When Peter and Barbie Reynolds set out on their usual route to Bamyan province, they had no idea it would end in nearly eight months inside Taliban prisons. The British couple, who had lived in Afghanistan for 18 years running a training and education organisation, suddenly found themselves cut off from each other, shuffled through a series of cells, and completely at the mercy of those detaining them.
Peter said later, gesturing to his wife during an interview on Good Morning Britain: “The hardest thing for me was not having contact with this gorgeous lady here.
“I didn’t know whether they were brutally treating her, I really just didn’t know.”
For weeks, he lived not knowing if Barbie was alive. He was placed in a maximum security facility, at one point handcuffed to a man who had killed his wife and children.
Barbie, meanwhile, struggled with the smallest of daily routines, including eating with her hands.
That was until prisoner staff 'took pity' on her and handed her a simple object that would come to mean everything: a spoon.
She said: “I was the only one who had my own spoon. We were in 10 prisons, but this was one of the first ones, and I learned that was my spoon."
She added, miming the movements using the same utensil for everything: “That was my knife… that was my fork.”
Barbie even explained how she used it to peel potatoes, cut apples, and even fry an egg.
At one point, host Kate Garraway remarked: “And it was just luck really… that you had that on you at the time you were taken…”
Barbie quickly corrected her: “No, no, the first people took pity on me because I’m just not very good at throwing food into my mouth and making it get there, so they gave me a spoon in the prison.”
That one piece of cutlery effectively became a lifeline for Barbie, one of but a few possessions she could call her own while everything else was stripped away. It was not only a tool, but also a symbol of dignity in a situation where both she and Peter were left with almost nothing.
Their daughter Sarah helped them cling to hope, phoning each parent and passing along messages of love when they weren’t allowed to speak to one another directly. She recalled: “It was definitely a scary time, and I was passing love messages between the two of them. It was always ‘tell him I love her’ or ‘tell him I miss him.’”
The Taliban have never explained what law the couple supposedly broke, only confirming their release after a court hearing. The pair learned they were free just an hour before being flown back to the UK, where their children described their return as ‘a moment of immense joy’.
Despite everything, Peter still believes Afghanistan can change. He said: “We have had a conviction that Afghanistan can change, and it could just amaze the world."
For Barbie, though, the memory of survival is bound forever to a humble piece of cutlery.
Featured Image Credit: KARIM JAAFAR/AFP via Getty Images
Ben Williams