First person: my return to Kabul going back to give back.

• Author: Atash, Samira

I have learned that true love does exist. While most people look for it in another human being, I recently found mine with Kabul, Afghanistan--a love that can endure for nearly 25 years, one that should not be ignored and cannot be replaced.

I was born in Afghanistan in 1975 and left with my family for the United States in April 1979 before the Soviet invasion. Immigrants assimilate to their surroundings like adopted children in a new home, but their hearts long for their birth mother. For years, I have felt a connection to Afghanistan, even though I left when I was three and a half years old and have lived a normal, peaceful life in the United States. That connection, like an umbilical cord that stretches from Central Asia to North America, motivated me to join my sister on a trade mission to Kabul. When I left my "mother", she was a beautiful, energetic and loving country with so much promise. I was not prepared to see her as she had become--like an injured patient emerging from a 25-year coma.

For hundreds of years, Afghanistan has been the crossroads of Asia, caught in the middle of cultural, religious and political discord between countries and regimes. When I lived there, it was a peaceful time, although Communism was slowly spreading through the veins of the Government. I don't remember much, but what I do remember is vivid and intense. In Kabul, my sisters and I savoured life, which involved sharing nightly meals with the entire family, nibbling sweet corn and juicy kabobs from the local stands, driving to Bamiyan to see the famous statues of Buddha, running through the meadows with my siblings and cousins, picking tomatoes from the garden, flying paper kites and devouring sugar cones. For the adults, it might have meant taking advantage of studying at local universities, taking in the crisp air, going to an Ahmad Zahir concert, strolling through Shar Naw, or secretly flirting with a crush at a bus stop. It was a very simple life, devoid of certain advancements found in economically advantaged countries. But there was love, there was family and, for the most part, there was pure joy in small things.

The last thing I remember about Afghanistan is boarding an Ariana Airlines plane and seeing my entire family waving to us from the airport window: my grandfather (who was executed by the Communists later that year), grandmother, uncles, aunts and cousins. I framed my April 1979 Ariana plane ticket; its return-date box has always been...