50-year love story begins in Afghanistan

Where does love begin? For one West Richland couple, it began more than 50 years ago in a most unlikely place.

“When I went to Afghanistan, probably 90 percent of the people had never heard of it,” Stephanie (Dawson) Janicek said as she recalled her Peace Corps service as an English teacher in Kabul. “Now, it’s so different.”

But in 1964, the country was a land of promise, a place where George Janicek could help develop the Department of Engineering at Kabul University through the U.S. Agency for International Development. Already an instructor for the University of Notre Dame, his alma mater, he went as its representative and found a warm welcome.

“We’d go out on hikes and it was everything you could do to keep them from having us come into their house to have tea,” George said, remembering the hospitality of the Afghan people who, even though poor, would insist on feeding him.

What this New Yorker also discovered was a young woman from Richland who caught his eye. At Peace Corps parties, the two occasionally danced together, but then an invitation brought George and Stephanie a step closer.

“In order to introduce ourselves to the single women, my roommate, Nick, and I would invite them to our Tuesday night dinners — and married couples too,” George said of the casual get-togethers at their house. “Stephanie was invited once or twice, and pretty soon it was just Stephanie that I was inviting.”

On weekends or after their workdays, George would show up fresh from a dusty ride on his red Honda 90 motorcycle, the only transportation the two had back then. Stephanie said the Afghan women whose marriages were arranged would see her out and about with George and think it was so romantic.

“The thing that impressed me so much when George and I were getting to know each other was how we are the opposite,” Stephanie said. She said they think differently — she is right-handed and left-brain and he is left-handed and right-brain. “But we had almost identical values and how we felt about having children, our pets, cooking our food and all those daily living things.”

The two believed their intrinsic principles mirrored each other. George, who calls himself a “cradle Catholic,” also recognized the importance of faith in a lasting marriage, as did Stephanie. Individually they devoted themselves to novenas — a kind of intense praying for nine successive days — asking for wisdom about choosing a life partner.

“I proposed in Russian on my motorcycle at the secluded walled area leading up to the Peace Corps house,” George said. “I still remember the words in Russian, ‘I love you,’ ” George said.

The words took Stephanie by surprise.

“It was amazing to me because he didn’t study Russian, but I did,” she said. Her bachelor’s degree is in Far East and Slavic languages.

Five decades later, they think back to that gesture of love and the challenges that followed in preparation for a wedding — not just one, but two.

The couple were first married Jan. 17, 1966, in an Afghan legal ceremony spoken in Farsi and held in an unheated office. Eleven days later, Stephanie and George said “I do” again in a Roman Catholic Mass at the Italian Embassy chapel, a feat fraught with challenges.

“I had no refrigerator, no stove, only kerosene plates,” Stephanie said as she remembered living at the Peace Corps house and trying to get everything ready for the big day. “We did have a shared ringer-washer in the corner that everyone envied, and hot water once a week.”

Unlike the abundance of bridal shops and exquisite wedding invitations in America, Western-style resources were mostly unavailable. On notebook paper, Stephanie designed her wedding gown and her attendants’ dresses, with fabric and fur haggled over at a bazaar.

“I wanted white rabbit fur for the bridesmaids’ muffs and trim, but we’d end up with coyote or some other creature, none of which were white,” Stephanie said with a chuckle, reminiscing about their multiple trips to the bazaar on George’s motorbike.

Eventually, the bride-to-be found the right items, and then spent frustrating sessions communicating with the seamstress in Farsi and French. Added to the mix was figuring out how to send handmade invitations in a city where there was no mail delivery, no house numbers and few streets with names — or at least ones translatable into English.

Nevertheless, marry they did with American and European friends gathered — a witness to George and Stephanie’s love that began 50 years ago in Afghanistan.

This story was originally published February 13, 2016 at 11:17 AM with the headline "50-year love story begins in Afghanistan."