoded ways.

A message through a family member to someone abroad, a contact who knew a contact.

It was slow and imprecise, but it moved.

Mariam had been in contact through means I will not specify because they involve people who are still inside Afghanistan with someone connected to one of these external networks.

She had communicated what had happened to me.

Not all the details, but enough.

This had set into motion a quiet process on the outside that involved, as best I understand it, two elements.

The first was what might be called documentation and visibility.

people outside knowing what was happening, being aware and in a limited and careful way making sure that certain parties understood that this situation was not invisible.

This is not a loud or dramatic thing.

It is the quiet work of making it known that someone is watching.

The second element involved, as I understand it, a financial transaction that I am not going to moralize about or pretend was anything other than what it was.

In Taliban controlled Afghanistan, as in many environments of this kind, certain outcomes can be facilitated through money.

Someone somewhere in the chain of people connected to my case made an arrangement with someone who had authority in the structure above the facility where I was being held.

The amount involved the the precise mechanism.

I do not know the details and I am not sure I want to know them.

What I know is that it was not my doing was not Mariam’s doing was the doing of people outside the country who had worked and prayed and given their resources to make it possible.

What is the order for my release? Whatever form it took, whatever justification was used to legitimize it within the system came down through the facility.

I was told I was being released.

I was told this by a guard who came to my cell on a morning, slid the panel open and said it simply.

No explanation, no apology, no acknowledgment of what had been done to me.

I asked him to repeat it.

He repeated it without apparent impatience.

I asked him again because I was not entirely sure my mind was working correctly.

He said it a third time and then slid the panel close and walked away and then came back a short while later and open the door.

Walking.

This is the part that no one who has not been in a comparable state will fully understand.

I had not walked properly, not stood and moved more than a few shuffling steps within weeks.

Other guards had to help me, not with any care or gentleness, but with the practical necessity of men who needed to move something from one point to another.

They got me upright.

They moved me forward.

My legs understood the concept of walking, but the execution was not reliable.

I held on to the wall when there was a wall.

I held on to the guard when there was nothing else.

the corridors, the compound steps.

Getting down steps was a significant challenge.

And then outside the cold air hit me with a physical force.

I had been inside in that cell breathing that particular recycled air for 54 days.

outside air, even the cold, still air of a cobble winter, hit my lungs in a way that was almost painful in its intensity.

I stopped at the threshold.

The guard pushed me forward.

Not harshly, but firmly.

I went forward and then I was outside.

What? I the sky.

I looked up at the sky.

I don’t know how long I stood there looking at it before the guards moved me again.

It was overcast that morning.

Not blue, not dramatic, just a gray cabbble winter sky.

The kind of sky you would walk under a 100 times without noticing it.

But it was enormous.

It was endlessly, staggeringly enormous in a way I had completely stopped being able to imagine from inside four concrete walls.

I had forgotten how large the sky was.

I had forgotten that there was so much space in the world, that the world was this big.

They put me in a vehicle, short drive, stop somewhere, made me get out and Mariam was there.

I have tried many times to describe the moment I saw her and I find that every time I try the words are not right and not because the emotion is too large though it was but but because the moment itself was very simple and very quiet.

She was there.

She looked at me at what I had become in those 54 days and her face did something that I cannot describe in any language.

Then she came to me and put her arms around me and I put my arms around her and we stood on a street in Kabul holding each other and I could feel that she was praying.

Her lips were moving against my shoulder and she was praying barely audible and I could feel the words even if I could not hear them.

I could not stand for long.

She had arranged for somewhere nearby to go, not our apartment which was no longer safe, a relative’s home where we could be for a short time.

She got me there.

She had figured out how to do all of it while I was inside.

She had kept the girls safe and managed our situation and coordinated with the networks outside and somehow remained standing through all of it.

She is a stronger person than I am.

I think I knew this before.

I was very sure of it afterward.

The first day outside I slept.

That is mostly what I remember of it.

Being horizontal somewhere that was not a concrete floor under actual blankets and sleeping in a way I had not been able to sleep for weeks.

Deep and long and without waking to cold or noise in the same way.

The first time I ate real food, Mariam brought me rice and a little broth, the most gentle things she could find.

I could only manage a few spoonfuls.

My body did not know what to do with food anymore and had to be reintroduced to the concept slowly.

This process took days.

The full process of my body learning how to eat again and my system adjusting took several weeks and was not without setbacks.

I was 41 years old when they put me in that cell.

I looked by Mariam’s account closer to 60 when I came out.

We could not stay in Kapul.

This was clear.

Whatever had facilitated my release was not a guarantee of permanent safety.

It was a window and windows closed.

The networks that had helped get me out were also the networks that helped us understand we needed to move and that helped us think about how the process of leaving Afghanistan is not something I will describe in detail.

Partly because it involved people and methods that I do not want to put at risk and partly because that story belongs to others as much as it belongs to me.

What I will say is that it took time.

I it required going through several places before we reached safety and that the moment we finally crossed into a country where we could stop running where we could take a breath and know that the breathe was not a risk.

The girls who were 12 and nine by then and had been through things no child should go through sat together on a floor and cried.

and Miam and I sat with them and we all cried together for a long time.

And then Sana, the younger one, the 9-year-old, stopped crying and looked at me and said that she was hungry.

And I laughed for the first time in I did not know how long.

I laughed just like that because she was right and because hunger this time was something I could do something about.

The sky the day we left Afghanistan for the last time was blue, clear, cold, very blue.

I looked at it before I looked at anything else.

I always look at the sky now every morning.

I do not take it for granted anymore.

The space of it, the simple extraordinary fact of it.

I am going to ask you to sit with me for a little while longer because I want to tell you about the part of the story that does not get told as often as the dramatic part.

People who hear a testimony like mine, people who come to hear about the prison and the starvation and the survival, they come for that part.

And I understand that it is a remarkable part.

I am not going to pretend it is not.

But the part that has actually shaped me the most, the part that I live in every day is not the cell.

It is everything that happened after the cell.

Survival is not the same as recovery.

And recovery, I have learned I is not something that happens on a timeline.

It does not follow the schedule that your hope would assign to it.

The physical recovery took far longer than I expected.

I understood in a general way that the body takes time to restore itself after severe malnutrition.

What I did not understand is how total the disruption is, how many systems are affected, how long they remain affected, how the recovery has its own difficult phases that are in some ways harder than the deprivation itself.

Because the deprivation has a clarity to it, a defined enemy, and the recovery is just slow and uneven and sometimes discouraging.

For the first 3 months after my release, I was not able to walk for more than a short distance without my legs giving in.

My muscles had been so depleted that rebuilding them was a genuine effortful process.

I needed help with things a grown man should not need help with.

I need to be honest about that because I think the public understanding of what these kinds of orals do to a person tends to skip past this part very quickly.

You do not come out of 54 days of deliberate starvation and then stand up the next week and give a sermon.

You come out and you learn to walk again.

Literally, that is what you do.

My digestion was disrupted for months.

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