Kabir Panthi
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Kabul park offers Afghan women a taste of freedom and opportunity
By Emily Wax
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, April 11, 2010; A14
KABUL -- On a recent day when the sun was finally strong enough to dry the Afghan capital's muddy streets, Habiba Sarwe sought her husband's permission to visit a spot that her daughter and all the neighborhood wives were talking about: a park, with swings, benches, flowers and a gazebo. A park for women only.
"Please, let me go," begged Sarwe, who is 44 but whose tired eyes make her look far older. "It's a good place."
Her husband decided it would be okay. So that afternoon, Sarwe put on her favorite fitted gray wool suit under her shapeless, head-to-toe burqa and set out with three of her children for the dusty park on the edge of Kabul.
Once inside the two metal gates, she pushed up the visor of her burqa and stood still, the sunshine warm on her face, while her two daughters and youngest son raced to the swings. She smiled as they soared higher and higher.
"This is the one place that's ours," said an out-of-breath Fardia Azizmay, 19, Sarwe's older daughter, as she jumped off a swing and looked over a pile of a dozen blue burqas, tossed off by women as they entered. "For us, home is so boring. Our streets and shops are not for women. But this place is our own."
The small park, protected by a half-dozen gun-toting guards, has become a favorite destination for Kabul women wanting a safe, quiet place to meet with friends, complain about their husbands, discuss their kids, line one another's eyes with black kohl or just shed their burqas and play, female activists here say.
But play is not the only draw. The park, paid for by India, also feels like a miniature college campus. India's Self-Employed Women's Association, or SEWA, which runs it, has set up a training center on the grounds for mothers and daughters who may never have been to school.
In classrooms overlooking the park, women learn embroidery and organic farming. They pickle tomatoes, bottle jam and sew at a row of new machines under a poster proclaiming, "Need Is Ability." It is all part of a $1.3 billion Indian aid program for neighboring Afghanistan that includes building roads and power plants as well as reaching out to women and girls through clinics and classes.
Although women make up more than half of Afghanistan's population, fear of fundamentalist militant groups has caused them to nearly disappear from public life, especially in the rural south, where U.S.-led forces are trying to root out Taliban fighters. Some of those insurgents still pressure women to cover up and to avoid schools and workplaces, defying the Afghan constitution's guarantee of equal rights for both sexes.
"I get threatening calls almost every day asking why I think I am important enough to work in an office," said Fouzia Ahmed, 25, a government secretary in Kabul. "The truth is, no women feel safe here. We are always threatened. That's why we need the eyes of the world."
Several foreign governments seeking to exert influence here are focusing on Afghan women in the face of what some activists say is the neglect of their needs by President Hamid Karzai's administration.
This month, 40 female U.S. Marines will deploy to Afghanistan as the first full-time "female engagement teams" -- four- and five-member units that will visit rural women in their homes. Typically, Afghan women are not allowed to speak to men other than their husbands or relatives.
Germany and Italy also have helped fund computer schools for girls and family health programs.
But it is India, with its long-standing cultural ties to Afghanistan, that has done the most.
"Our classes and our park are so busy -- but only because India went to the Kabul slum areas and talked to the women about coming," said Tamana Ghaznewil, 19, an Afghan who works at the park. "For many women, having someone come from another country and offer this little garden was really new. Some asked me, 'Why would they see me, an Afghan woman, as important?' "
On a recent afternoon, Sarwe described what the park represents to her. "It means a break from cooking and cleaning," she said. But it also represents opportunity.
Sarwe's husband lost a leg in a suicide bombing several years ago and is unemployed and depressed, she said. During the factional fighting of the 1990s, the family fled to the refugee camps in Pakistan, where Azizmay learned English and graduated from high school. The family returned to Kabul because they missed home.
Today, Sarwe stays home to care for her husband. The family urgently needs money to send Azizmay to college, so her mother wonders whether she should take an embroidery class to earn a little extra.
"This park has been a few minutes of freedom for my mother," Azizmay said, coaxing Sarwe onto a swing and pushing her into the air. "That freedom can be addictive."
By Emily Wax
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, April 11, 2010; A14
KABUL -- On a recent day when the sun was finally strong enough to dry the Afghan capital's muddy streets, Habiba Sarwe sought her husband's permission to visit a spot that her daughter and all the neighborhood wives were talking about: a park, with swings, benches, flowers and a gazebo. A park for women only.
"Please, let me go," begged Sarwe, who is 44 but whose tired eyes make her look far older. "It's a good place."
Her husband decided it would be okay. So that afternoon, Sarwe put on her favorite fitted gray wool suit under her shapeless, head-to-toe burqa and set out with three of her children for the dusty park on the edge of Kabul.
Once inside the two metal gates, she pushed up the visor of her burqa and stood still, the sunshine warm on her face, while her two daughters and youngest son raced to the swings. She smiled as they soared higher and higher.
"This is the one place that's ours," said an out-of-breath Fardia Azizmay, 19, Sarwe's older daughter, as she jumped off a swing and looked over a pile of a dozen blue burqas, tossed off by women as they entered. "For us, home is so boring. Our streets and shops are not for women. But this place is our own."
The small park, protected by a half-dozen gun-toting guards, has become a favorite destination for Kabul women wanting a safe, quiet place to meet with friends, complain about their husbands, discuss their kids, line one another's eyes with black kohl or just shed their burqas and play, female activists here say.
But play is not the only draw. The park, paid for by India, also feels like a miniature college campus. India's Self-Employed Women's Association, or SEWA, which runs it, has set up a training center on the grounds for mothers and daughters who may never have been to school.
In classrooms overlooking the park, women learn embroidery and organic farming. They pickle tomatoes, bottle jam and sew at a row of new machines under a poster proclaiming, "Need Is Ability." It is all part of a $1.3 billion Indian aid program for neighboring Afghanistan that includes building roads and power plants as well as reaching out to women and girls through clinics and classes.
Although women make up more than half of Afghanistan's population, fear of fundamentalist militant groups has caused them to nearly disappear from public life, especially in the rural south, where U.S.-led forces are trying to root out Taliban fighters. Some of those insurgents still pressure women to cover up and to avoid schools and workplaces, defying the Afghan constitution's guarantee of equal rights for both sexes.
"I get threatening calls almost every day asking why I think I am important enough to work in an office," said Fouzia Ahmed, 25, a government secretary in Kabul. "The truth is, no women feel safe here. We are always threatened. That's why we need the eyes of the world."
Several foreign governments seeking to exert influence here are focusing on Afghan women in the face of what some activists say is the neglect of their needs by President Hamid Karzai's administration.
This month, 40 female U.S. Marines will deploy to Afghanistan as the first full-time "female engagement teams" -- four- and five-member units that will visit rural women in their homes. Typically, Afghan women are not allowed to speak to men other than their husbands or relatives.
Germany and Italy also have helped fund computer schools for girls and family health programs.
But it is India, with its long-standing cultural ties to Afghanistan, that has done the most.
"Our classes and our park are so busy -- but only because India went to the Kabul slum areas and talked to the women about coming," said Tamana Ghaznewil, 19, an Afghan who works at the park. "For many women, having someone come from another country and offer this little garden was really new. Some asked me, 'Why would they see me, an Afghan woman, as important?' "
On a recent afternoon, Sarwe described what the park represents to her. "It means a break from cooking and cleaning," she said. But it also represents opportunity.
Sarwe's husband lost a leg in a suicide bombing several years ago and is unemployed and depressed, she said. During the factional fighting of the 1990s, the family fled to the refugee camps in Pakistan, where Azizmay learned English and graduated from high school. The family returned to Kabul because they missed home.
Today, Sarwe stays home to care for her husband. The family urgently needs money to send Azizmay to college, so her mother wonders whether she should take an embroidery class to earn a little extra.
"This park has been a few minutes of freedom for my mother," Azizmay said, coaxing Sarwe onto a swing and pushing her into the air. "That freedom can be addictive."
