Sylvia's Journal

Today’s Fourth of July didn’t feel much like an Independence celebration, except that it was a day off which was nice.

I spent the morning reading up on various blogs about Afghanistan, going from one hypertext to another, in order to make sense of what’s happening here. It left me utterly depressed because I think we are doing this ‘saving Afghanistan from itself’ all wrong.

The absence of women in public life, at any level, and the parochial views that the male-headed families, clans, villages, districts and even provinces pursue are in my view root causes that no army in the world can address (or root out, as in ‘dig out and destroy’ – think weeds!)

It seems to me that only education and bringing women into public life and decision making roles can turn this country around – together these two strategies are more powerful than the most sophisticated armies and weapons in the face of violence, corruption, and other manifestations of unbridled and uneducated testosterone.

Each woman in a decision making position and each boy and girl who go to school long enough to learn to think for themselves bring us one thousandth of one thousandth of a millimeter closer to peace. It’s that slow. It’s at least a 1000-Year-Project. I am just one small actor in an enormous relay race that started seriously in the 1800s and will continue long after I am gone. What keeps me here is the many Afghan and non Afghan women (and men) who are participating in this race in which our main responsibility is to prepare the next relay to carry the torch forward.

I felt a little better after seeing a YouTube video of the Free Hugs project that friends sent me. It took about 3 hours to download the three and a half minute video about a few brave souls offering free hugs in Sondrio (Italy) and another one in Australia. I wondered how that would go over to offer free hugs in downtown Kabul, or Riyadh or Cairo. If it can be done in Japan, not a very hug-friendly place, why not here? God knows people here need hugs real badly.