Word: rodriguez
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...Deborah Rodriguez left two sons and a failed marriage behind in Holland, Michigan, when she headed to war-shattered Afghanistan in 2002 with a few weeks of disaster-relief training and a suitcase full of moist towelettes. "I imagined I would spend the month there bandaging wounds, splinting broken limbs, clambering over the rubble, and helping people who were still hiding from the Taliban," she writes. "I didn't have any idea that I'd still be here five years later doing spiral perms and introducing the art of pubic waxing...
...Rodriguez was a disaster at disaster relief, but she brought along some tools that proved providential. "I never travel without my scissors," she says in The Kabul Beauty School, her amusing, inspiring account of good intentions gone platinum, with streaks. Rodriguez had worked as a beautician in Michigan, and when word of her skills got out, fellow aid workers besieged her for haircuts. Before long, she realized her real destiny was training Afghanistan's oppressed, burqa-encased women to support themselves as hairdressers...
With funds from a local NGO, Rodriguez helped open the Kabul Beauty School on the grounds of the Ministry of Women's Affairs. Applicants thronged the gates, and soon the first class of 24 women - some hadn't left their homes in months - were learning the finer points of highlighting, manicuring and waxing. For supplies, Rodriguez called the U.S. toll-free number on a jar of Paul Mitchell styling gel, got through to owner John Paul DeJoria, and before long a truckload of shampoos, gels, sprays and other essentials turned up at her door. Estée Lauder and Vogue...
...Rodriguez and her school also encountered hair-raising setbacks. Though the Taliban had fled, fundamentalists threatened to destroy what they viewed as a school for scandal. Some of her students were beaten by their husbands. Water and electricity were elusive. Money dwindled. The Afghan government finally evicted the school, socked it with punitive taxes and seized its equipment. Meanwhile, bombs exploded on the street outside and neighbors were kidnapped. The book ends with the school shuttered, the students dispersed and Rodriguez unsure of ever reopening...
What propels The Kabul Beauty School are the stories of its students. One of them faces shame and possible death because her husband-to-be is about to discover, on their wedding night, that she's not a virgin. (Rodriguez helps out with blood from her own finger, cleverly repackaged.) A young woman's husband insists she show her obedience by sleeping with other men; it turns out he's a pimp, and she narrowly avoids a lifetime of prostitution. Indeed, hardly a page goes by without somebody collapsing in sobs. Male readers especially will find the book sodden with...