Word: kabul
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...burka. So do many less educated ones--if you can question them where men cannot hear. The heavy cloth covering can induce panic, claustrophobia and headaches. It's a psychological hobbling of women that is akin to Chinese foot binding. It's also life threatening. Try negotiating a busy Kabul street--around donkey carts, careening buses and the Taliban roaring by in Datsun pickups--when your hearing is muffled and your vision is reduced to a narrow mesh grid...
...hard to find a woman in Kabul now who does not remember a beating at the hands of the Taliban. As it consolidated power, its orders became increasingly bizarre and sadistic, based on its extreme interpretations of Koranic instructions. One of these demanded punishment for women who allowed their shoes to make noise when they walked down the street. But this surreal pettiness masked real misery. The ban on work for most women had a disastrous effect on schooling for both sexes, since as many as 70% of all Afghan teachers were women. Excluding them from the classroom meant that...
...work ban extended to widows, who were left no recourse but to beg. In a nation with as many as a million widows--out of a population of just 20 million--that decree alone produced a silent disaster. Sabza Gul, 32, now begs at the Kabul bus station and makes about 50[cents] on a good day. Some years ago, when she was still living in a village north of the city, her husband went blind. The family became dependent on whatever money their son Humayoun, 17, could earn as a field worker. The fields were close to the occasional...
...those who stayed home, determined mothers have found ways to get schooling for their daughters. Rawshan and Nasima, both 30, are married to the same man, Abdul Qadir, 55, a porter in a Kabul market who makes about $1 a day. Rawshan has one son and three daughters by Abdul. Nasima has one son and two daughters. Desperately poor, they live in a house peppered with bullet holes. For the past two years, Rawshan's eldest daughter Wahida, 10, has been going to a secret school in an abandoned building. She has only one hour of lessons a day, given...
This helps explain why the signals being sent to women by Alliance forces in Kabul are so mixed. Though they re-opened a movie theater there last week for the first time since the Taliban took power, women were not admitted. A brief street demonstration last week by women who wanted to march to the U.N. headquarters in Kabul to demand equal rights was blocked by the police, who claimed they could not guarantee the security of the protesters...