The dictionaries were heavier than the textbooks Parweez Koehestanie dragged to the library every day in the first year of his medical studies. As a young refugee from Afghanistan, he had a huge language gap. He could understand the study materials only with the help of English-Persian, Dutch-Persian, and Dutch-English dictionaries, as well as a string of other translation literature.
“Look, I used to sit down there,” the doctor tells us as we walk into the medical library building. “At the bottom of the stairs in a cubicle. I often only went home at 10 pm, when the receptionist came to lock up.” Things have changed around here, he notes. “Where are the books? I don’t see any books.”
The layout of the building appears to have changed considerably since 2017, when he left Nijmegen. Still, he contentedly takes a deep breath to say how nice it feels to be here again. “For the first few years of my studies, I more or less lived in this library.”
In October, former Radboud University students elected him alumnus of the year, because of his social commitment and inspirational course of study. Koehestanie now works as a gastrointestinal and liver specialist at the Bravis hospital in Roosendaal. His house, which he shares with his wife and two children, is in Utrecht. Nijmegen may be something of the past, but it represents an intense and precious time.
“Did you know that I walked around here for 16 years? Study, hospital internship, PhD programme ... I know every passageway of Radboud Hospital, and I often ate my meals in the Refter. “€4.5 for a meal, including dessert.” Sixteen years, he repeats to himself. “That’s longer than I ever lived in Afghanistan.”
Intolerance and terror
Hairatan, 1996. Parweez Koehestanie lives with his father, mother, brothers and sister in this town in northern Afghanistan, on the border with Uzbekistan. Previously, the family fled Kabul as the Taliban took control and established their first Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan in the country. Hairatan remained an exception, kind of like that small indomitable Gallic village of Asterix, that just could not be subdued. A town where girls were still allowed to go to school, where you could still fly kites (a popular hobby among Afghans) and where people watched CNN and the BBC to hear what was happening in their part of the world.
Until, there too, the Taliban (literally: 'students') came and rattled at the gate. Their arrival brought a very different lifestyle, with a medieval attitude. Those who did not accept it faced intolerance and terror. In all haste, Parweez and his brother buried the satellite dish that allowed them to access foreign TV channels. One night, father Koehestanie took his son aside. “I’ve arranged everything for you,” he said. "You’re leaving the country, travelling to Europe." The father did not want his son to have to fight for or against the Taliban, which led him to this radical decision. Parweez was 15 years old.
“I was still young, I didn’t stand out,” the Afghan explains 25 years later at a table in Nijmegen’s Faculty of Medicine. “The Taliban didn’t know who I was, so I was able to travel through their territory unnoticed. If they’re after you, you don’t stand a chance, they’ll catch you.” Parweez’s
father arranged his flight through people traffickers, middlemen who are everywhere but are rarely seen, Koehestanie says. You never know where they will turn up or how they will take you further. Parweez had to cover part of the journey on foot, drove on the back of trucks, travelled stretches on a Russian train, where he hid in the luggage compartment under a bench, was arrested twice and spent some time in prison. A year into his journey, he had crossed ten countries, and all this time he had had no contact with his parents.
“Now that I have children of my own, I try to imagine what it must have been like for my parents,” he says, as he gazes down at the table. “I don’t know if I would have dared it, letting my son go like that. On the way, I often blamed my father for sending me away, it was a terrible journey, but now I just think it was really brave.” Not that his father had much choice, as Koehestanie acknowledges. A life under the Taliban is like dying, he says. It’s a life without freedom, dominated by fear. By sending a son to Europe, father Koehestanie opened a door to the future. It proved to be a successful strategy, because in the wake of the son, the parents, brothers, and sister also came west.
A year of somersaults
He remembers his arrival in Lochem, after a three-day stay at an application centre in Zevenaar. “Lochem is a small, green village at the edge of the Achterhoek. A group leader welcomed me with open arms after my bus trip. There was food, and there were clean towels and a toothbrush waiting for me in the room. I immediately felt safe. As if I’d been doing somersaults for a year and was now finally allowed to stand still on the ground again.” From day one, the staff at the centre for UAMs (unaccompanied minors) asked him about his dreams. What did he want to become? Together with other young refugees, he was offered language lessons, sports, music. “They did so many things with us. Looking back, I think that it helped enormously to get the trauma of that lonely journey out of us.” Koehestanie wanted to become a doctor; he could not remember ever wanting anything else, even as a child. In the Netherlands, he started with MAVO, went on to complete HAVO, and followed this up with a first-year programme at a university of applied sciences. In the meantime, he moved to Blerick. He never stopped focusing on his studies.
“The counsellors said medicine might be too much of a stretch, given my language gap. I’d only had a few years of English at the HAVO, and most medical textbooks were in English. But I’m a huge optimist, and also quite stubborn. So I just went ahead and did it. I’d been in the Netherlands for over four years when I was accepted to study medicine in Nijmegen. I always say that perseverance and motivation are more important than intelligence when it comes to completing a study programme.”
The stack of dictionaries he lugged to the library every day was a manifestation of that perseverance. And yes, he did spend more time studying than his fellow students, but so what? He did not aspire to student life in Nijmegen pubs and fraternities. When he wasn’t studying, he worked for the Paymaan foundation, which he co-founded. This foundation raises money to pick up orphans and other children from the streets in Afghanistan and send them to school. It still exists in 2022. Proudly, Koehestanie explains that the first girls who were helped off the street at the time are now running the entire operation.
Survival instinct
As soon as we talk about Afghanistan, Koehestanie’s tone changes. He often shakes its head. He would like to remain positive, but how can he be positive about a country that has gone completely bankrupt? About his homeland having gone to the dogs now that the Taliban are once again in charge? The entire world could watch via TV and internet as the bearded men went back to calling
the shots last year – after the dramatic retreat of the US. The images of Afghans desperately clinging to the last planes leaving for the free world at Kabul airport are burned into his memory. That man who clambered onto the wing and fell down ...
“That was not a stupid man,” he says softly. “He was a young man from Afghanistan’s national football team. But this is what people do in an emergency situation. It’s called survival instinct. They turn off their rational thinking in an ultimate attempt to save themselves.” It was what he did himself, 25 years ago. And it was also what led his father to his decision. His father, who literally said to Parweez: “I’d rather you were alive anywhere else than to see you die before my eyes at the hands of the Taliban.” And so he sent his son on a risky journey with no guarantee of a happy ending. It was the last straw. After seeing the terrible images of Afghans in distress, the young Koehestanie pulled the plug on all his social media. He couldn’t do it; it hurt too much.
In 2010, he went back to Afghanistan for six months to train doctors. He did so via the second foundation he set up with some colleagues in the Netherlands: MCAN (Medical Committee Afghanistan-Netherlands). Dutch doctors help to rebuild healthcare and medical education. Koehestanie sees it as his duty to give something back for the freedom he gained in the Netherlands.
In 2010, Afghanistan was safe; the country was on the rise. “But the reports I’m getting now are not very hopeful,” he says gloomily. There is nothing left of good healthcare in his homeland. There is a severe shortage of drugs and medical equipment, and infant mortality has quadrupled. If you get cancer in Afghanistan now, you have no chance of getting treatment. Only the rich still have access to private clinics where good doctors work. But then again, who is rich in Afghanistan?
A year after the Taliban’s return, the economy has collapsed, women have fewer and fewer rights – parks and fairs were recently declared off limits – and, aside from the radical Talibs, there are other, even more extreme Islamist groups who carry out attacks on Shiites and anyone else they consider to be heretics. “People are tired; they’ve lost their resilience. I would so love for Afghanistan to be part of my life. Despite the war, I have fond memories of it; I was a child there. I love every stone in Afghanistan. But I cannot go there. My children have never even been there.”
Hardened atmosphere
Outside the medical faculty, evening has fallen. Students are few and far between in the library building tonight. A group of doctors come in for drinks. Kuwait greets several of them. “I still know a lot of people here.”
Social, left-wing Nijmegen has only ever been good to him, which is why he likes to come back here. But he will not come back to live in the Waal city; Nijmegen is not central enough. His wife, also an Afghan, obtained her PhD in Leiden. He himself works in Brabant. And for the things he does for the Afghan community, it is useful that he lives in the middle of the country. Just the other day, he acted as interpreter for an asylum seeker stranded in Ter Apel. The man was angry. And rightly so, says Koehestanie. “He’d been complaining of abdominal pain for six months. Turned out he had metastatic stomach cancer, in the terminal phase. But he was not heard, even though he spoke perfectly good English.” This coincided with the death of a baby at the Groningen application centre, which led to a lot of criticism being levelled at Ter Apel. The atmosphere in the Netherlands has hardened a lot when it comes to the reception of asylum seekers. “I was asked: what do you want to become? Now the question is: when are you going back? That’s quite a different approach.”
Or take Harskamp. The Afghans who arrived there last year after fleeing the Taliban in their own country were pelted with eggs. Asylum seekers are increasingly seen as unwanted immigrants, people whom 'we' don't want here. Koehestanie is really concerned about it. “I heard myself defending the Netherlands to that man with the terminal cancer. I heard myself say: in this country, we take care of everyone. But actually, he was right: the care he got was no good at all.” For this particular asylum seeker, it no longer made a real difference; even with an early diagnosis, he would have died. But still. Why does it have to be this way in the Netherlands?
Koehestanie prefers to not get involved in public debate. In the past, he occasionally appeared on a talk show, but that is not something he would do now. Otherwise, he might come home to find angry citizens with torches on his doorstep, as Sigrid Kaag did recently. “I’m safe here and I’d like to keep it that way, also for my children.”
He prefers to help patients at his Brabant hospital. What lights him up are the encounters in his consulting room, with people of all backgrounds and ages, from 18 to 95. Outpatient work, interspersed with medical interventions, makes his work dynamic. His colleagues see him as a connector. So do our former students, as is apparent from the jury report of the Alumni Award. He does recognise himself in this description. But he thinks the title of Alumnus of the Year is too much praise. “They make me look too big. I consider myself lucky that I came to the Netherlands at the right time and was given so many opportunities.”
The Netherlands suits him, he likes how direct the Dutch are. And yet, one way or another, he also hopes one day to work actively as a doctor in Afghanistan. “That is my biggest dream. I will always remain a kind of nomad.”
Text: Annemarie Haverkamp. Photography: Duncan de Fey.