Word: rangina
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...That is a life 26-year-old Rangina Hamidi managed to escape. Her family left Kandahar in 1979, and after 10 years as refugees in Pakistan, ended up in the U.S. Her father became an accountant, and Rangina went to the prestigious University of Virginia. In her sophomore year, though, she started wearing a head scarf, puzzling her American friends and perturbing her liberal relatives. "I was very comfortable in America," she says, "but I always felt there was something missing." After the Taliban fell in 2001, Rangina said goodbye to her friends and family members, got on a plane...
...Rangina works on women's issues-including self-sufficiency projects-for Afghans for Civil Society, a nongovernmental organization founded by Qayum Karzai, brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Every morning, she walks the crooked lanes of Kandahar urging women to learn to read and encouraging families to send their little girls to school. Refusing to wear a hijab, Rangina is an unusual sight in deeply conservative Kandahar, where most women remain cloistered at home. Hers is not a universally popular pitch. Some husbands forbid their wives to listen...
...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...
...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...
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