Women’s programs

One of the best pieces of news for Afghans for Civil Society recently has been the arrival of Rangina Hamidi, a Kandahar native, who, after her family fled the Soviet invasion, grew up in Pakistan and the United States.  She will be directing our women’s programs.  Rangina is one of the very few women members of the Afghan diaspora brave enough to come back to assist the reconstruction process outside Kabul.  With her cultural penetration, her gentle way tempered with a quiet solidity, Rangina will be an enormous asset to ACS.

The income-generation project, based on traditional Kandahari embroidery, exploded in my absence.  I came back to find the big yellow trunk in the office positively overflowing with placemat and napkin sets, and material ready for sewing into shirts with intricately-worked patterns around the collars.  We now have a total of 13 “centers,” homes where groups of 5 to 10 women – relatives, in-laws and neighbors – work on our orders.  Nasima and Salima, our two Afghan program officers, visit each of the centers in turn, two or three a day. 

On Rangina’s second day, I joined them.  We went to Chawni, a mud-brick neighborhood on the Herat road leading out of town to the northwest.  Open sewers flank the alley-ways, but at least they’re cemented, not just runnels scraped out of the hard ground as I’ve seen elsewhere.  Houses are built half underground for cool in the summer-time.  One had a big chicken coop on a raised platform above the courtyard, another a black cow tied in a corner. 

We sat drinking tea with one family in the shade of their verandah, and I came to realize how truly revolutionary this project is.  It is the only one in the region providing women with that absolutely essential implement: money.  And it is one of the few that approaches women in their homes, the only place all but a handful can be reached.  “The men like your program,” said one husband.  “It doesn’t break any rules.  The women do their work in the house.”  And yet, all the women we talked to that day said they do keep the money they earn, to spend on their own needs or household necessities; they don’t have to turn it over to their men-folk. 

Through the meanders of our conversation, we learned of the horrors of these women’s everyday lives: one of the daughters-in-law, her pinched face darkened by some skin affliction, had lost five children in seven pregnancies.  Each of the babies had died before the age of 1.  The family blamed vaccinations, and her rare trips to her father’s house.  Her latest baby was immobile and invisible as firewood in a corner, tied up in swaddling clothes covered by a cloth.

Appalled, Rangina and I began casting about for ways to build on the base of our embroidery centers to expand the help we bring to these women.  We started simple: “What if we were to hold a party in your house, and invite all the neighborhood women in for tea, and just talking?” we wondered.  Our hosts smiled nervously, glancing at each-other.  “Ijaza nista,” they finally said: “We wouldn’t have permission.”  They explained that only for weddings and funerals do they leave their homes and gather with women outside their immediate family.  The husband concurred: “I know my wife’s father and brother,” he said.  “I don’t know her cousin or her uncle.  She can’t go to their houses.  How could I let her go to a complete stranger’s?”     

Rangina and I were silenced.  We came away even more convinced of the importance of our program, and how crucial it is to work with women on a house-to-house basis.

Loya Jirga delegates

In a Policy Center project funded by USAID, we have been holding focus group meetings with delegates elected to last summer’s Loya Jirga, the grand tribal council that selected the current transitional president of Afghanistan.  The idea is to have them reflect back on that exercise, and recall what aspects of the process were good, and what the disappointments were, so lessons could be drawn for planning the next Loya Jirga. 

What emerged from the discussions with startling clarity was the sense of elective responsibility felt by these delegates.  “We wanted to be a bridge between the people and the government,” said one, “to explain the people’s needs to government and point out what the government is doing wrong.”  “But,” in another’s words, “we’ve been discarded like old socks.”  The disappointment at not playing a role in public life after the Loya Jirga was acute.  “We went to the governor with the people’s wishes, but he never found time for us.”  Now, the delegates feel defeated: “We promised people we would help them, but we had nothing to give them.”  In Kandahar, they praised our meeting as the only one of its kind – bringing together delegates across tribal and political lines – to take place since the Loya Jirga.

The other emphatic message the delegates conveyed was that the current Afghan government has failed in not disarming the gunmen and commanders who hold sway throughout the Afghan countryside.  In fact, they all believe the Loya Jirga actually made the warlords stronger. “Before the Loya Jirga, the heart of Marshall Fahim (former Northern Alliance commander now defense minister) was shaking with fear.  Now he is strong.”

Most of these men and women are tribal or community leaders.  They are intimately linked with the traditional structures of deliberative democracy that have governed southern Afghan society over the years, and they enjoy the added legitimacy of election as delegates of the people through a process praised as remarkably free and democratic.  They would constitute a precious resource and foundation for building habits of citizen participation in governmental action. 

Akokolacha

Hallelujah!  The final window and the final door, constructed in our compound yard, have been hung in Akokolacha.  The project is complete.  But from Salima and Nasima, of our embroidery project, has come a jumbled story about how the men of the village want to stop us from working with the women.  The problem, it seems, was that the village headman (“Datsun” Shir Mahmad, known thus for his fraudulent purchase of a pick-up truck) and his brother, a fairy book image of the Big Bad Wolf, weren’t given a big enough house, or the new guest room they demanded.  We had to cancel a first shura, called to discuss the matter, but which only the headman’s family attended.  But what absolutely knocked my socks off was the welcome we received.  All those dirty, wild, bratty, adorable kids came streaming up the road when they heard the car:  “Sarah rala, Sarah rala!!!”  “Sarah came back!!!” they shrieked, as I dropped out of the moving car and hoisted each one up in the air in turn.  The elders said the whole gang of them had been waiting on the road all afternoon.  Whispering like church mice, they crept into the room where we sat awkwardly with Datsun’s family, drinking the obligatory cup of tea.  They filled half the darkened room, whispering and edging closer to me by turns, until Datsun shouted them away.  In the doorway, just visible in the night, were the figures of some of the women.  I ducked in to see them as we left, and the press of kisses, the laughing shouts of welcome, the Heimlich maneuver performed over and over again by the hefty lady who chased me around the yard to give me tea once, almost brought tears to my eyes. 

What further proof needed, despite all the travails, that Akokolacha is a success.  That – quite apart from the houses – we have forged real bonds with the villagers.  That we exist for them as people, just as surely as Wusila and her beautiful embroidery, or the little mute child who’s always getting cuffed, or my tiny shy “son” with the great scar across his scull, who smiles at me from behind his mother’s legs, but runs away shrieking with panic whenever I go near him, exist for me, and have become an irrevocable part of me.