Story of an Afghan woman

This morning I paid a visit to a local NGO founded in 1999 to protect the rights of the women and children of Afghanistan. Naturally the task is a daunting one for a small, under funded charity, but the staff I met were upbeat and proud of their programmes: literacy centres in all the main cities of the north, a women’s centre for victims of domestic violence, and a women’s cultural centre scheduled to open next year. They were frank about their recruiting problems – a local NGO constantly bleeds qualified staff to international organisations with vastly larger budgets. IOM pays its drivers 600 USD a month – far more than any engineer or doctor working in the public sector could ever aspire to. I plan to volunteer for them, keeping in touch by email from Mazar and visiting them whenever I am in Kabul, and as most of their funds come from Italy and Spain I will be able to help them with liaising and donor relations. Finally my days of indolence are ending, and I can begin to feel useful once again!

While I was there, I met someone I am sure I will never forget.
I was introduced to her as someone who has had a tragic life, which is putting it mildly, even in the context of Afghanistan. I hope my face did not betray anything untoward as I was introduced to her, as her face is severely burnt on one side, pulling her eye out of shape and puckering up her mouth. As she spoke, in a low, almost inaudible whisper, I tried not to wince as she nervously twisted and pulled at the crinkled skin of her chin and neck, but occasionally a wide white smile would flash out and light up her face. At first, remembering the shelter for domestic violence, I assumed that she had been the victim of an acid attack, but I did nothing to lead the conversation in that direction. We talked instead of her studies: she has attended the courses in literacy, computer studies and English organised by the NGO, who is also subsiding the rent of her family home, and she will graduate in May from high school.

According to the agreement she has made with the NGO, she should start working with them once she graduates, as this is the smart system they have devised to address their recruiting problems. But recently she has decided that what she really wants to do is go to university and study law, so that she can really pull her weight in the fight for women’s rights. She told me that there are two faculties of law in Kabul – a Law faculty, and a Shariah Law faculty, and it is the latter’s graduates who end up working for the government. Our friend Brendon described his visit to the Kabul law faculty in his blog. When she explained how worried she is about the role accorded to Islamic Law in the new constitution drafted for Afghanistan in 2003, her intelligence shone through her shyness.

When that conversation dried up, we fell silent, but she continued to look at me expectantly, perhaps wistfully, so I ploughed on with more topics, spurred out of my shyness by embarrassment. Incidentally, I noticed that her clothes were rather strange, even admitting that she is poor and hardworking – she was wearing a shalwar kameez of a very plain pattern, in dark blue, thick fabric like worker’s overalls, a yellow and black check head covering done up in none of the usual styles, and no trace of feminine adornment anywhere.

I told her about my family, and discovered that she lives with her parents and three sisters, in a little house up the hill. Her hand is bandaged up because she recently fell off the bicycle she uses to cycle to school, and she rocked slightly back and forward in her chair as she spoke as if in pain. I told her she is very brave to cycle in a city like Kabul, and she said she thought that she was the only woman in the city to do so. “Women are not to drive cars, not to ride bicycle or motorcycle, only men”. Stumbling for words, I told her what an inspiration she should be to other women, with her courage and her sense of purpose.

In another silence, she told me she would like to hear about my country, as so I told her about the hills of Italy where I live, and the sea, the beautiful sea which she has never seen. She flashed one of her beautiful smiles, and said that she would love to visit the sea with me when – as one hand fluttered about her damaged face – her face is cured.

Then she explained that a rocket had hit her home during the fighting in Kabul, which had left her brother dead, and her severely wounded. She lifted a flap in her head covering to show me the burnt stump of her ear. She has no hair, either.

When her brother died, and the Taliban came to power, her family lost their only breadwinner, as women were forbidden from working and her father is mentally ill and unable to work. So, at great personal risk of course, she, the eldest daughter, dressed in her brother’s clothes, assumed his identity and went out to seek work.
That was when the Taliban were in power, and she has kept her family and her male identity ever since. She has worked in the fields and on construction sites, and goes in constant fear of being unmasked, but she is also afraid of revealing herself as a woman.

Perhaps she feels that she has burnt her boats by taking on her brother’s name and documents, but she feels that her only way out is to have reconstructive surgery, and only then to come clean as a woman. Even as I write, I can hardly believe that it is all true, and I met her only this morning. I can scarcely begin to imagine how her life must be. I must try to do something to help her.