From the November 30th, 2003 Parade Magazine:

They Found Hope in Art
By Tamim Ansary

They live in Quetta now, a border city in northwest Pakistan. None of the boys remembers Afghanistan much- or perhaps they'd rather forget. Their neighborhood is a warren of narrow streets winding among mud huts,tin shacks, cinderblock houses and occasional concrete apartment buildings. The settlement started as a refugee camp but morphed over the years into a vast urban slum. It is called Haraza Town, because the refugees are all Hazaras- a long-suffering ethnic group from Central Afghanistan, victims of discrimination in regional wars and of brutal ethnic cleansing under the Taliban.

Saadat Ali, 19 and his family of 12 live here in three rooms. Elsewhere in the maze are Ahmad Zakaria, 12 and Abdul Wali and Ahmad Shuja, teenagers whose exact ages are unknown- also living with their large families. None has plans to return to his homeland. " Our lands are lost, our villages gone, " says Abdul Wali. " The fundamentalists are still gunning for us. It is better here."

"Here," however, is not great. Jobs are scarce, rents are high, and people worry about the water shortage in a city where ferocious dust storms sometimes blank out the sun for days.

Yet these young refugees do have one shelter from despair. They have art. Amazingly, Hazara Town offers 10 free drop-in art centers, founded by visionary activist-artists like Hussain Ali Rahimi and Hatif Ali, each serving some 200 boys and girls. And, more amazing still, the art these young people created has now traveled halfway around the world to California, where 10 of the boys' works of art were chosen as finalists in a contest affiliated with The Library of Congress.

It was Ahmad Shuja who found out about the contest in America, because he speaks some English. He was browsing in a shop that sells secondhand goods from the West on e day when he came across a tattered copy of the children's nature magazine "Ranger Rick." "I am a kid blessed with an extraordinary love of nature," he says. Ahmad brought the magazine and saw an article about a children's art and poetry contest run by River of Words, a nonprofit organization in Berkeley, California. It called for enteries on the environmental theme of "watersheds." But the magazine was four years old!

Ahmad hurried to an Internet cafe and fired off a frantic e mail to River of Words. Was the contest still on? Director Pamela Michael wrote back and said, " Yes- every year."

Hastily, with the help of their teacher, Hatif Ali, Ahmad and three friends got entries into the mail. Two of the boys made it to the finals, and that summer, Saadat Ali and Ahmad Zakaria got their prizes: a T-shirt, a box of art supplies and a ribbon.

News of the triumph spread at the art center. Hatif Ali soon found himself besieged by kids wanting to try their luck. And son, one day last spring, Pamela Michael and her assistant, Sasha Rabin, received a big package from Quetta. Wrapped in old muslin, tied with string and sealed with wax, it contained 73 astonishing works of art.

The largest item was a gift from Saadat Ali t River of Words-a painting depicting Bamiyan Valley, the heart of his people's homeland, as it looked before the Hazara's troubles. The painting showed two enormous Buddhas- the male Salsal and the female Shamama- carved into the cliffs some 2000 years ago by the Kushan Dynasty. Those sculptures projected a majestic serenity over the valley until the Taliban blew them up in 2001.

Saadat Ali made it to the finals again this year. He was glad, but notes:" The first-place winner gets a trip to Washington, D.C. I was only a finalist again. Well, one accepts what God gives."

He seems not to realize the scope of his achievement. This contest, co-founded by former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass, gets more than 11,000 entries a year. Fewer than 50 become finalists.

Noor Ali Haidar, 14, whose painting also made the finals, says he entered the contest to find out if he was really an artist. " I come to the art center two hours a day, but at home every minute I can spare I do my art," he says. "What Picasso was for the Spanish, I want to be fore the Hazara tribe."

His entry showed a boy in the desert whose water jug is broken. Perhaps because he has seen so much, even at his age Noor Ali seems concerned about his legacy. "When a person leaves this world, his art remains, " he says. " It proves that he lived- that he existed once."

For Saadat Ali, his art tells a story. "No one knows how hard we struggle in our lives," he says. "We are luck if we can show the world one page from our book of troubles. That's why art is important to me. Because one page of art can show so much."

How do the young Afghans picture the unknown world into which they have sent their art? Abdul Wali says, " I barely know Quetta. What does a poor man like me know about America? From the stories I guess it's like paradise."

Their dreams for the future range widely. Saadat Ali is going to travel to Iran this year to look for work as a servant. He hopes to make enough to keep his family in a home- that's his dream.

By contrast, Ahmad Shuja exudes optimism. "Before the Columbia crashed, I wanted to be an astronaut. Now I'm trying to decide between social worker, doctor, writer or artist. I like art because I can use it to show the suffering of my people. You ask what I think of America? I wonder what America thinks of us. I hope they know that we are not savages here. We are modern people, with our own culture. We are human. We love each other."

Tamim Ansary is the author of the memoir " West of Kabul, East of New York:An Afghan American Story." Picador