Children in the notorious Jalozai refugee camp (©c.mann)

FemAid report on Afghanistan, May 2008

I have just returned from three weeks in Afghanistan, which turned out to be spent in Kabul only, because of security reasons. My Afghan family and friends were terrified by the prospect of me being kidnapped to the point that I was not allowed to take a taxi on my own. Naturally, from their point of view, my presence, however welcome, was a liability and a heavy responsibility.  I nevertheless managed to work on the Library project in Farah, teach a course on ‘Women at War’ at the new Gender Studies Institute at Kabul university, research maternal mortality (still one of the worst in the world) and start work on a programme trying to limit this catastrophe. And I lived Kabuli style, as usual, with my family sharing meals, laughter, Indian video-clips on TV, homework, housework, outings as well as limited electricity and water, open sewers and the ensuing stench and the daily restrictions which befall this brave population.

Kabul in May 2008.

I  was expecting the worst, conditioned by what I- and everyone else- had been reading in the media. It was bad, I nearly have to add ‘of course’, but I have seen worse in this country. Far worse. Despite the noise, the filth, the pollution, the bustle, the intense misery, the obviously paracolonial aid installations, things are changing and moving. There are roses growing everywhere for a start, carefully tended. Our beautiful little Leili is responsible for watering the parched pink roses in our house which she does extremely diligently, pulling out the bucket from the well, filling the pitcher and going back to her homework which really means another scuffle with her younger sister who has been taunting her all along. I hope none of them will ever think of pushing the other down the well: as an over-anxious western mother, I’d have a lid padlocked, but nobody even thinks of anything like that here, a dish just sits on the rim of the well: there is obviously much more to worry about in Afghanistan today.

In a messy chaotic way, one step forward two back and a side-way shuffle here and there, but the movement is there and the people of Kabul- if not the rest of Afghanistan- are making it happen. In the West, it is fashionable to blame international humanitarian aid for all the ills in post-war and reconstruction zones. Yet, even if I am to be called a politically incorrect harridan, I have to say that some of this aid- if not all - has been producing positive, indeed invaluable results. There are hospitals and clinics in Kabul, schools and universities have been renewed, perhaps not to Western standards admittedly, and the principal beneficiaries have been the local population. Much of this aid is patchy and has been uncoordinated, but it is better than none at all. Girls in cities are returning to school, but certainly not enough and figures never take account of the alarming drop-out rate.  Naturally, this does not mean that I automatically condone military intervention  and operations, the real problems are well beyond military fireworks and out of reach of any Kalashnikov or Stinger missiles: these are the contradictory expression of cynical politics that are decided upon in plush distant boardrooms and padded armchairs. They are in the domain of power distribution and political alliances.

And I have to repeat that Kabul is not representative of the rest of Afghanistan, the standard of living of its population of two and a half million is completely unequal and founded on revenue.

Exile and return

Afghanistan has particularly suffered from the loss of  its most educated and skilled population which left the country during successive waves of exile, during the Soviet intervention (December 1979 onwards) but also after the withdrawal of Soviet troops and the pro-communist government (February 1989)  which heralded the breakdown of health and education and the departure of doctors and teachers, male and female. The ensuing factional fighting during the Civil War  permanently scarred the city reducing it to rubble so that the Taliban were welcomed with relief when they came to Kabul in 1996. But many artisans and those who deemed they could make a living in nearby Iran and Pakistan scrambled out.

Few Kabulis stayed out of sheer patriotism, many remained out of despair and unwillingness or incapacity of being able to tackle the ardours and expenses of exile, especially as city-dwellers with no rural roots or homes to fall back on.

The state of the country reflects the hotchpotch of population which has returned, inter-acting sometimes painfully with those who remained, as after any war. Most regret the more comfortable and safe conditions in Pakistan or Iran, despite the obvious hardship of being unwelcome and shunned. The most skilled professional have established themselves abroad, unwilling to sacrifice their lives and their families for such a hazardous return. The new elite is composed of  Anglophone exiles, those who benefited from an English-language education in Pakistan, especially those who have been in the US as well. Apart from the strong Afghan-American community, the US is giving out a number of scholarships to bright students, encouraging girls especially to apply, the same way the Soviets had done in the 1970s. Elites are created from the outside, to replace the tribal and family power structures which nevertheless still exist in parallel, functioning through influence (Ibn Khaldoun’s ‘Assabya’) and tactical alliance.

A middle-class is steadily growing, especially amongst the young (boys, but also girls) eager to study and gain well-paid jobs with NGOs. As in Sarajevo, the elite find themselves working for foreign aid and the Civil Service suffers badly as a consequence. Teaching attracts the least competent candidates and, as a nation-wide consequence, the level of education is abysmally low. Indeed, why teach school for $ 80 to $100 a month when you could be working in front of a computer in an air-conditioned office for eight to ten times that amount at age 23? The young often say they cannot financially and morally afford idealism in a society where everyone has to fend for himself, prices are soaring and health care, like everything else, needs to be paid for.  Families in the city are increasingly subsidized by their young unmarried members. The twenty-something year-olds are the ones dutifully bringing in their pay and shouldering all the expenses, especially the astronomical rents in the city. As Farid, a returnee, said: “I came back from Pakistan hoping to build up this country my family had dreamt about all these years. Now, I don’t care anymore, all I want is to make money anyway I can, pay the hospital bills for my mother, the rent for my family ( 6 brothers and sisters) and when all that’s taken care of, think about something else, even get out of the country”. Yet having said that, I have occasionally observed the opposite with women. In Herat this has been the consistent stance of the incredibly courageous lone female attorney Maria Bashir  (who, as I have been saying for two years, I really think should get the Nobel Prize in Afghanistan, save that she does not have PR machinery to get her name around). She has refused to work for NGOs in order to continue to defend women. Also my young friend Zala who speaks perfect English has accepted to be vice-principal of a school because she knows that will make a difference in the children’s lives, whereas she could have had a job anywhere in the city.

Kabuli women today

In the streets of Kabul, there are far fewer blue-shrouded women than I had observed a couple of years ago. The burqa has become more than anything a class marker,  principally indicating poverty and unemployment. And there are many desperately poor women in Kabul, some begging with their children, huddling in the middle of thick traffic. Cars swerve at the last minute to avoid them, drivers shooing away beggar children clawing at the windows. But as a Kabuli friend observed, these people are not homeless, no-one sleeps openly in the streets as you find in Paris, London or New York. There is always somewhere to go, however miserable, at least for the night, a glass of tea, a crust of dry ‘nan’.

Yet all the different groups are united by their strict attitudes to women as vessels of family honour: at every level of society, women remain subservient to men, their marriages arranged, vital decisions taken by fathers, brothers, husbands and reinforced by the all-powerful mother-in-law. The right to study, to work, to go out, to seek medical aid are privileges that may or may not be meted out by the males of the family, be they vegetable vendors or ministers. Suicides by self-immolation or the slashing of wrists are the ultimate  resource of girls of every background.

On the everyday, urban level, the novelty has been all these young women in scarves, long skirts and coats- belted raincoat affairs, mid-thigh sometimes surprisingly tight, made up  eyes and painted nails, sometimes even a bright and flimsy  headscarf. But also quite a number of Iranian style black veils which is something which would need further exploration.
At the university, there are a number of female students. In the vast and beautiful gardens of the campus, the girls sit together on benches, giggling, obviously pleased to be where they are. Only the boys loll around in the grass or crowd the new outdoor cafeterias, complete with white parasols, tables and chairs. At the end of the day, they will return home to ramshackle flats where electricity works for about 4 hours every two days, and running water cannot be depended on (as I found out one night, my hair full of shampoo when the water and the light stopped simultaneously). With a bit of luck some of these students’ families might have a generator which will further add to the enormous pollution of the city. They will do their homework seated on the floor under dim neon bulbs, the girls will have to negotiate every outing with their father and sends scores of SMS in Dari-English to their friends. Their marriages will be arranged- engagements take place early on and there is no way of getting out of them, short of the bridegroom visibly advertising that he is a drug addict/murderer etc. Thus was the case for one young girl I got to know on a university bench. An educated family, her father an engineer, her brothers students, one employed part time in an NGO. She had been engaged at fifteen to a handsome cousin she hardly knew and subsequently grew to dislike intensely. Her parents, I am sure thought they were doing their best and put down her reticence to her immaturity and lack of experience. “The difference between your society and ours” as a Pakistani lady I had met in Peshawar years back had explained “is that you want love before marriage, and for us, it grows after marriage”  As the wedding date was approaching,  young Shahida had to be coerced to go to her fate as by now the family honour was at stake. On the eve of her departure to what would be her new life in her husband’s town, she attempted to slit her wrists. When I met her, she still had discreet bandages on. I found out that, despite the suicide attempt, the family would not be moved and everyone piled up in the car to go to the wedding, complete with the exhausted and patched-up bride whose knife had not been sharp enough. It was only when they realised that the prospective son-in-law was indeed everything their unhappy daughter said he was that her father decided to call off the ceremony. Did the members of this otherwise enlightened and educated family feel guilty in anyway? Not sure. 20 year-old Shahida  had, it turns out, refused to eat for days on end and protested any way her gentle self could devise in the previous two years but to no avail. How many brides come to the altar with bandaged wrists in this society in the name of family honour? Suicides by self-immolation are still frequent for comparable reasons, especially in the Western part of the country, near to Iran. But the trend has spread to other regions.

Many weddings in Kabul are henceforth celebrated in one of those new-fangled Vegas-like ‘Wedding halls’  with names like ‘ A Night in Paris’, Paris-Kabul’ Kabul-Dubai’ etc. There even is an illuminated “Eiffel Tower” in the middle of a roundabout. The building themselves are encased in ribbons of bright coloured lights whilst the poorest citizens huddle in dark, dank make-shift tents on the other side of the avenue. Wedding halls appear to be a favoured investment for warlord-politicians with a surplus of cash from their wholesale drug ventures. Hardly a risky venture as families spend fortunes there, a lifetime of debt guaranteed, with up to 1 500 lavishly fed guests, two orchestras- for males and female guests rigorously separated on different floors. Such was the wedding I went to. Each one of the younger women- that is to say before she had reached the status of becoming a mother-in-law herself- had lavished attention and money on evening dress and an obviously lengthy expedition at the beauty parlour. No veils, scarves or burqas here to hide the elaborate lacquered coiffures or spoil the dramatic make-up, inspired by the Eighties American B-movies that seem to abound on satellite TV, just as the sequined fuchsias, reds and turquoise outfits seem to owe their glitter to the much-loved Indian music clips and soaps watched gleefully by most of Afghanistan (that is to say any location where electricity is available). These have elicited self-righteous wrath on behalf of the orthodox clerics who would like to see such pagan sedition banned.

And the Taliban?

Admittedly, there are the Taliban about which the press go on so much and which seem to be there to justify US and Allied Intervention –whilst being simultaneously sustained by Iranian and Pakistani aid, I am told. From what I have heard, these are not the Mollah Omars of yesteryear. This lot are gangsters with little or no ideological backing of any kind, save the usual misogyny. They are into money, power and business, allied to local warlords and drug barons (many of which happen to be MPs) and act as pressure groups against a government that (feebly) opposes their endeavours. They attract the poor to their circles who are desperate enough to do just about anything to make a pittance. As Jamshed observed: “Look at their activities over the year in the provinces. During the poppy harvest time, they are busy at work in their fields but for the other nine months they need money to survive”. Kidnapping is a major resource. Sometimes a small group sets up and goes into business. The media likes to label them as Taliban sympathisers, but this is not necessarily the case, some of the kidnappers may well be locals, even neighbours, hence the huge mistrust. This was the case for a hapless doctor who lived across the road from one place I was staying at in populous (and litter-choked)  Kheir-Khana which I call Chattal (garbage)-Khana. Some pals came to pick him up in order to go to a wedding. He never returned and a day letter, the distraught family received a note clamouring a million dollar ransom. No-one has that kind of money here (outside the more dubious entrepreneurs), I don’t know how he got out of it, but he was returned to his family a month later. How much he was made to pay I don’t know. Having said this, I keep on encountering Taliban nostalgists who claim that life was much safer, less corrupt and the prices lower when Mollah Omar was around. As Nahida at the university put it “Life was really boring for us girls, but it was safe”. There naturally are groups of ideological neo-Talibans at work amongst the young in the universities, but I doubt very much that these are the ones throwing bombs at civilians in the south of the country. Every university is potentially a hotbed for political ferment, the best is to keep it in the open and offer public debate.

Teaching Gender at Kabul University

This was a project I was able to put together thanks to the new Gender Studies Institute at the University of Kabul. This was done via my new  academic association Women in War (www.womeninwar.org) I was lent a classroom in the French Studies sector where Paris-nostalgic professors dream about La Douce France, accordions and unmentionable Bordeaux wine. My blatant lack of patriotism and audible lack of respect for our new president, not to mention the absence of an official, stamped embossed letter of introduction somehow put them off. As well as my iconoclastic way of teaching, eliciting maximal student participation. The students loved it and this has turned out to be one of the most positive teaching experiences in my life.

I asked the students what they thought about the controversy regarding the Indian soaps. One of them, a boy, surprised me by saying that he thought them reactionary and demeaning in their depiction of women as schemers and plotters or just victims. It was during this seminar that I came to the conclusion the best solution for Afghanistan would be to rid the country of anyone over forty. The younger generation as represented by the fifteen students I  exchanged with over a period of two weeks was enthusiastic,  intelligent, desirous of change and cautious freedom.  As were those I met outside. Admittedly these were relatively privileged being able to afford their studies, which means not being expected to support their families, even though many had part-time jobs. With one exception, all of them had spent their lives inside Afghanistan, had experienced continuous war and disruption. One girl had taught her neighbours how to read and write during Taliban times, when she was twelve. One boy remembered how an older girl in the house had taught him and his siblings. We discussed all manner of issues concerning gender and they themselves concluded that prejudice and  gender difference were largely a social construction. I thought back at the various  bearded and turbaned Pro-Taliban sympathisers I had met in earlier years in Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan expounding on what they considered to be their divine authority.

The girls spontaneously welcomed any kind of criticism of the system and an opportunity to vent their anger. The boys managed to see that they too would suffer from gender discrimination, being forced to work all their lives for their parents, sisters, enormous families. “And if your future wives could work and share the responsibilities with you as equals and partners, you could become poets or singers or anything you like” I said. That argument won them over. I imagined saying that to old Abdullah in Khewa camp whose beard reached down to his navel, his two young wives looking so worn and weary kneeling silently beside him. He had offered to marry my own daughter, “I’m just and fair to all my wives, I just bought a new burqa for each of them! Your daughter will get the same”. I could imagine how delighted my Alice would be and got out of it by saying that I had to consult my husband about this momentous and, I hastened to add, most flattering, proposal….

All things not being identical, a male student boy at the seminar in Kabul  asked me candidly  “In your country, are marriages arranged?”. The elder of Abdullah’s wives had asked me that question as well. As had the girls at Herat University two years back. All marriages are arranged here on a scale goes from being advised, strongly suggested, enforced to brutally forced. In these more liberal times, boys’ consent is generally sought which is not quite the case for the girls. Romance only happens on starry Indian video-clips, involving the divine Shah Rukh or his younger look-alikes on the innumerable satellite channels.

At Kabul University, those kids were nevertheless united by the refusal to continue as before and claimed a minimum of self-determination and autonomy as far as their own existences were concerned. I really hope they get the opportunities they deserve. Many of the US influenced teaching directives seem to emphasize “entrepreneurship” ( a favoured term in much of the documentation I have seen) which I find rather alarming. There seem to be a few too many ‘entrepreneurs’ as it is, dealing in narcotics, smuggling etc and not enough emphasis on responsible citizenship and nation and state building.

With Palwasha, we are thinking of organizing a conference in Kabul on ‘Women and War in Afghanistan since the Taliban’ and we really want the students to participate with their own research. They were very enthusiastic about that.

Across the years, since 2000 when I first got involved in the region and its inextricable problems, I had only ever heard women’s rights being vindicated in such an open way in RAWA rhetoric. What is marvellous is that other young people in Kabul, educated young men and women are beginning to express similar convictions. To what extent this will be truly enacted in their lives remains to be seen. I have seen supposedly progressive families react in startling ways towards the girls in their midst. Doubtless, we need another generation or two and really widespread education and awareness.

As an additional project, we will be sending toys to the Kabul University day-care centre in a scheme I am putting together with my local Town Hall and transported by the French Army. I don’t quite understand the usefulness of a couple of thousand TV- bred boys French, presumably recruited from the French suburbs, stuck out in Afghan desert conditions, hoping for some kind of action but the fact that they will be delivering teddy bears fills me with glee and deferent gratitude to our valiant Minister of Defence in his magnificent office in Paris, decked out, wall to wall, with priceless antique furniture.

One hundred children come every day to a damp, dismal place, where toys are carefully put on shelves  and rarely taken out because they cannot be replaced. Babies - up to one year old- spend much of their day in their cots. Day-care centres in a university such as this one are vital for women’s rights, because this is how students, professors, clerical staff can actually go out to work and study. I met one woman, Ferida, whose mother-in-law refused to look after her grand-children whilst her daughter-in-law was out working, because she thought this would keep Ferida in the house. Through the day-care centre, Ferida and so many like her can go to her job and earn some much needed money for her family, as well as stake her (modest) right to some autonomy.

Perhaps we can help set up day care centres in all Afghan universities and colleges some day. . I have since found out that there had been a project by a French-Afghan charity to build a such a crèche at the University: monies were seemingly collected as well but obviously never arrived, or not anywhere near these children and their hapless carers. As I deal with so little money and even less pretence of any kind, nothing of this will happen here, short of the French troops delivering at the wrong door.

The library in Farah

This is a project that has been going for the past two years with the then Member of Parliament, Malalai Joya. Let’s hope she will be reinstated. My dear friend and associate Carol Mark in Toronto and yours truly had valiantly tried to find money for it through exhibitions, appeals of every kind, sales of handicrafts and donations. An uphill battle in face of chronic donor fatigue and the lack of interest in things Afghan generally.  In recent months, we had heard that the American PRT team in the area (Provincial Reconstruction Team) were in fact building a civic centre  which includes a library.  This was as unexpected as it was positive: the PRT are very discreet about they do, one only hears about the military bungling and hapless punitive expeditions. I have been corresponding with an officer working enthusiastically on it and it does look promising, despite continuing and despairing set-backs. One does n’t realise that apart from a lot of (to me useless) swash-buckling there are some very dedicated idealistic soldiers out there really trying to bring the best they have. I had discovered the same thing with some UNPROFOR soldiers in Sarajevo who had agreed to deliver the parcels  I would send them from Paris as purportedly personal post. They generally contained medication, chocolates, packets of soup and sanitary towels for the women I knew and worked with during the siege. At one time, I sent antibiotics for 800 kids in the school we were attempting to rebuild disguised as a birthday-cake for a kindly French officer. In those days, as a novice in aid, I had no idea this was illegal and was just worried about an outbreak of flu in the frozen besieged city.

Back to Farah, a stone coloured city, hard and rough and wild where I was hoping to go. We are really hoping to add a play centre to the project for young children, in order to entice these teenage mothers to come along. This would introduce the notion of childhood being a special time in life, not a gap between infancy and adulthood where you learn to harden up for whatever fate holds for you- and fate here deals out mean cards to girls and boys alike. It would not be wrong to say that childhood as the West invented in the latter part of the 18^th century does not exist here at all. Afghanistan needs its very own Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Certainly in the West, childhood was a privilege reserved to the well-off, until the First World war when child labour gradually receded and state pensions came to replace their contribution. But in Afghanistan, there is neither state, nor pensions, nor care-free children.

Carol in Toronto will be able to airlift supplies for the library and we will look after the books- in Persian and Pashto and educational games. In the meantime, in Kabul, with the guidance of teachers and specialists, I bought a substantial  amount of books for a lending  library  for schools in the Farah area. I purchased one encyclopaedia-type dictionary for each of 60 schools and books that the headmasters and headmistresses will come and borrow for their school. Once the PRT central library is up, we will purchase more books in local languages: for the time being, English and other foreign language books are useless in a context of such low literacy.

In the age of Internet and uncertain electricity, books remain vital. I purchased a number of children’s books, from fairy tales to books on science for the Mehan orphanage in Kabul where I also taught some English. The time spent reading is time not spent practising being an adult.

Maternal mortality

Maternal mortality and suffering have been my core obsessions. Ever since I gave birth the first time, twenty three years ago, in the supposed comfort and safety of a Paris clinic. Not Afghanistan.

Maternal mortality in this country continues to be the second highest in the world, after Sierra-Leone, with 1 800 deaths for 100 000 births and in areas such as Badakhshan, rising to 6 500 maternal deaths which is the world record. 75% of those newborns  babies die, because of lack of food, warmth and care, usually the unloved little girls.  In Afghanistan as whole, a woman dies of pregnancy-related causes every 27 minutes of every day. That is at least every 27 minutes, because many such deaths go unrecorded, just as for cattle. Many, perhaps most, we will never know are, or rather were, under sixteen

The Taliban- generally blamed for just about everything by foreign aid, politicians and media- have officially been gone for nearly seven years, so what went wrong? Mobile phones abound, there is something called ‘Afghan Cola’, internet works (sometimes), there are a couple of ATM machines, sophisticated heroin laboratories, four-wheel drives, five-star hotels, operatic ads for private banks- the trappings of capitalist modernity yet women- adolescents mostly- die like flies, in pools of blood and deep-rooted indifference. Why has n’t this been the Number One priority in this country and of international aid generally?

Despite assistance programmes and aid that has been pouring into Afghanistan, the overall figures have hardly evolved, even though improvements have been noted in urban areas where health facilities have been  built and those boasting new community health-care workers programmes and newly trained midwives. As one doctor told me: “ A competent midwife or nurse had rather be out of work in Kabul than stuck in a remote village”.  Most Afghanistan is  indeed composed of remote villages, those in Badakhshan can at best be reached after a day’s bumpy ride on a donkey.

This situation has been attributed to different causes,  mainly lack of infrastructure and local economic conditions, war and strife, yet cultural questions have not been addressed.
Maternal mortality is caused by a number of factors, possibly the most important being gender discrimination, this needs to be said, repeated, clamoured, louder and louder.

I heard a dreadful story of a breach birth which a traditional midwife did not know how to handle. In the end, she wrenched the baby’s body out, severing it from its head which remained six days inside the mother’s womb. It took them six days to get to a hospital in Jalalabad which in fact was not very far from where the unfortunate girl lived. She was operated upon and somehow survived, with major health complications including permanent fistula. The tragedy can be read on many levels, each more heart-rending than the next. But note this vital fact: it occurred near a health facility. As soon as the midwife saw that the baby was coming out feet forward, she must have known that there was little she could do to save mother or baby. Even before that, she would have noticed that the child had not turned properly and that major problems were on the way. This means that  someone- a husband, mother or father-in-law had taken the decision not to send the young woman to the hospital and kept her in inhuman suffering for nearly a week.

Why, why, why?

The answer is not (just) about building more hospitals but about changing deep-rooted disdain  and disrespect for women. I do believe things have got worse in the past thirty years, with Political Islam of a particular Afghan brand compounding an already misogynist pre-Islamic, tribal tradition. The situation cannot be reduced to being simply stone-age or medieval or whatever the condescending mass-media would have us believe. It is the paradoxical product of backward-looking and reactionary form of modernity, not the expression of a monolithic culture. The point is that in this Fundamentalist day and age, with the rise of right-wing governments everywhere, the threat to secular values and the erosion of socialist values, modernity does not necessarily equate progress and social evolution.

The law, education and media could change this in Afghanistan, but no official entity has taken this seriously enough so far. Women’s lives are not valued and suffering is perceived as unavoidable by the women themselves as well as the men.

 There should be an inquest after each death and laws making it criminal to forbid access to medical aid, when available, to women and children (or more correctly children and their children, seeing that girls are often married by the age of 13, malnourished, ill-treated). Prisons, I fear would be full of abusive husbands and I regret to say, vengeful mothers-in-law.

I was fortunate enough to meet a marvellous woman M.A. C, working on media projects in Kabul for the national radio and TV. She has been in Kabul for five years and knows the situation well. Together, we are working on the concept of health and awareness programmes for radio and TV designed for a largely illiterate population. What seems incredible is that there has not been any consistent and continuous media-based health programme created by the government or aid agencies. Instead, a flood of private channels, musical clips which when shown on public channels are especially funny as any soupçon of flesh is hidden under a hazed blur.

I really hope this will work out, I will do my outmost. I have managed to get the Health Ministry, WHO, the Malalai Maternity Hospital and others on board and I will continue to further research this frightening subject and work on it. In a record time, I managed to get all these people to agree. I could not go in taxis, did not have a driver to myself and depended on the kindness of the strangers so to speak, asking whoever I met if they had a driver going into some other part of town. They would look aghast ‘What, you have no driver?’. I would add, I have a tiny NGO, funded by donations given by friends and trinkets bought on Chicken St resold in Xmas/Chanukah bazaars and no, I do not have an office. I’m a hard-working militant academic zooming the world from my kitchen….. I don’t think anyone believed me, because they can’t imagine that people like me- and there are so many- exist.

In conclusion

In some ways, Kabul reminded me of Sarajevo at the very end of the war in 1995, but much more chaotic, intense and miserable. It ‘s the mix of  destruction, arbitrary specks of haphazard reconstruction and circulation, the contrast between the local standard of surviving and the comparatively luxurious trappings of foreign aid, the over-equipped soldiers teetering under their armour and the thinly clad population, the ‘No Guns, no Weapons signs next to sandbags and litter.

Change is in the year but what happens next depends on so many factors, including the local elections next year. The state is very weak. It is to be feared that the reigning oligarchy with its Mafia-like interests may dominate the scene, to the detriment of the younger generation which really deserves to live. Even tribal chieftains in the provinces are being supplanted by Taliban et al. cadres, so local solidarity structures are being dismantled.

As long as maternal and infantile mortality are not made a priority, I feel that all aid will have failed because the priorities are wrong. Perhaps we should look towards other examples of countries nearer to Afghanistan who efficiently tackled a similar set of problems, such as Egypt and  especially Iran. I think Teheran may hold the answer and this is the direction I feel like researching. We cannot continue imposing cut n’paste standard, pre-fabricated aid solutions.

There is enormous energy in Afghanistan, pragmatic idealists who want change and would know how to implement it, especially amongst the young (and not their professors) . These are the ones we should encourage.

Femaid’s aid projects in Afghanistan still concern women and children, health and education. Our participation to the library project in Farah remains, funds will be necessary to organize the collecting and sending of furniture and equipment. We have also decided that we will help the Farah Hospital and Malalai Joya clinic for women and children by sending medical supplies. From Paris, we will send a convoy of educational toys to the Kabul University day-care centre.  The fight against maternal mortality will be a priority and more projects will evolve around this. I am particularly lucky in that I am able to combine academic research in sociology and anthropology with what I hope can be realistic aid projects. What is even better is that across the years, I have true friends in Afghanistan and real families. I am the batty, ice-cream toting ‘Khala’ from Paris and I love my little nieces and nephews dearly. Without their help and affection, none of this would have ever been possible.

(The names have been changed to protect privacy)

For any more detailed questions, please contact me

The Femaid website will be overhauled to include the recent events and changes, please bear with us!

 FemAid report on Afghanistan, May-June 2006

Kabul, summer 2006

Kabul is still is the sprawling ugly city it was on my last visit a year ago. Instead of the slithering mud flying all over the place, clouds of dust seep into your eyes, ears and nostrils from the unpaved roads covered with litter of every kind. As does the stench of the open sewers. “Progress” may be summarized in the following poster, espied in the Kabul Bank: two women are clad in blue burqas; one holds out a credit card to other saying ‘Tut tut, don’t you use the Kabul Bank ?’ Feudalistic patriarchy remains undisturbed, but capitalism rolls on… There may be a new commercial centre, absurd glass fronted buildings and luxury hotels but the municipality still has n’t organized garbage collection, it’s everyone for themselves trying to make money as fast as possible. The hideous new commercial centre sports boutiques boasts the same made-in-China clothes one finds in any European market, overpriced for the local would-be clientele. The $200 + a night rooms in the new-fangled hotels are for the well paid NGO members, entrepreneurs and drug-dealers. Anybody with half a brain tries to work for an NGO, so the universities and schools are badly understaffed and rarely paid. One can’t blame them really. The head of the English  department in the teacher training department can barely align three words in coherent English, his students despair, especially those who spent years in Pakistan and who would be well equipped to teach in his stead but don’t have the official diplomas or the kind of pull this pretentious fellow has. The school in housed in a resplendent building built by the French, but the contrast with the level of teaching is alarming and bodes ill for the next generation of teachers, not to mention their future students.

 Of course the city is filled with admirable projects, especially those empowering women in rural areas run by UN Habitat which I saw in action; but overall they hardly seem unified and express more donors’ charitable fantasies than anything practical. Sure, there’s nothing wrong with the girl sponsored by France to take her troupe of clowns to entertain kids in hospitals- but what about the state of hospitals themselves, the level of the care and nursing, not to mention the sheer misery of this kids once they return to some form of health and probable begging in the street ? In many ways a hateful city, the wild east, so to speak of Asia.

Meeting Malalai Joya was momentous. This is the  famous  young dissident parliamentary representative who never ceases to express her opposition to the warlords in the government, at the risk of her life. And as much as a committed feminist as any woman could be in this most patriarchal of feudal societies. A moving, tiny woman with blazing eyes- I realized how charismatic she was when I went to the welcome party at the airport where we waited for a couple of hours under the meagre shadow of a tree for her delayed plane to show up.  She has to fight physically and morally against every kind of enemy, from bag-bashing fellow female deputies or crutch - wielding veterans during parliamentary sessions, to death threats by war lords. Talking to people everywhere, I have come to understand to what extent she expresses the by now barely suppressed anger of the Afghan people everywhere, outraged at being governed by the self-same warlords (now clean-shaven) who brought civil war to the country. The streets of Kabul are filled with men in jackets and women in burqas, yet slightly less of the latter than a year ago. Curiously, it is the memory of those years of civil strife after the fall of the Communist regime (of which the last Najibullah era is generally seen as a golden age) that remain more painful to the population itself, not the Taliban.  The destruction of Kabul led by the savage hordes of Rabbani and Massoud  led to the Taliban, initially welcomed for their law and order policies which even to the eradication of much  of the poppy fields. Today, many Afghans feel betrayed by what was a promise of democracy and is turning into a rewriting of history best symbolised by the way the warlord Massoud has been turned into a national hero through Western pressure, giving his name to the airport, a main square etc. Feirouzeh, a physiotherapist from Kabul hospital told me that with the Taliban « Women were  admittedly locked-up, stopped from going to school but at least safe, not threatened by rape and killing by roving bands of Mudjhaddin ». Having said all this,  the situation in the capital city at least holds more promise today than in the recent past and Afghanistan reflects and perhaps concentrates the chaos and contradictions of what is indeed a global situation. President Karzai’s job is a phenomenally difficult one.
 

The youth library project which was the reason of this trip had been launched last autumn in Toronto by my friend Carol Mark and myself. The idea of a play centre had added itself on as something new and essential as the very notion of playing is alien to Afghan childhood. We had written to Malalai Joya and she had responded favourably. The Western area of Afghanistan, on the Iranian side has a long literary and artistic tradition  and learning has a special status. For women, getting an education means accessing a hallowed privilege- which may also be the reason why on the other side of the frontier, women have been flocking to universities, even encouraged by the government, especially in the days of Khatami.

Malalai Joya is keen on the youth library project, but is worried that this may be another empty promise, the kind which she has heard more than once. In a city like Farah, with no facilities but a growing school population, this would mean so much. Properly managed,  it could change even the self-perception of the citizens of this forlorn city. During our meetings, I realized that it would be heart-breaking to let  Malalai down : I did not want to over-promise, but such a project does indeed seem possible…

Leaving Kabul for Herat in the nick of time.

The French embassy was under orange alert on Sunday (turned red  on the Monday when the riots started. The consul had been against going West, informed me that Afghanistan, like Liberia was officially off-limits for French citizens and refused to facilitate the visa for Iran which I wanted, as I was travelling near the border.  «We can’t stop you but… », the consular administrator said, taking a photocopy of my passport ‘just in case’.Just as I got to Herat, I found out that all non-Afghan personnel in any NGO or representation had been evacuated, so I was the only Western person in the whole of that frontier area

By a stroke of incredible luck Feryal my friend, assistant and interpreter and myself were on the early plane to Herat at exactly the moment the riots in Kabul were beginning- in Kheir Khana where I had been staying. On a rickety previously South American Kam Air plane (blacklisted after a fatal air crash earlier this year) rattling every screw and bolt all the way, women in burqas held their tightly swaddled babies. In an emergency, do they put the oxygen mask under or on top of the burqa ? You may well ask….

As for going to Farah by road, everyone thought I was insane, but Malalai assured me of her protection, I feel that these people know the ins and out of the area better than anyone else- I am writing the first part of this report from Farah, we still have to get back from this place and go through the Taliban danger zone once again, so let’s hope they’re right or otherwise no-one will ever get to read these lines…

Herat is a truly beautiful city, the breathtaking blue-tiled mosque which was to influence all of Moghul India architecture. A feeling of near opulence even, shops filled with goods from Iran, down to freezers and cookers. Yet at night you hear donkeys braying and at dawn the call to prayer with the mosques competing in this heavily religious city. Which means that the women are shrouded in black veils of sweaty synthetic material from head to toe, contrary to the free-wheeling men dressed in white cottons. Because of the local tensions following the Kabul riots, I had one such veil made, the cut is complex  with a circular peace at the bottom sweeping the floor and some kind of elastic band that needs to be attached in front one’s ears, then the fabric pulled over the side of one’s face. It keeps on sliding off and ideally one needs another scarf underneath to keep it on- which is great at 40°C in the shade. This is indeed a major form of oppression and must rate as the most unflattering costume ever inflicted against women. I now get the hang of how to keep the wretched thing on, but I always have tell-tale wisps of hair showing and anyway the way I stride (rather than a demure mincing walk) gives me away- not to mention  the time when the thing was practically blown off (as well as most of what I was wearing) as we came out of the mosque, revealing  the tattoo on my shin. I am not sure the religious scholars in big turbans, walking hand in hand out of the madrassa as is their wont were particularly delighted. Feryal was falling apart with laughter, I was n’t. Rural Pashtun women often have little tattoos on their forehead and chin- so they always admire mine !
Apart from the library project, I wanted to pursue my research on self-immolation by fire of young women which has become endemic in the West- this is related to a research project I am presenting at a conference at the Sorbonne in September. My earlier  hunch was right : much of this is caused by exposure to the media and the ensuing feeling of powerlessness. A number of educated girls having lived in Iran are amongst the victims, they had spent refugee years there , which so many tell me was so progressive, rich and open (in comparison with Afghanistan) – one pretty girl (fashionably clad in  a figure-hugging pink denim affair outfit bought in Iran) in the Journalism Faculty told me returning here had made her positively stupid- the  Iranian deal is simple and utterly hypocritical : as long as you play the game, appear covered in public, everything else is your own business. The girl is much envied in her faculty for another reason. As her school mates told me « She made a love marriage with another student. » This indeed is exceptional here, as all marriages are arranged when not actually enforced which is more the case in rural areas. Yet of love, these girls indeed dream, doubtless the boys as well under their rugged manner, more and more so as they discover other norms through the media. The sense of deprivation is become increasingly intolerable as the soaring rates of  suicides show.

Women as burn victims

We visited Herat hospital which according to articles had been lavishly  renovated. Where and how remains a mystery. The sick lie on the floor lining the passages, babies covered in burn wounds are placed atop their mother’s burqas on the rickety beds, the filth and the stench are nauseating. In the burns wards, the girls whimper pitifully on filthy sheets, or directly on plastic-covered mattresses, they are tended by their mothers and mothers-in-law. The sole nurse on guard assures me they are given pain-killers, I found that hard to believe.  Apart from suicides, the border between murder and accident is hard to define. Two girls had fallen in the fire as a result of epileptic fits, and had been left in the flames for hours ! The mother-in-law of one such girl fifteen and pregnant (but probably no older than twelve) was indignant and all she had to say was «We spent 40 000 afghanis ($800) on her, we did n’t know she was sick ». In brief, cheated on the goods. I held the poor girl’s emaciated hand until she stopped  shaking and weeping, so she drifted into asleep, I wish I could have taken her back to Paris to care for her. No love or tenderness is expended on girls in this most brutal society. What indeed happens to these girls when they finally return home ? The survival rates must be low as their lives are incredibly harsh, something which I have been able to observe at close quarters across the years. Up from four in the morning to fetch water and make bread, these young women never get to sleep before eleven at night, when the chores are finally done. And they give birth to about eight children on average. In these clanic extended families, only the mother-in-laws (i.e. the mothers of sons) actually manage to rest and be waited upon by the dutiful wives of those sons. And as yet, I have never heard of a kind-hearted mother-in-law.

At the hospital, they claim that suicide figures are going down in the city- how far that is true remains to be seen- what about the cases that never get to the hospital ? Furthermore, according to Angeles of Medica Mondiale whom I met in Kabul, girls often believe that a hospital will never treat attempted suicide cases. Awareness programmes and workshops  may well have had an effect in the larger  cities. This is not the case for  the rough city of Farah, south of Herat and closer to Kandahar where things are getting worse and suicides are on the increase. In a remote village in the area I asked women about this. One summarized the situation « In the old days, we were not happy but we accepted our lot : I was a slave to twenty people and tended to my five children. My mother in law was cruel, my husband did n’t care about me but that was the way life was. Today girls know that all lives are not like that, and they just can’t take it »

One remarkable woman has been fighting nearly single-handed against this : the attorney Maria Bachir. At the Kafkaesque law court of Herat, women come to see her to ask for help against violent husbands and mothers-in-law. Maria tries to get them jailed, but they usually buy their way out. Judges, hospital authorities, the police, officials, anybody can be bought in this country, murderers go free, she confirmed. She has refused to work for any NGO « Otherwise, who would defend these women ? they’d be left even more wretchedly alone ». In her pitiful office, writing on scraps of paper (while her superiors loll about in plush premises), the Shirin Ebadi of Afghanistan has to face death threats and goes about with a gun in her handbag

 A youth library project for Farah

Farah was the aim of this trip. Now that I’m back, I can write about it. An ancient city with a ruined fortress purportedly built by Alexander the Great (in my opinion, a later tyrant who may have used him as role model), today it is wretchedly poor and isolated. This forlorn area is a furnace, set in a desert, surrounded by ominous black mountains, with temperatures reaching the 50°C. I was told that I was lucky with the weather, only the early 40s, with me practically comatose under my black shroud. A year ago it had been ten degrees more at the same period… Plus the most voracious mosquitoes in the world, as starved as the rest of the population, they were feasting themselves on my pampered Western body as we slept outside by bright moonlight. The poverty is extreme, people live from the opium harvest. An average garden yields about $150 a month which is what families of about ten to twelve live from here. Poppies here are what geraniums are on Austrian or Swiss chalets windowsills, i.e. ubiquitous. A little girl handed me some dried husks which had been slashed to extract the juice that leads to heroin. A souvenir which I smuggled in the sleeve of a jacket to show my son in Paris. What seems obvious, that with the American pressure, drug abuse eradication seems to be limited to arresting the small fry on the road from here to Herat with a little bag of opium, whereas the four-wheel drives with official number plates sail past, stuffed with heroin according to articles and vocal rumour Because of the Taliban on the road from Herat and Farah, I travelled « sotto burqa », between desert and jagged mountains that resembled rotting teeth. Each time some soldier or other stopped our car and peered through the window, I tried to sit demurely. We were joined by Malalai’s armed guard afterwards, and I had three cheerful Kalashnikov-wielding guards following me around hereafter- so everyone in town knew there was a foreign woman in town, continually buying ice-cream for her retinue…. It is only afterwards that I found out about a suicide bomber and a killing whilst I was there- no wonder the guys looked nervous each time I stepped out of the car…

I had come to check out the possibility of building a library or acquiring a building for this purpose. We had bought about 50 books from Herat to start it off- mainly Iranian publications, encyclopaedias, poetry, novels, English-language manuals. This is the just the beginning: we plan to buy many more. Illustrated encyclopaedias type books from abroad will be sent as well. Why a library in one of the most  illiterate countries in the world ? Since the fall of the Taliban, girls have been increasingly attending schools, they see education as a mode of salvation and self-advancement. School may be compulsory, but families can refrain their daughters from going. Nevertheless, some 3000 girls attend on a shift system, for 4000 boys, this indeed is promising. Furthermore, there is a tradition of folk poetry as well, as Pashtun women spontaneously compose ‘landays,’ a local version of haikus. In Herat, next to the imposing public library, I had encountered a group of girls who met weekly to write poetry and they told me this kind of pastime was not unusual in the city. Let’s hope this  custom persists, at least alongside  MTV’s Afghan look-alike, namely Tolo TV…

 From France, I had carried educational games and toys. The project includes a library area for school kids, computers and room for young children with toys. Half the pupils in the Melman Nazo are married and mothers, so the idea is that they could come with their children. Playing does not exist, because the concept of childhood as a period of  discovery, learning and development is inexistent. Just as in pre-Enlightenment Europe, a child is considered just an incomplete, immature non-sexual adult who has to train for future hardship, especially girls. Cheerful Nilofar, aged eight but looking no older than six, spends the day lugging her baby brother and /or heavy ‘toshak’, the mattresses people sit and sleep on, drawing water from the well and assisting her heavily pregnant mother ( in her early thirties, expecting number seven). When I taught her how to put a puzzle together, she was thrilled, but naturally the household chores were forgotten, something her mother promptly reminded her of. An area devoted to playing will certainly advance the cause of childhood here, but it seems essential that we train someone who can work in this way with children.

We toured the aid agencies, lethargic in comparison to the buzz in Kabul. People are waiting for money to materialize as they fan themselves with brochures, bemoaning the absence of funds. Much of the latter seems to have been sunk into carpeting and outsize armchairs of which the same species is visible in most of these offices anywhere in the country. The American PRT, the reconstruction team sits in cement bunkers behind miles of barbed wire- my black veil kept on getting caught in its barbs as a strong wind, like a burning hair dryer, was blowing continuously. The ambiance is very Dino Buzatti ‘Desert of the Tartars’, on permanent alert, as if expecting an imminent attack. Huge Marines in combat uniform parade about, even a surprising young female military all blonde hair and dimples. Totally surreal.
We finally located a possible building- I insisted that it had to be in the local style, with ‘gumbazi’, earth cupolas that absorb the heat. The architecture here is truly beautiful- the soft round pregnant shapes of the gumbazi providing a welcome contrast to the jaggedness of the rocks all round. Yet the population yearns for cement palaces in the gaudy Pakistani style which is what drug barons are building in the midst of the desert. The house we found is brick and earth, newly redecorated, with four well appointed rooms, a well and a series of rooms round the garden. The asking price is about $ 50 000 and we are hoping for solar energy, which the PRT said they were interested in. It is obvious that this would be an ideal solution for energy in this part of the world, where electricity is mainly (and sporadically) available through private generators which means that most people are deprived of it. We also want to provide the furniture, computers and a steady supply of appropriate books, which means another $30 000 on top of that. This is destined to become the municipal library, geared towards the youth of the city- after all, they would be the only ones in fact truly interested by such a project. English classes for girls need to be part of it, but they would have to be free, because otherwise families would be reluctant to invest even the tiniest sum for their daughters, even if they might do so for their sons. What a challenge ! In the meantime, we are housing the library in temporary premises nearby to launch the project, and we indeed need all the help we can get

 In conclusion

This trip was a high intensity adventure- to say the least. I’ll need some time to recover. All the more after a harrowing trip which had me sitting about in Kabul Airport in a filthy and uncomfortable lounge for ten hours, not knowing if this or any plane would ever take off again. The Afghan company, Ariana Airways is blacklisted and they hire a different carrier company each week- this time round the stewards needed training and Frankfurt airport was reticent to OK the landing of this particular plane - which is why my flight out, officially due the previous day had been cancelled. With a few other women, I ended up curling on a bit of carpet on the airport lounge floor normally reserved to prayer. Coming took home three days instead of one. I also damaged my ear-drums by flying in too many ramshackle, badly pressurized planes.

All in all I must admit that I got more than  bargained for. In these circumstances, I could simply rely on Malalai’s safety schemes and pray to whatever deity might be presiding. But in view of all the killings, suicide bombs and Taliban attacks, no arrangement is really foolproof. Accidents happen, I realize how lucky I have been. Afghanistan has once more become  war zone - not that it has ever ceased to be one in the last quarter of a century. Women remain the victims of patriarchal tradition and fundamentalism- but men, in their own way toil under the consequences : enforced marriages, the obligation to submit to (and hand over earnings) to paternal authority all their lives and the continuous pressure of extended families contribute to frustration and rage. So the suffering and misery remain intense everywhere in a context of increasing insecurity. Yet whereas I chose to challenge fate by coming here, they are landed with daily violence and hardship they have n’t asked for. One woman in a remote village said to me « Thank-you for coming, you’re kinder than our own people : you left your family in a distant land to come and help us, that’s really something ». On that scorching day the sun beating down on my shroud-like black tchador namaz, having gone through a rocky desert track preyed upon, as I found out later, by notorious highway killers, in a mud village that felt like walking into Old Testament times, those words went straight to my heart.

 Why fight on under such difficult circumstances ? The intensity of the voyage reminded me of my initiatory trip to wartime Sarajevo in the summer of 1994, I had encountered, for the first time this particular mixture of despair and hope. With Azra, an amazing woman from the city who had reorganized the education system in her neighbourhood, we dreamt of rebuilding their school. In those days, the siege felt interminable and  the return to a normal life seemed beyond the scope of imagination. But somehow it happened and the Skender Kulenovic school in Dobrinja is the most beautiful one in the Balkans- see www.os-sk.edu.ba/historijat.htm. Likewise, the seemingly improbable library project remains emblematic of a future for the new generation of Afghans as well as our own kids. Their fates are intertwined : what affects women in Afghanistan ends up having consequences in our own world, as the rise of reactionary politics all over the world ominously demonstrates. Sharing literacy, literature and games, creating a common set of references through dreams and ideals may create bonds that wars and politics might have otherwise irretrievably destroyed. The fight goes on, for them, for us.

 If you wish to donate for the library project, you can use Paypal on the home page

If you want to send books (from the US) please contact me, but bear in mind that they should be illustrated, non-controversial (geography, geology, basic biology etc) designed for a youth public that does not read English. We are also looking for books in Persian and Pashto : the latter is difficult to find and really essential. 

Carol Mann

June 2006

Femaid report on Afghanistan and Pakistan, March-April 2005

This report was started in an antique Tupolev flying from Kabul to Baku, crossing the rugged mountain landscape so typical of Afghanistan as I was emerging from what may rank as one of the most intense and adventurous trips of my life, just after that first epic visit to wartime Sarajevo in 1994.
I had visited Afghan refugee camps on the Pakistani border several times over the past three and a half years, but this time I needed to understand the other perspective, the one coming from the capital city. So for the first time, I went to Afghanistan, invited to stay with a wonderful family I had met in the days when they were refugees in Pakistan. The journey included visits to Kabul, Peshawar, Islamabad, a lot in between including two refugee camps and at the end a couple of obligatory nights in Baku which would be worth a trip in tiself
The continuation of FemAid projects with RAWA- the orphanage, sponsorship of students and a midwife training project were on the agenda as well as my ongoing anthropological research on female refugees. I also arrived with about 50 kilos of baby clothes and medical equipment, for which Azerbaidjan Airlines uncharitably forced me to pay a fortune in surplus weight and then proceeded to crush one of my suitcases driving the luggage to the plane after the stop-over in Baku, claiming wind as a « force majeure » (their term). You now know what route and flight-company to avoid.

Impressions of Kabul
Perhaps the problem is that I arrived when it was cold and raining after an unnaturally freezing winter which had killed thousands in rural areas. It certainly did not prepare me to think positively about what I was seeing, wading through the mud and the filth in a largely unpaved city. All I can say is that the warm welcome I received and the sheer generosity of the people is equivalent in intensity to the dismal and despairing aspect of their city, as if to compensate for its daily agony. Where else in the world does the security person at the airport who has just frisked you invite you to have a cup of green tea and a chat with her ? Fahima’s husband had been killed by the Taliban and she was bringing her three children up in a single room, but managed to be cheerful and interested in my life in Paris. Where else in the world do people, when you leave them, wish you find to flowers on your road through life ? Where else do women and boys alike spontaneously break into verse, at full moon in a dismal refugee camp or huddling in a musty room in a wrecked Kabuli building ?

Everyone appears to think that conditions in Kabul are much improved since the time after the Taliban : at least that‘s what they claim. At this point of my life and in my middle years as a writer and novelist, and therefore a professional in the exercise of my imagination, words fail me. I cannot begin to conjure anything more sordid than what I have seen, especially in the suburb of Khairkhana where I stayed. The first images one receives (or rather are hurled at you) on the potted road from the airport, are ruins and more ruins, rusting tanks from Soviet times, followed by mounds of rotting rubbish with children rumaging for anything recyclable and therefore resaleable. Women in burqas stand in the middle of the highway begging, their babies at their feet as cars and carts whizz by. Admittedly, some construction work is going on. There are a small number of would-be modern building sites in the centre, looking utterly irrelevant, some sort of botched cut-and-paste job, including an unlikely bluish glass structure going up next to open drains and throngs of beggars tugging at your sleeve. In the ‘smarter’ streets (Wazir Akhbar Khan), the beggars in the know ask for Panch (five) dollars/Panch Afghanis alternately. On Chicken Street, a generally over-priced haven for aging hippy shoppers, these get particularly virulent, presumably encouraged by the pudgy GIS descending from their armoured vehicles in flack-jackets, sweeping the urchins away like flies. It seems that Claude Lelouch, the French film-maker admiring the newly rebuilt Ariana cinema showing recent, if not the latest, French films praised the quality of Kabul reborn. Had n’t anyone told him that women were not admitted to this abode of Gallic culture unless they attend « family » viewing at 8 am ? Obviously I’ve missed out on the progressive aspects of the city, picking my way through its refuse which stands around in stinking heaps everywhere. I did choose to avoid the expat community alltogether, its Intercontinental breakfast parties and embassy gatherings, where journalists and aid officials from the larger agencies throng. It seems that someone in the US compound fortified like a bunker and causing daily massive traffic diversions has had a tee-shirt printed with “Welcome to the most gated community in the world”.Indeed there seems to be little communication between the post-colonial humanitarian occupation and the local population, outisde their immediate staff .
I was lucky enough to stay with my adorable Pashtun family, far from the paved streets in the city centre. This is indeed a most traditional patriarchal family, where the married brothers live with their wives as well as single siblings and young cousins. Togetherness and loneliness operate simultaneously, women work very hard at daily chores, but the warmth and love is there. My contribution has mainly consisted of making French-style cakes, kneading dough on the ground and using a bread oven. Frugal Pashtun habits do not allow for sugar, but my productions were more than politely appreciated and Djevad, the youngest boy of the famiily has now taken over as the family pastry chef!
In Khairkhana, typical of most of Kabul, when the rain stops and the sun comes out, the stench is overpowering- but that is the case in every shanty town on the subcontinent, and Kabul appears to be a post-modern combination of a shanty town, a medieval bazaar after a Genghis Khan stampede, crossed with a rambling refugee camp and at its centre a latter-day version of Kafka’s ‘Castle’ where politics and money are generated. The mud roads are filled with every form of transport known to humanity since the beginning of time, carts pulled by sturdy weather-beaten men who hire themselves out as cart-horses, military vehicles, donkeys, horses, clapped-out Ladas, 4 X4 Toyotas and mainly some kind of cubist-collages on wheels, not to mention a few goats and roosters. Not a single traffic light, but less hooting and systematic shoving off the road than in Pakistan.Nobody in either country appears to have a driving license and about twelve appears to be the right age to put a kid behind the wheel- boys, that is, not girls.
Much of the population lives in the sprawl of mud houses that circle the city. I thought that these were just characteristic of rural areas and camps, having seen this kind of structure in profusion in the NWFP. Little did I know that this was also typical of capital city urban living. Perhaps the boundaries of rural/urban tend to be looser here, but the truth is that the NGOs have grossly inflated the real estate market and the rents are astronomical. The inhbitants of Kabul simply cannot afford their own city. A widow I met lives with her four children in a tiny room paying 8000 Afghanis monthly ($160) and the house my family rents in their unsavoury suburb costs them over $20 000 a year whereas the average salary is between 3000 and 5000 Afghanis (50 Afghanis to the US$), unless you work for ‘farangi’. NGOs who naturally pay far higher rents for less-than- clean and/or modern facilities. You end up wondering what the hell some of these are doing here : at least the effects on the general well-being of the population are not immediately visible, For a certain educated middle-class, just as in post-war Sarajevo, there are a number of rather well-paid jobs. So instead of teaching in schools and universities, the brains of the country find themselves as interpreters or drivers at the service of bemused expats, civilian or military making sure that the natives feel suitably grateful for all the benefits they are apparently pouring on them. One hears at least two contradictory assesments but which work together. First, that things would have been better if the Soviets had stayed (which is obvious after just one hour in any ex-Soviet republic like Azerbaidjan) and secondly, that if the Americans pull out, civil war is unavoidable. Nevetheless, this would be the result of the explosive political situation which the US has so carefully constructed and somewhat repeated in Irak. A self- destructing configuration dependent on Washington, dressed up up as ‘democracy’, President Karzaï, however, is immesely popular and is seen as doing the best he can in appaling circumstances.
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A propos the stench of the gutters. One realises that this is when a veil turns out to be useful, you just lift it gracefully to your nose (though never as gracefully as Afghan girls). Nevertheless, this hardly explains the ubiquitous burqa. In the city-centre, female faces are certainly visible on the street, usually wrapped in a dark scarf, topping loose clothing and high stacked heels, but they are the exception. Those who claim the contrary must keep on running into the same girls and/or have never left the two or three central streets of the city. Everywhere else, burqas abound ; the difference since the fall of the Taliban is that they are not shadowed by an obligatory male escort-cum-jailer, the mahram, usually a close relative as opposed to an unrelated therefore (Allah-forbid) seducable man. The locals at Khairkhana must have wondered what yours truly was doing walking down the road with a succession of handsome mahrams obviously unrelated to her stumbling, sternly beshawled person.
Shrouded in the comforting albeit cumbersome anonymity of the burqa, women nowadays go about on their business alone, especially to shops and markets where modernity comes in the form of brittle plastic consumer novelties made in China and also exorbitantly highly priced vegetables (nearly 1 US$ for a kilo of tomatoes or apples, the same for a big bottle of Pepsi) : multiply by ten to get the Western price equivalent.
The middle-class often find themselves donning the blue nylon burqa--shroud, under the pressure of conservative mother-in-laws with whom they have to live, as a girl always moves in with her husband’s family in order to serve and wait on his parents. This is the case of a university professor who arrives to her classes in her burqa, sheds it for her classes and pulls it back one once she leaves work. Things only change if the money factor comes in- which leaves the women out. Access to education which certainly is a plus of these post-Taliban times, does not bring wealth, unlike shady entrepreneurship, so typical of a post-war economy where war profiteers rule and allow themselves a degree of freedom in terms of business and social practices as well, sometimes,life-style. The traditional regulation through patriarchal family structures and the typical Afghan frugality are beginning to disappear in these circles as far as men are concerned even if restrictions continue to operate for women. Another thing, once the burqa drops, surprises abound even in the refugee camps where I went after a week in Kabul. The wearer often turns out to be a carefully made-up woman wearing fancy clothes and flashy jewellery ; one twenty-year old I met in an otherwise pro- Taliban refugee camp actually had multiple piercing in her earlobes with silver hoops and a CK scarf. Thanks to the media- mostly Bollywood and Islam-friendly Western clips permitted on Afghan and Pakistani TV, these girls are in the know and not just for fashion. Yasmin, my brilliant Afghan daughter who has been interviewing young girls all around the country reports that through the radio, they have become aware of their rights and are indeed clamouring for what the government has promised them. Naturally, this heightened awareness does not help for easing their conditions within the traditional family set-up. This is exactly where the zone of friction is setting in : women’s new expectations clash with those of their males who have not had to rethink their authority and see these changes as an attack on their privileges. This new-found awareness is often the result of having been exposed to alternatives from abroad, as refugees in Pakistan and Iran, corroborated by the new democracy- speak spouting from the media. Just by the way women walk, you can immeidately tell where she has spent the last few years. This goes a long way in explaining the wave of suicides of Afghan girls, who could be termed as first-generation literate especially those who have received some education and vocational training and cannot bear to be married off and condemned to be ruled over by domineering and largely illiterate husbands and mother-in-laws.

Afghan Politics for the Western Sympathiser
What can any Western sympathiser hope to achieve in such a set-up ? I think the first thing is to help to set the picture straight. Keep a critical mind in front of the images of carefully orchestrated propaganda that serves to legitimate what the West has deemed appropriate for Afghanistan, namely a religion-based government made up of the crew that originally brought bloody civil war to the country after the Soviet retreat, so much so that the Taliban were greeted as liberators.
Part of the Western production includes the by-now iconic image of Ahmad Shah Massoud, plastered all over the city, down to the ramshackle booths of stalls on the road to Pakistan. The Lion of Panshir comes in all shapes and sizes, as post-cards, giant posters (even on the facade of the airport, next to Karzaï) leaflets, or wall-hangings or carpets : at least you can stand on his face, which may have been the secret intention of the local weavers….. If the current logic prevails,, doubtless tee-shirts, mugs and, why not, thongs will follow to be sold to US and allied soldiers and embassy staff, Even if the French, for reasons that remain their own, invented this national hero who happened to be fluent in their language, the Kabulis themselves don’t mince their words when it comes to describing the atrocities he committed on the civilian population. Why not ask the Afghans themselves to chose their national hero and write their own history ? They would have voted for King Amanullah. After all , unlike Massoud he was a true progressive who believed in women’s rights- and got killed for his attempts at modernisation in the 1920s.

So there is the absurd, indeed obscene worship of Massoud ; the presence of Fundamentalist warlords and like-minded affiliates in the government- such as Barhuddin Rabbani or the Chief Justice Shinwari whose sympathies lie close to the Taliban. He has named judges in the highest posts in the country who have absolutely no formal education outside limited Coranic studies. The maintenance of Afghanistan as an Islamic republic like Saudi Arabia or Pakistan makes sure that the strictest form of Sharia, religious law is here to stay. Why, if religion is an obligation,, can’t the country be allowed to be simply a Muslim country like Morocco or Tunisia or most of the rest of the Muslim world.? It is more than slightly sinister to ponder that the present bigot US president and opponent of modern human rights has chosen to ally himself with the most reactionary (and anti-women) Muslim nations. Fundamentalists of the world unite, your time is nigh! . Nevertheless, I do think the Afghans themselves have to do something about it as well. As I told many of the more academically-orientated RAWA members and supporters, they need to reconsider their own history and counter the propaganda. A courageous group has started a weekly called ‘Rozgaran’ which systematically denounces the routine abuses committed by the government, relating it to recent history. I really hope that someone starts to rewrite the history of the past 25 years ; the war-lords and Fundamentalist Mudjhaddins (Massoud included) styled themselves into the sole opponents of ‘heathen’ Communism, with the logistical blessing of the US- (watch Rambo in case you’ve forgotten). Now there were other modes of secular opposition ranging from intellectuals such as the poet Majrooh, various shades of committed socialists and one-time Maoists who found the pro-Soviet manner to be ineffective within the Afghan context.- this is where the figure of Meena the founder of RAWA has her place The leaders of these groups were nearly all murdered, usually by the most sanguinary of all warlords, Gulbedddin Hekmatyar. The memory of the socialist, non-Soviet secular alternative has been obliterated as anti-Islamic but it seems to me that today, the only people with whom a dialogue is truly possible are representatives of a secular alternative, admittedly few and far between. The outspoken parliamentary and one-time presidential candidate Malalai Joya in Farah is one such person. And there are others, these need to be sought out and encouraged by thinking intellectuals in the West. Despite keeping a low profile and concentrating on vital humanitarian issues, RAWA also needs to develop an open political platform. With religion as the moral norm creeping back into the daily fabric of today’s world at a frightening rate (viz. the media frenzy over the demise of senile, AIDS -promoting Pope John Paul), secularism needs to be defended and fought over by each and everyone of us- what is happening in Afghanistan and Iraq is bound to have sinister consequences in the entire Western world

Travels to Pakistan
I am happy to say that I travelled over the legendary Khyber Pass overland twice inside a week. The road from Kabul to Peshawar, complete with gorges, precipices, camels against a mountain backdrop, orange groves, Kutchi shepherds- and brightly clad shepherdesses, goats and sheep holding up the traffic, enormous rocks thrown by a giant hand on the hillside, turbaned warriors of every kind (including Taliban) ancient caravenserail stops where locals dream their opiate dreams and the rest of us eat delicious pilaw- surely the trip of a life-time which doubtless your embassy will advise against, for all kinds of perfectly logical, completely pragmatic reasons… I chose the madcap romantic alternative and loved every minute….
The first time, I did n’t really know how illegal it was to cross the notoriously lawless Tribal Areas in Pakistan without a permit, the second time, on the way back, I did, and had to resort to hiding under a heavy shawl and ducking each time a soldier turned up tapping at the bus window. Just as well I’m not a slim young blonde after all. That’s when I fully realized what a sinister package deal the whole veil is : it is truly a system (in the Baudrillard sense), not an element of partisan costume, as veiling supporters in France (and elsewhere)would have you believe. Cover your head and your face and you discover that you may not show your hands or your feet, you have to keep your arms close to your body, walk in tiny steps, always look down, never stroll about, gape, wonder or take photographs, at best hurry from one place to another. Sitting motionless is just as hard, (my gorgeous Afghan son and travel companion-cum-bodyguard warned me : « And stop saying ‘Wow’ every minute otherwise we’ll really be in trouble »). For good measure, I removed my glasses as that’s a dead give-away in a country with about 90% rate of female illiteracy ; after all it’s at school that you find out you can’t see on the blackboard and need glasses…
When I was in Peshawar, there was rioting in this Fundamentalist stronghold held by the Taliban-friendly MMA coalition, stones had been thrown at windows and passing vehicles. This sinister party has just won a major victory by enforcing the stating of religion in Pakistani passports, thereby ensuring possible discrimination against the non-Muslim population. On advertisements and movie posters, female faces have been blackened-out, music is forbidden and women are rapidly disappearing from public space. The thinking, educated population is increasingly alarmed, but the reaction is to flee the area as far as possible.

Back to the refugee camp
In previous reports (see below) the camp where RAWA and FemAid have been particularly active has been described in great detail. Here, I would like to say that the refugee question is still of vital importance. Nancy Hatch Dupree, the grande (and merveilleuse) dame of Afghan studies whom I met in Peshawar informed me there were still 1.8 million refugees in the area and strongly deplored UNHCR ‘s policy of pushing them out of the country at full speed. She knows- what I had discovered myself, that many such returnees have been shivering in makeshift tents for two and a half-years in Kabul simply because there is nowhere for them to go.
Nevertheless, in « our » camp, the atmosphere has definitely changed. People are on the move, they no longer truly relate to this uniquely experimental settlement which has become what all camps set out to be : temporary shelters for those waiting to go back to their frequently devastated homes. Many of those waiting have been doing all their brief lives.…
I had come here to put in place an educational programme for untrained and uneducated birth-attendants. The fact that Afghanistan holds the worlds record in maternal mortality has made this FemAid’s top priority from 2005 onwards. For a variety of logistical reasons, we decided to launch the first programme in the refugee camp, where women need to develop skills to prepare their return to Afghanistan. Although there are a few doyas, recognized midwives in every community, women help each other to give birth, using their experience as a guideline. This is not the first time we have attempted this: in 2003, FemAid was involved in putting on one such project in RAWA’s dispensary in Quetta, now closed.
Whereas it is naturally impossible to imagine training according to Western standards, it is possible to improve conditions through a series of simple measures and basic education in hygiene and anatomy, which are totally lacking here. After all, one hundred and sixty years ago the Hungarian doctor Ignaz Semmelweiss made a landmark discovery when he proved that babies were saved when doctors attending birthing mothers simply washed their hands … We are here light years away from any such conceptions, because traditional notions of impurity, decency and honour need to be considered and woven into this project. I conducted research with these women and medical staff in order to work on the anthropological input lacking in existing programmes.
The report of this particular research will be published at a later date, but in the meantime, I discovered that most women (especially those living in urbanized conditions) at their first pregnancy did not know where the baby would emerge from their bodies. None knew anything at all about sex on their wedding night. One woman reported that despite giving birth in hospital she did not know what was happening « I was distraught with fear, I did not understand what was going on, I just wanted to be rid of the pain ; I thought the doctor was operating in my crotch ». Why the doctor had n’t explained anything remains to be seen. For many, the connexion between sex and pregnancy is not clear and all think that they are personally responsible for bringing girls into the world and therefore inviting punishment from their males. A mother of seven said « I still don’t know where exactly the baby sits in my stomach when I’m expecting”. Another mother of five can’t figure out why a pregnant belly was high in the beginning and then low at the end. When asked why they thought maternal and infant mortality was so catastrophic in their country, amongst many reasons most blamed malnutrition for women and marital violence, nobody ever mentioning hygiene : « My sister’s baby had ribs broken because her husband hit her so much » reported one participant whilst others nodded, remembering similar tales….However, .I hope we will be able to recognize and include any positive aspects of traditional practices and remedies, as these can maintain confidence amongst women attending this course who will be able to find some kind of continuity amongst different ways of tackling the situations they are confronted with.

If this project takes off by weaving in such considerations in this way, it will be truly innovative.

RAWA will be responsible for recruiting the staff. If the Malalai Hospital in Rawalpindi has to be closed for lack of funds, it will shift to the camp, especially as the clinic, funded up to now by IMF, has been closed. Otherwise, they will provide a midwife and nurse to run this programme and we shall be working together on the contents of the course. We have agreed that these women afterwards have to promise to share some of the knowledge that they have acquired with their entourage, especially their daughters. The latter may be the hardest part to enforce, as it is “shameful” to speak about sex and childbirth to your own daughters, but it is certainly the most vital as far as the future of the women of their country is concerned

FemAid projects for 2005

The birth-attendant-training programme henceforth will be our main priority. We are launching it for one year and hope to be able to train a maximum amount of women in two camps, which ideally could concern a few hundred women. The idea is to offer a full 3 months programme covering main issues linked to anatomy, pregnancy, ante and post- natal care, pain, as well as birth control. We plan to have a few sessions for men as well. This should be a forum for active discussion. At the end of the course, women will be given a small kit containing basic disinfectants and presented with some kind of diploma. In Peshawar I met with UNHCR and IMF and hope to get them on board as well. If this works, out I should like to involve specialists from the West.

The orphanage
RAWA has informed us that they now have a sponsor who is able to foot all the bills concerning the running of the Sitara orphanage.
However, we will continue to pay for educational and vocational programmes, especially as we have developed such a close link to the children. First of all there will be English classes and the setting up of a little library of English language books and films.
The sewing and carpentry classes have been a great success. As planned, the first five girls who returned to Afghanistan took their manual sewing-machine with them to their village, which will ensure them a livelihood. We are going to launch the same course in another RAWA orphanage in Peshawar.The other ten will go when each girls who has completed the course leaves to go home- something which may not happen immediately. In the meantime, they have been making ‘shalwar-kamiz’, the traditional tunic and trouser outfits for all the other children and staff in the orphanage and have also learn how to embroider. They henceforth take orders! The boys have made miniature pieces of furniture and are working on larger examples and all are enjoying their work..


Sponsorship of specific students
In Afghanistan, through RAWA, we are sponsoring four gifted teenage girls in order to help them with their studies. Their photos and stories of Najia, Feryal, Salima and Mashkan will be appearing on the site soon
In Pakistan,, we are also helping a particularly brilliant student to complete his ‘A’ level studies. Despite being a charity which makes helping women its priority, it is impossible to do so without working with the men they live with. In such an ultra-patriarchal society, it is far harder to change male mentalities..
We are continuing to sponsor three Christian girls in the Hatoon-e-Fatima School in Islamabad, as we have been doing for the past three and a half years because the Christian community is the poorest in Pakistan.

For the time being, we are dropping the Burns Unit project. It is impossible to even consider such an enormously ambitious project without firm and active commitment from a Pakistani women’s organization prepared to work hard at this. And for the time being, none has been forthcoming despite the urgency of the problem. We have met with prominent activist Shahnaz Bokhari in Islamabad and hope one day to be able to work with her


Funds
Well, funds are somewhat low at this present time and, more than ever, we need your help and assistance to carry out these projects. We are commiting as far as our finances allow us and are not making promises we can’t keep. As you know, much of our money comes from individual dedicated donors and also sales of scarves and handicrafts- if interested, please contact us. We are now equipped to receive donations via Paypal- any donation can be sent with one click directly from our site.


FemAid, 33 rue Guy Moquet 92240 Malakoff, France (note new adddress)
Tel: 33 6 10 30 71 05
www.femaid.org
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MISSION REPORTS IN PAKISTAN

You will find four mission reports, starting by the latest.
For a more complete analysis of the whole situation, we suggest you read all four...

Femaid’s latest fact-finding trip to Pakistan - a rambling report
October 23rd- November 2nd 2003
view pictures

The aim of this trip was a dual one : first to see how our projects are developing and second to pursue my ongoing anthropological research on the subject of Afghan female refugees in camps. I travelled to Islamabad and Rawalpindi to visit RAWA’s Malalai Hospital, and the Hewat school, to Peshawar to the Sitara orphanage and then to spend some time in the refugee camp where RAWA is prominent. Whilst in Islamabad, I also met Saadia of NAWA the Pakistani group we are also working with in the Gilgit Hunza area, Although Afghan refugees and work with RAWA remain our priority, we have felt that in a country crushed by overwhelming poverty which has been hosting the refugee population for a quarter of a century, it is only fair to contribute to a particularly worthwhile Pakistani project.
Travelling regularly by public transport across the country, one gets a fair idea of how the country is moving along, especially as this is my fourth trip in two years. The further north one goes (in direction of Peshawar, the NWFP and Afghanistan), the more police controls multiply and the hold of the fundamentalist-friendly local government (ruled by the MMA) becomes obvious. As a female, one would be ill-advised to travel wearing anything else than local shalwar-kamiz, concealing one’s head in a scarf and the camera in a handbag (or vice-versa). Not a place for indolent tourists or the faint of heart…

An unfashionable cause
The cause of Afghan women appears to have been near enough forgotten, overtaken by the events in Irak that have somehow made the cause of Afghan women yesterday’s news, except for a few die-hards. A situation which is not helped by the maddening self-congratulatory, border line fraudulent reports and statements issued by UNESCO (such as the one dated October 3rd) about the million girls purportedly returning to school and the supposedly safe conditions in which women are giving birth.
Needless to say, this is wishful thinking at best-because if this were just a tiny percentage of the truth, the refugees I met in refugee camps and slums would have run back to their homeland which they have been dreaming about for a quarter of a century. In rural Afghanistan, that is to say places where Western journalists are too afraid to travel, girls’schools are being torched by fundamentalists and the maternal mortality rate continues to be the highest in the world.
Hardly an enticement to return for these refugees, many of whom are by now second generation, not to say third (in view of the early age at which girls give birth) Statistics show that an important number have indeed gone back, especially the educated minority hailing from cities, but the flow seems to have slowed down dramatically and many in fact do sneak back into Pakistan, unbeknown by the authorities.

Hospitals and medical aid
I first travelled to Islamabad and Rawalpindi t to review RAWA’s projects, in particular those we are supporting in the area. The Malalai hospital continues to cater for women and children living in mud-huts by the highway or sheds made of sticks and tattered rags. Huddling in their burqas, they walk for hours or else pile up in a rickshaw to get there, clutching painfully thin infants. The diseases are those engendered by poverty and lack of immunization of these people who simply do not exist in any statistics, born and frequently dying in anonymous filth. I have to say that this fate is not just reserved to Afghan refugees but also to the local population who frequently live in equally miserable conditions, but may have access to some vague semblance of official medical aid and recognition. But what can you expect of a country that spends 65% of its budget on armament and 5% in development and social services ? Private charity takes over in lieu of coherent policies, in the form of assorted NGOs of variable enthusiasm and efficiency and at the lowest level, by private bouts of zakat, especially in this month of Ramadan : the poor crowd round bakeries so that customers can donate a few loaves which are then distributed- surely the wrong word. In an Afghan slum, bread which yours truly bought for about hundred people sitting in the dirt along the pavement was literally flung at them by the baker wielding a stick, as if feeding pigeons or stray dogs.
RAWA runs the only free clinic for Afghans in Islamabad, the Malalai hospital ; this valiant effort has been sponsored up till now by hard-working support groups (especially AWM), but as we all know Irak (or is it Arnold ?) seems to have taken precedence over Afghanistan, not to mention the ubiquitous growing personal crisis which justifiably mobilize many people’s resources in these depressed times. As a result, RAWA envisages having to cut down on what they offer if the situation does not improve within a year, turning it into dispensary, open in the mornings only such as the one they run in Quetta, which I visited last January. So what is going to happen to those women who choose to give birth elsewhere than muddy floors, those kids operated from appendicitis, those unremoved gallstones, those unrepaired bones and festering wounds ? They’ll just have to go back and die much in the same way as they have hitherto lived, in filth, relentless misery and pain.

On October 23rd, we sent two convoys of mainly medical equipment by plane, one to Pakistan, one to Afghanistan. The first was for RAWA’s Malalai hospital and also to the Pakistani group NAWA which works in the Hunza area (for more details see the site). Fourteen large crates are presently sitting, as we speak, in the Islamabad customs whilst someone finds the right person to, shall we say, ‘negotiate’ with in order to get it all released at, we pray, a not too extortionate price…
And we will have to pay a daily fee for the time this convoy is at customs, forcible rent of unwanted space, if you will. The twenty-seven crates of medical instruments and first aid kids along with baby clothes we sent to the Rabia Balkhi maternity hospital in Kabul on the same date are experiencing a similar fate- having been ‘lost’ for a week between Islamabad to Kabul…. It always gets there in the end, but it’s so nerve-racking !
That’s one of the most maddening aspects about sending aid, the sheer perversity of the complexities of actually getting anything there… . I have set myself the task of exploring the various shipping possibilities and rates ‘offered’ by different ports and clearance points. Ever since I started organizing convoys for Bosnia ten years ago, one of my chief regrets is not having a truck-driver’s license !
Such research is all the more important as we are planning to send more medical material and hospital furniture such as gynaecological tables. Such material is available at low cost in France (and elsewhere) simply because hospitals renew their equipment every ten years or so and often get rid of the older one. Same thing with instruments : I brought a couple of dozen metal specula to delighted doctors both in Pakistan and Afghanistan, simply because nowadays gynaecologists in the West use discardable plastic equipment. There is so much surgical equipment around which would really be a boon to other parts of the world. This is something we will be working on in the future, the recycling of medical resources.
CHECK HEALTH PROJECTS PAGE
Hewat school and schooling
RAWA has cut down its three schools to one in Rawalpindi, catering for 400 pupils who come for two shifts. We have been paying teachers’ salaries for the past 2 years for these schools and also the one in the refugee camp. Now there is more staff and various expenses, including a pay-rise, so the expenses will remain the same.
As there is no free education for Afghans, this community relies on this kind of private school of which a number have been established, come and gone by different political and social groups during the past 25 years. RAWA’s schools and various facilities, unlike others, are free. The curriculum tries to follow the official Afghan one in order to prepare the children for the schooling they should be going back to once back home. Of course, there is a continuing sense of frustration in receiving an education for a promised land which seems to remain inaccessible, whilst not learning anything (such as Urdu) which might help to integrate more in Pakistan where the vast majority of these kids have been born and brought up. The RAWA school caters to girls as well as boys and offers adult literacy classes for women (‘adult’ designating anyone married which could and often means a 13 year old student sitting with women twice or three times her age) . An extra budget has to be sometimes included for those husbands who begrudge their wives’ attempts at education- they have to be paid off with a few ounces of tea and ghee… But as I have realized, by now, the most enthusiastic student in the world is the intelligent previously suppressed adult woman who has belatedly discovers literacy and just can’t enough of it…Some of the staunchest, most active RAWA militants are precisely admirable women of this kind.
Education provides the only possibility of developing any form of awareness to women locked into the traditional system of self-abnegation and mindless submission. Nevertheless, learning in schools all over the sub-continent is generally done by rote, with kids repeating lessons without much aim at comprehension, just as they chant Koran in Arabic in the madrassas, without understanding a single world. Inter-active learning, criticism and debate do not take place before university. In all RAWA-sponsored schools, debates and discussions are organized, which is all the more important for girls brought up in the traditional way. Nevertheless, the boys are the most vocal in schools, whereas as the girls excel at written work.

Status, Kudos and Education
Education is something valued by the Afghan community as status building and respectable. However not just any education. A traditional curriculum is preferred and anything which will add to their social image, which is why we have been always asked to sponsor computer courses, despite my objections about the practicality and real use of such courses on outdated material and dubious electricity. The point is that they idealize technology as the magic solution to all their problems : countless boys want to be ‘computer engineers’ not having a clue what it means, just that it sounds Western, powerful and futuristic. Girls don’t nurture have such fantasies : at best, those who access education might dream of becoming teachers or doctors, professions that were accessible to women in the 1970s.
The importance of status in educational choices is reflected in other ways.
An enthusiastic FemAid supporter from the US suggested sponsoring a music class, which I also thought was a good idea, for the Sitara orphanage which we help in Peshawar. These are rural children who have all lived in the most miserable refugee camps in the NWFP area, most have begged in the street and collected garbage from day to night, before being saved by RAWA. I suggested it to the orphanage administrator who went to discuss my proposition with the children. Three days later, she came back to me and said that learning music was out of the question for the families, as it was deemed an extremely low-class occupation ; « The families would be outraged that RAWA is teaching their children music » she said.
I should have remembered. The Indian caste system has somehow injected its scale of values all over the subcontinent : musicians, dancers, actors (however successful) are practically on the same level as prostitutes- as they were in Western Europe centuries ago (I may add that mullahs are n’t very high on the social ladder either, which is something of a consolation !) All this has to be taken into consideration, even if it seems contradictory to us, coming from families who did not mind their children being rag-pickers. French philosopher Pierre Bourdieu coined the term ‘symbolic capital’ to explain precisely the paramount importance of what these people are holding on to, having lost everything else. A way of life, some principles, some educational choices continue to define people and make them respectable in the eyes of others, even in extreme circumstances : which is why veiling and purdah are so strong in some of the poorest refugee communities.
To get back to the orphanage, the children apparently suggested a computer course instead. I objected, pointing out the lack of electricity to be expected in rural Afghanistan where they are theoretically all headed, not to mention the improbable availability of computers in the Pukhtun/Hazara/Baluch (etc) hinterland. I do hope I don’t sound too patronizing, but standards of progress are far from universal : even if the odd clapped-out computer were available in these areas, it would hardly be entrusted to a mere female cooped up in her backyard surrounded by a dozen children … It would land in the reception room reserved to the males in the family, on show, never plugged in, like the antiquated A/C installation which I was made to admire in a refugee camp ; it was n’t working, but everyone thought it looked stylish.
I suggested a woodwork course for the orphanage, a useful skill that they could use anywhere ; even though carpentry is not see as a high class occupation, it is at least honourable. I am trying to get the girls taught as well, but this proposition has raised a few eyebrows. One of the problems is that the traditional crafts (carpet-making, embroidery etc) are no longer a real source of income : countless NGOs have set up such projects and since 9/11, the demand for crafts has plummeted and Persian/Afghan carpets (often the work of nimble little fingers in refugee camps) appear are remaindered in many Western capitals.
I trust RAWA will understand this and see how girls can learn new skills. After all, they have set up boxing, karate and football classes for girls in the refugee camp in which they are particularly active- a total revolution in that part of the world, to say the least. I watched a girls’ football match one evening and when asked for my opinion, all I could say was that if it had n’t been for the ball, I would have thought it was some kind of all -out wrestling match ! I just hope that the girls manage to keep a bit of that defensive spirit when confronted by the horrors of the arranged mariage that inevitably awaits them.

The concept of ‘shame’, female honour and tribal law
It is during the riotous football match that I could I could appreciate RAWA’s sheer genius at evaluating the women’s problems here and finding a creative solution, albeit a temporary one. What cannot be pronounced in words can be expressed through the body.
Practically from birth, girls are trained to submission and self-denial to a degree that is quite beyond belief in the Western way of thinking. This is because a girl must feel shame about her body, her very existence and the first thing she learns is to cover her face and hide her ‘shameful’ body. I have seen toddlers clumsily pull a tattered veil on their tiny heads in the camp ; a woman ‘s first gesture upon setting eyes on anyone is to pull down her veil or burqâ : purdah is a way of life which they have totally integrated without any male being present. Female existence is reduced to being a fragment of life concealed behind a bit fabric, beyond any form of personal will or desire. And a little girl has to learn to submit to escalating brutality, from the blows or kicks of any of her brothers, including the younger ones, to the nameless brutality of the rape which takes place on the wedding night. And generally nobody tells the girls what to expect, except that her husband has the right to do as he pleases with her. As more than one woman in the refugee camps told me : « Of course he can beat me, if I disobey him, he is always right… ». As if by divine right, because women are persuaded that it has been ordained like that since time immemorial, attributing to the will of some fierce God posing as Allah. They may delightedly watch the musicals produced by Bollywood/Lollywood on TV, this is the stuff the dreams are made of for the hundreds of millions of tormented women on the Indian subcontinent, none of them would imagine for one moment that this could have the remotest link with reality.
So to clamour for women’s rights on a Western scale of is hardly relevant Women will not be liberated from such endless oppression at the drop of a burqa. In our society, self-fulfillment (indeed self-indulgence) is presented far too often in lieu women’s rights, whereas here we are talking about something far more basic : the right to respect, healthcare, education and indeed life.

Because a woman’s life is not her own property, hardly her own birthright, according to a code of honour linked to tribal law which makes Islam appear benign and indeed benevolent in comparison.
To give an example, I met a woman who had come to Peshawar to bring two of her seven daughters to see a doctor, because they appeared to suffer from strange, incomprehensible diseases. As we were sitting and talking, the elder daughter, age 18, started go into some kind of fit, rolling on the floor, squeezing her hands around her neck trying to strangle herself and shouting. Three people were necessary to restrain her from really harming herself, it was frightening. As she started to calm down, her younger 12 year old sister started whimpering and then sobbing convulsively. The mother showed us some tablets for epilepsy which one doctor had prescribed, and explained that the mollah had suggested that someone had given them the ‘evil eye’ and had tried fumigating the spirits which apparently possessed them. To no avail. It was obvious that there was some other kind of explanation to this and I began to ask if something had happened in their lives, the mother vigorously denied any contributing factor, until their young cousin who spoke a bit of English whispered to me that the eldest had been engaged (by her family) to a young man she absolutely did not want to marry. Need one say more ? I suspect the youngest identified with her older sibling, hence her own fits. This is a society where women are forbidden to express opinions, emotions or even pain : when giving birth, it is dishonourable to howl. The only permissible cries in a girl’s life is on her wedding night : her screams are seen as an proper acknowledgement of her husband’s virility…
With great difficulty, I tried to organize some kind of discussion between the mother, the RAWA members and myself. However horrified, they could see that I was trying to invade the most sacred territory of them all, that of family honour of which the mother is the sacred guardian. This could be easily misinterpreted. We talked for a long time, me intervening as the mother of teenagers conversing with another mother about problems we parents have to face, which is generally a good platform for an exchange. It is hard to fathom what will happen in the end. But the real problem is far more deep-seated than a psychosomatic manifestation. I asked the mother how she could cope with the idea that perhaps her daughter might truly die because of some decision she and her husband had taken on her behalf. The mother’s initial reaction was ominously clear « Let her die, let them both kill themselves, the honour of our family is more important than their lives : we have given our word »
And when I asked women in refugee camps what they thought of this story, most of them agreed with the mother… Women sometimes also participate in honour killings, they have totally integrated the dominant social values which is why men have to be made part of any kind of attempts at liberation.
I am convinced that Afghanistan’s main social problem is tribal law, especially the dominant Pushtoon law, based on vendetta-type revenge of the most extreme kind. Women are routinely traded, exchanged, given like commodities between rivals, allies or even enemies one is trying to placate. Until there is a strong central government which makes justice dependent on a balanced set of laws and not private enterprise, the status of women cannot change in anything but a cosmetic manner, and men will never recognize their partners’ rights.
However, having said all this, when such attitudes are removed and girls can devellop at their own pace in an atmosphere that is truly respectful of human value, the results are really striking: you get young people that are far more sensitive, altruistic and motivated than their Western counterparts. It suffices to compare a teenager brought up through RAWA with any of our self-indulgent, consumer kids to see that on our side, we may have less to teach than hitherto imagined...

FemAid’s work goes on
Sometimes, things are despairing, but meeting such forceful young women determined to change things is always encouraging. And RAWA members (female, but also male) remain enthusiastic. Their male supporters and activists are particularly promising, because they represent a truly liberated alternative ! All of them plan to return to Afghanistan but are aware that the problems in Pakistan are so overwhelming that their presence is indispensable there. Humanitarian agencies nowadays tend to ignore the refugee plight in Pakistan, concentrating what resources they manage to drum up on Afghanistan itself.
We have therefore decided to continue to support the Hewat school, the girls’school in the camp and the Sitara orphanage. We will continue to send medical material to RAWA, NAWA and Afghanistan. We will also attempt to sponsor RAWA teachers in Afghanistan. Sadie who runs the Cornwall branch of FemAid, will continue to send toys, and school supplies.
We will continue to sponsor three girls at the Hatoon-e-Fatima school in Islamabad as we have been for the past two years.

Needless, all of this is impossible without your support, as we do not enjoy any kind of help at all from the French government.
Please send donations in any currency (although Euros are prefered to avoid banks charges) to the following adress:
FEMAID, 115 rue Saint-Dominique, 75007 Paris, France

In a fund-raising effort, we are selling finest quality pashmina and cashmere shawls, brought in from Pakistan at prices ranging from 25 Euros to 200 Euros (excluding p & p) ; please mail us for more details.

FemAid 's report on the muission undertaken January 14-24th 2003

In brief: I went to check on the different projects we have been working
with RAWA (the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan) all
over Pakistan, schools, orphanages and now a clinic for destitute Afghan
refugees. And also the pupil sponsorship for the Pakistani school in
Islamabad we support… Mainly zooming round the country in ramshackle buses
and taxis held together with masking tape, I went to Islamabad, Rawalpindi,
Peshawar, Quetta and the camps in the area. You know you’re on a Pakistani
highway when the donkeys break into a canter…

In Part I: you will find a report on FemAid’s actions.
In Part 2: a rambling report on the complex local situation.

Now read on…



PART I

Femaid’s continuing actions
We have decided to concentrate specifically on the work undertaken by RAWA
within Pakistan but also support financially when possible adult education
within Afghanistan. I have been going to Pakistan every six months in order
to understand the best way FemAid can advise its sponsors.
Once again, I can confirm that working with RAWA is definitely the best
possible course. As usual, I was impressed by their dedication and
efficiency and cannot express my admiration enough for them.

Our aim has always to work continuously on a small number of projects which
we can sustain. Being a tiny organization, we had rather limit ourselves to
what we can handle rather than spreading ourselves too thin.

Over a year ago, we had chosen to support three schools run by RAWA for
Afghan refugees, two in Rawalpindi slums and the third in the refugee camp
known as Jalozai II.
We have decided to go on paying the salaries of the teachers (details on the
site)
It is true that the teacher and student population tends to fluctuate as
families attempt to go back to Afghanistan, but nevertheless, the need for
schooling remains.

We are also supporting the Sitara orphanage in Peshawar, run by RAWA. We
have just funded air conditioning which will be installed in March-April
when temperatures start soaring, inside as well as outside.

The orphans in Peshawar were sent 150 boxes of carefully chosen clothes and
toys by a particularly generous donor, Sadie Brinham from Cornwall. I went
over to distribute them, after endless complications with the Karachi
Customs which were sorted out by our great friend at DHL in Peshawar…

The children were blissfully happy, they had never seen anything
like it. The Peshawar daily ‘The Nation’relayed the event.

We brought several boxes of medicines and medical equipment to the
day-hospital in Quetta donated by doctors in France as well as clothes and
toys from various donors. Naturally, the overweight on a aeroplane needs to
be negotiated.We also brought donations collected by our friend Sacha in her New York high school, who runs teenfemaid.org

And we continue to sponsor three teenage pupils at the Hatoon-Fatima school
in Islamabad, which looks after the children of the notorious ‘French
Colony’slum.

And I am continuing to research and write about this situation in the
context of my own anthropological research at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes
(EHESS) in Paris.

A note on standards
I cannot stress enough that any humanitarian aid has to be adapted to the
local situation. Standards of education, comfort, social behaviour even
hygiene as we experience them in the West are simply not applicable in
impoverished Asia where open sewers and malnutrition are the norm and
wife-beating are perceived as entirely natural. Heterosexual men hold hands
and express affection openly, but a man will never display the slightest
show of feeling towards any woman, including his wife who will cover her
face in public . The most passionate relationships occur between mothers and
children, especially sons. Only by producing a male is a woman empowered and
respected by her husband’s parents with whom she will live all her married
life. On the other hand, Western couples are perceived as being cold and
unloving towards their children and their own parents as they don’t usually
live with them.
Despite the popularity of Indian sentimental movies, filled with
tear-jerking love stories, every marriage is arranged between people who
often only meet on their wedding day. By our standards, the ensuing sexual
relations can only be described as rape but this too is perceived as normal.
One man I interviewed in a refugee camp won’t let his teenage daughter go
to the camp store to buy vegetables “because neighbours might tell that the
vendor’s hand touched my daughter’s when giving her the change”. So
meanwhile, the girl, covered in a burqa can only walk a couple of yards down
the mud trek in front of their compound. And one is hardly surprised that in
the poorest camps, girls are barefoot in winter as well whilst boys get
outfitted with shoes. After all, they are the only ones to need them as will
have the freedom to run around and play whilst girls just work in the home.
Sending shoes for girls is not the solution, helping educate them into some
form of self-awareness through schooling that is truly relevant and
accessible to them is. RAWA indeed reaches such children.
The fact that children in RAWA orphanage get fruit and meat once a week may
appear shocking to us, but for them it’s an exceptional luxury reserved only
to the well-off. In the presence of adults, they are quiet even as a group,
which initially I found suspicious until I realized that standards of
acceptable behaviour were so different. Indeed, our kids would appear brazen
to Asian parents, especially amongst the poor as in rich families kids are
indulged and can turn into brats as spoilt as our own.
These are some of the essential considerations- and there are many more.

New projects

The Malalai hospital in Quetta
We have decided to help the day hospital run by RAWA in Quetta (in far-away
Baluchistan, next to the Afghan border). It is situated in a slum in an area
called ‘Brewery’what they brew there apart from trouble remains a mystery -
doubtless a name left over from the beer-swilling British Raj). It is not
far from Sima Simar’s clinic, but unlike this clinic well supported by the
US, RAWA’s clinic does not charge anything for consultation or medicines
outside a ten rupee registration fee.
The clinic caters to women and children of the area and is open from nine am
to one pm- there are three hospital beds and also a room where women can
give birth, especially as there is a gynaecologist on the premises.
The queue runs all the way into the yard as women wait their turn to be seen
by the doctor and then collect their medicines on the way out.
We would like to keep this clinic open in the afternoon and possibly at
night, so we are looking to pay the fees of an extra team comprising a
doctor, a gynaecologist, a nurse, a receptionist and a guard.
We have discussed the sending of material offered by our friends from the
Catherine Collective in Toronto.

Training of midwives
We have launched an experimental project about training midwives.
Most births take place in the home with at best the help of an experienced
woman, more often than not, just a neighbour or the eldest daughter. As one
woman, cradling her baby, put it: “I could be dying and my husband in the
next room, but he wouldn’t dream of coming in to help me” Because of the
lack of the most basic hygiene, the infant and mother mortality rate in the
Afghan population is amongst the highest in the world.
So the idea is to find ten middle-aged women in the area who have had some
experience in birthing and give them a three months training course three
afternoons a week in the clinic. The doctor, Khaleda and the gynaecologist
Hanifa are very enthusiastic about this. They know the local population and
are trusted by them and will find the way to explain things to these
illiterate women. Just as for other RAWA projects, namely the literacy
classes, we hope that these women will then spread what they have learnt to
others and that this will help to save babies and mothers.

Collecting women’s narratives
We are launching a project of collecting women’s narratives by a group of
particularly gifted Afghan high-school students in a RAWA hostel who will be
going into some of the camps to record stories. We hope to be able to
publish a book- in local languages, Dari and Pashtun for circulation within
Afghanistan.

Next time, Afghanistan
I sincerely hope to be going to Afghanistan later on in the year. I am truly
interested in checking out RAWA’s much-needed literacy classes which we
continue to support.

For more details about RAWA, the camps and everything else, please look up
the previous reports.

The future of Femaid
Despite their continuing plight, the cause of Afghan women is no longer
fashionable…
Unfortunat