Word: ghotair
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2003-2003
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Ghotair sits in her dingy hut in Kandahar, nursing one of her four children and slapping another who is wailing for attention on the mud floor. Orphaned at an early age, Ghotair was married to a cousin because, in war-torn Afghanistan in the early 1990s, no girl was safe unwed. At 24, Ghotair has been married 12 years and her husband, a pickup-truck driver-when he finds work-can barely support the family. Asked to describe her life, Ghotair smiles, but her answer is somber: "Finding bread to eat during the day, sleeping at night and looking...
...earnest 26-year-old with a degree in religion is best friends with Ghotair, who can barely write her own name. They are both devout Muslims born in the same city. But when these new friends meet, two worlds collide: the old life of an Afghan woman, which reached a nadir under the Taliban, and a new kind of existence that's mightily struggling to be born. And while the faltering government in Kabul has made big promises to liberate Afghanistan's women, this struggle mostly occurs behind the closed doors of houses like Ghotair...
...Rangina gets a warm reception at Ghotair's lane. Children playing outside alert their mothers and elder sisters. Clad anonymously in the customary blue-pleated hijab, they head for Ghotair's hut, carrying shawls and tablecloths they have embroidered. Behind the dirty rag that serves as a front door, they give Rangina their work, for which she pays from the ngo's funds. (They are sold through a loose network of friends and family back in the U.S.) "It has changed our lives," marvels Ghotair. "We can get clothes for our children and milk powder for the babies." She points...
...visitors in her room are all related: in fact, the nine couples who live in the adjoining mud houses on the lane are brothers, sisters and cousins who have cross-married to avoid paying dowries. When they shed their hijab, Afghan women lead a feisty life. Ghotair is the family hairdresser, and all the women have short, styled hair. The husbands enjoy it when their wives apply makeup and dress in transparent, low-cut outfits so that they look like Bombay movie stars. "They have many desires," grins Ghotair. The other women chortle happily, swapping stories of conjugal demands...
...women say they envy and admire Rangina. "If my daughters could become like you," Ghotair tells her, "it would be the greatest gift I could receive." In fact, none of the female children in Ghotair's lane attend school. Ghotair's pretty seven-year-old niece, Farzana, has already been promised to a man to whom the family owes $2,300. (He has agreed to write off $450 in exchange.) Rangina hears the story in horror. She admits to suffering from what returning Afghans ruefully refer to as "survivor guilt," wondering how she escaped the horrors that still enslave...
| 1 |