Sylvia's Journal

My colleague S’s little girl is very sick. She is only five years old but suffering from something no doctor in Afghanistan or Peshawar has been able to diagnose. The family has made several trips with the little girl to Peshawar, delivered blood to a Karachi laboratory. Still, the girl cries at night from pain and has large welts, bumps and bruises on her legs no one can explain.

He was going to deliver a presentation at a quarterly conference of military doctors on Saturday but today he realized that his priorities are rearranged. Family always comes first – as it should be. He was away from the office trying to get a visa to fly with the little patient to Islamabad, to a hospital that is among the best in the region. Something needs to be done; the family has not slept in days.

And so I get to go to the military-medics conference on Saturday to replace him. Our powerpoint story needed to be sent in today. When you work with the military everything needs to be checked and thus submitted in time. In some ways it is a good thing as all is now fixed – hard for me who always wants to make endless changes until the bitter end. Not possible now.

Today was my weekly SOLA class. I shared my hour with the coordinator of the Afghan Women Writers Project who explained the girls how they could become part of this very exciting project. We listened to one of the girls who has already published on the AWWP site as she read to us her essay to get into colleague in the US. I used a series of questions to guide the response of her classmates about powerful images, feelings and the message she tried to convey.

The essay triggered several stories, most very disturbing: the young girl, mother of a small boy, who had sneaked out to attend high school, 10th grade, and was beheaded by her husband upon return from school; her mother was too. The sin: wanting to be educated. She was the classmate of one of my students who will bring her photo next class.

Or the 13-year old married off to a 45-year old poppy grower as his 3rd wife, a relative of Sofia. “Even though she was younger than most of her step-children, she seemed to agree with her life, accepting it as her destiny and a practice of her culture,” wrote Sofia. “She did not protest – it was expected, something to be endured.”

And then there was the young girl in Kandahar killed by a passing motorbike rider, right in front of Sofia’s eyes. She described her reactions as “my […] senses had stopped working for a while and I could do nothing except like a statue staring [at] her.”

I watch the faces of the girls as each one tells her story. They could all easily become one of these stories themselves, and they know it. I am glad that they are just as outraged as I am. One could expect them to be rather inured to such horrors that surround them.

After just a few classes it is clear that I never have to worry about not having enough material for my conversation class. We just started to talk about the rule of law versus moneyed power when our time was up. We are now having a waiting list of conversation topics: will educating the young girls and women make any difference if the men are not educated? How can the rule of law be enforced when the enforcers themselves are wealthy and powerful? Does God pick your husband?
Since we are leaving for Dubai next week the girls will have several weeks off. Their homework is to interview a woman they admire and then report on the interview in class four weeks from now.