By Richard LaJeunesse
Guest columnist

This past weekend I participated in a citizen diplomacy program sponsored by our U.S. Department of State. The experience was extraordinary and compels me to share my reaction that our nation is doing something beneficial, effective and good.

Previously I would have had difficulty making a direct personal link between Cincinnati and Afghanistan in any sort of a coherent sentence. That was before our family welcomed a group of Pashtu-speaking Afghans to our house for Friday night dinner.

The Afghan visitors were brought here by the State Department on a three-week tour of several cities. Their specific objective was to assess the status of Islam in America. The general point of these State Department-sponsored visits is to let the up-and-coming leaders of developing nations see what the United States and Americans are like, first-hand.

Their visit to Cincinnati was coordinated by the International Visitors Council of Greater Cincinnati. By day, the Afghans participated in discussions and programs at various locations including the Islamic Center of Greater Cincinnati, and Xavier University.

By night, three of the Afghan visitors were our home dinner guests. My wife Madeleine and I assembled a houseful of extended family members, brothers and sisters-in-law, their children, our own three daughters, and some of their friends, more than 20 in all. This was an educational experience of the first degree, a remarkable opportunity for our family to get to know Afghans face-to-face; call it, citizen diplomacy.

These Afghans were no ordinary dinner guests. The delegation included Mr. Mawlavi Ghulam Mohammad Gharib, a Director in the Ministry of Hajj and Endowment in Kabul, Afghanistan. He played an active role in the resistance against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the subsequent rule of the Taliban. His fellow Afghans called him "Imam"; so we did too. He was one of the first religious scholars to issue a "Fatwa" (religious edict) against the Taliban when the Islamic militia came onto the Afghan political scene in 1994. That took guts.

We dined with Mr. Hajrudin Eqbal, the Chief Editor of Afghanistan's only Pashtun daily newspaper, Hewad. With a circulation of 5,000 to 10,000 the newspaper is probably the most-read print media outlet in Pashtun-speaking Afghanistan.

Our guests also included Mr. Shamsul Haq Hashimzai who is the General Director of Administration at the Research Center for Islamic Studies with the Ministry of Hajj and Endowment in Kabul. (The Hajj is the pilgrimage to Mecca, which is a lifetime goal of the Islamic faithful.)

Since our guests spoke Pashtu, Dari, Urdu and Arabic, but not English, we were relieved that the State Department provided an Afghan-born interpreter from Virginia. Yet language was absolutely no barrier to meaningful discussion and exchange.

We spoke and learned much from our guests. Hopefully, they learned about us and our country- citizen diplomacy at work. We found out that the top priorities of Afghans are security, food and education. We empathized with their plight in which political discussions and theories necessarily take second position when people go hungry. We learned that the problems facing Afghanistan are huge. Nonetheless our guests are hopeful.

We also shared the perspectives of our religious faiths which bind together Judaism, Christianity and Islam, as the three great monotheistic religions of the world. We conclusively established that our similarities are stronger than our differences.

Our guests seemed pleased to get to know an American family in its home, particularly with an extended family. The conversation was spirited, accentuated with many smiles and laughter. They seemed to join right in as members of the family. We were very pleased when the Imam, without saying a word, got up from the table and headed to the kitchen, for seconds!

What should you serve Afghan dinner guests? We really don't know, but were glad that we opted for an eye-appealing buffet of couscous with chicken, lamb and vegetable stew. It was a big hit, only surpassed by the poppy seed bread and strawberry pie which brought wide smiles to Afghan faces. The evening went quickly, and after our guests left, the family continued to talk about Afghanistan and the Afghans. Their situation is now real, and personal, to us. That's what happens with citizen diplomacy.

While our U.S. government spends billions of dollars on defense, we know that the lesser amounts spent on citizen diplomacy programs might offer a true long-term prospect to build friendly international relations, spread goodwill, and ultimately secure peace.

We do not live in embassies nor are we sent to faraway lands on perplexing diplomatic assignments. Yet each one of us has the potential to be a citizen ambassador of goodwill.

---

Richard La Jeunesse is an attorney with Graydon, Head & Ritchey LLP. He is also a board member of the non-profit International Visitors Council of Greater Cincinnati.