Reason for worry easy to interpret

I worry about Enayat.
Sometimes, when I’m having trouble getting to sleep, I try to see how many of my interpreters I can recall by name. After press development projects in 11 different countries, they tend to blur together.
Counting them, naming them, is a little like counting sheep: Rodica, Iulian, Sandu, Olga, Dmitry, Tamuna, Denis, Elena, Ekaterina, Irina, Rosa, Anton, Lucia, Ina, Diana, Angela, Nyan Lynn, Htin Aung Kyaw, just to name those who come to the top of my head.
Until you work through an interpreter, you can’t understand the relationship. This person is your voice. This person is your ears. You are incredibly dependent upon this individual, and if you work well together you develop an intensely symbiotic relationship.
ESP and the old “Vulcan mind meld” begin to work. You begin to understand the language even before it has been translated. A hard to define connection is established between the two of you.
Olga was my first interpreter in Moldova. She was drafted into it. Though she was just another student in my class on the role of an independent press in an open society, her language skills were better than anyone else’s. She was fluent in English, Russian and Romanian, and her command of French was better than my high school version.
Ina filled in a few times, but the students didn’t like her very much. Sandu fared much better, probably because he was a guy and most of the students were young women.
Some — Dmitry in Kyrgyzstan, Iulian in Moldova and Denis in Central Asia — were more like assistants than interpreters. Anton in Belarus was also sometimes my babysitter to make sure I didn’t get arrested. In trouble maybe, but arrested no.
Others were drafted into the role. Htin Aung Kyaw is an outstanding staffer at the U.S. Embassy in Yangon, Myanmar. But when the regular interpreter couldn’t show up, he stepped in. When he did, it sealed our friendship.
And then there is Enayat.
Enayat is a young Afghan guy, smart, articulate, free-wheeling. I met him in Mazar e Sharif, where I had been sent by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting to do some training in 2011. Enayat wasn’t my interpreter for the seminar, but he was invaluable outside of the classroom.
A fixer by trade, he had worked for a number of Western news organizations since the U.S. action in Afghanistan was launched. He had the language skills, he had the connections and he was pretty much fearless.
I met him through a mutual friend and he quickly agreed to help me out during my one-week solo stint in that part of northern Afghanistan.
My routine was pretty boring: Take a different route to the office each morning so I wasn’t establishing a pattern, do my training session, get on the Internet at the office to send an email home, take another route back to my hotel, eat in the crappy restaurant in the hotel basement, try not to lose consciousness from the fumes of the kerosene heater in my room, watch soccer on the TV, write in my journal, then climb under as many blankets as possible to try to ward off the winter chill.
But when I met up with Enayat I had two requests for my weekend off.
I wanted to go to a buzkhashi game and I wanted to visit Balkh. Enayat did his best to make both happen.
Balkh turned out to be the easier part. It’s an ancient city outside of Mazar e Sharif that is now pretty much rubble, but Enayat had a college friend there who could show us around. Because it was winter, the Taliban were not so active.
Buzkhashi was a little tougher. Enayat took me to the place where the game — a kind of barbarian polo where horsemen battle over the carcass of a dead goat — is usually played each weekend. When we showed up, it looked like it was time for kick-off, or whatever it is you do with a goat carcass to get things started. But there was a problem.
It seems there had been a quarrel the week before over the outcome of the game, a quarrel expressed with AK-47s. That week’s game was called off, but I’ve always been grateful to Enayat for trying.
And now, of course, I worry about him. Events in Afghanistan continue to go badly, and they are especially dangerous for people exactly like Enayat, people who helped the West, whether military or journalist.
Each time I have trouble going to sleep and count the interpreters, it’s always Enayat who keeps me awake.