Ascent of Women (33 page)

I told Akbar that the women in Cairo said they had breached the barricade of fear, and I asked her if she had as well. She has a small voice that matches her delicate frame, but she speaks precisely. “I am still afraid very often. I think anyone who has joined YWC has had fear because people who dare to speak out against injustice face backlash, and any new idea is bound to be rejected before being accepted, especially if it challenges societal norms and rules. However, I deeply believe in the equality of humankind, and I know that regardless of how tired, depressed or afraid I am, I will not give up on myself or the millions of women in Afghanistan who can be equal, who deserve to be treated equally. When we rise for what is right, what is our right, when we have a truth we’re willing to stand up for, we have nothing to lose.”

From Asia and Africa to the Americas, these women and their sisters and mothers are showing the way forward. They aren’t victims, they’re victors. Like 3.5 billion beautiful rosebuds, half the world’s population is about to bloom into the future.

CONCLUSION

Here Come the Girls

A
s the summer of 2012 morphed into fall and the fresh start that that season brings, I went back to Afghanistan. I decided to return to that fractious, troubled place because Alaina Podmorow, fifteen, a Canadian girl from the interior of British Columbia who had devoted much of her young life to bettering the lot of girls in Afghanistan, was going to Kabul for the first time, and I wanted to be there to see her meet the kids she’d been helping since she was nine years old. She also planned to try to connect with the co-founders of Young Women for Change, an encounter between young women from two sides of the world that I wanted to witness.

For all the pessimists who claim the women’s movement is over and that young people don’t care, Alaina Podmorow’s story is an injection of hope. I met her in the fall of 2006, when I was in B.C.’s beautiful Okanagan Valley to give a speech sponsored by Canadian Women 4 Women in Afghanistan about conditions for women in that conflict-ridden country. The auditorium was packed. During the question period that followed, I could hear a
voice calling out but couldn’t match a face to it. I strained my eyes over the large crowd and finally spied a pint-size girl on her feet, dwarfed by the adults around her. But the words she spoke made her a giant in the room that September night.

Alaina Podmorow, then only nine years, had no trouble making her position clear. “Those girls you’re talking about—they’re my age. This has to stop,” she said, with all the indignation a girl-child can summon. The audience erupted into applause.

Alaina had held up a pure, clear light in the midst of the renewed darkness that had descended on Afghanistan as the hard-won post-9/11 improvements started slipping away in 2006 in the face of an insurgency that was gaining ground. My adult audience surely cared about the resurgent brutality and hoped for change. But Alaina’s reaction came from the unvarnished innocence we each had begun with before we were beaten up by “the way things have always been.” Later, when I got to know Alaina, she told me that when she arrived home after the event, pamphlets tucked into her satchel and the girls in Afghanistan on her mind, she couldn’t stop thinking about how to help her “sisters” halfway across the world. By the next morning, she had a plan. She would start Little Women 4 Little Women in Afghanistan (LW4LWA), and together with her classmates and preteen friends she would hold bake sales and bottle drives and car washes to raise enough money to pay teachers in Afghanistan so that kids her age could go to school. “I felt I had a power within me,” she said. “I knew I could do something that would make a difference to the girls of Afghanistan.” Her first fundraiser, a silent auction, made enough money to hire four teachers. “I’d made a difference and felt amazing knowing that. If one girl can make a difference, imagine what would happen if a powerful force of girls got
together.” She lit a torch in the process, building awareness and spreading the facts about the lives of girls in Afghanistan, and carried it all the way to the prime minister’s office and then blazed its light from Kabul to Kandahar.

Alaina at fifteen is the quintessential Canadian girl, her wavy hair in a ponytail one minute and flowing over her shoulders the next as she flies down a soccer field, focused on the goal with victory in her eyes, or pitches forward on her snowboard, cruising down the slopes near her home in the B.C. interior. Lainy, as she’s known to her friends, also dances and performs in the school musicals and sings like an angel. Since she was nine, she has started chapters of LW4LWA across Canada, enlisting dozens of girls who are equally determined to restore the right to education to girls their age on the other side of the world. She’s done hundreds of interviews, been featured in a documentary, won the Me to We award presented annually by Craig and Marc Kielburger and
Canadian Living
magazine. It’s an award given to ordinary Canadians making an extraordinary difference in the world for thinking less about me and more about we. It comes with a $5000 donation to the charity of the winner’s choice. And she was the ambassador for Canada to the Day of the Girls held on the UN’s International Girls’ Day in New York City on October 12, 2012. She is equally unfazed whether she is chatting with Prime Minister Stephen Harper on Parliament Hill or Peter Mansbridge on CBC TV. She sees the many barriers in the way of her goal to educate girls in Afghanistan simply as nuisance factors that need to be overcome. Her slogan is “education = peace,” and she has already spent six years of her life working to make those words a reality. She’s a girl who makes us all feel proud because somehow she represents the best we can be.

But going to Afghanistan? Until this year, that was a dream she dared not even hope would come true. Then Alaina received an invitation that no girl with a sense of adventure and a heart of service could refuse. Lauryn Oates, the projects director for Canadian Women 4 Women in Afghanistan, was going there to check out their progress and asked Alaina if she wanted to come to see the work her own organization was funding. She jumped at the opportunity. Her mom, Jamie, who has been working alongside her daughter ever since she decided to become a game-changer, said, “Of course she can go—as long as I go with her.” And so the intrepid travellers set out in late August.

I caught up with them in Kabul. Sitting cross-legged on the couch in the room where she was staying in Kabul, Alaina described the preparations she’d made for the voyage. The packing was one thing: baggy clothing, hijab, long shirts that covered her female form. But it was the psychological preparation that got most of her attention. She knew about the Taliban and warlords, of course, and naturally feared that she and her mom might be attacked, injured or even killed. But the greater fear that kept circling through her young mind was of “seeing something I cannot unsee. I had to look inside myself and realize that what I was about to see would change me.”

She wanted to meet the girls her charity was funding—the girls attending school, the children being cared for in a centre that her group supports for the dependants of women in jail for crimes such as being raped or running away from an abusive husband. But she also hoped to meet Sahar Gul, the girl who had been forced into an underage marriage and then told by her in-laws that she had to work as a prostitute to bring money to the
family, and was tortured when she refused. Sahar had escaped and was living at a shelter in Kabul.

Alaina also hoped she would meet the co-founders of Young Women for Change, Noorjahan Akbar, only twenty-one, and Anita Haidary, just nineteen. She had followed their campaign to change Afghanistan on Facebook and wanted to know how they were getting along, what they were thinking and whether, as she suspected, they shared much with her in their approach to changing the world.

She described the power of her arrival in a country she’d been imagining for so long. “Driving from the airport in Kabul, I saw how harmed the city was—smashed streets, children begging, some women still wearing burkas, men sitting around, broken buildings. But then I saw past that—vendors creating their own businesses, women wearing hijab and very high-heeled shoes, girls going to school, children flying kites. What I saw was the broken beautiful that is Afghanistan.” Like Alice in Wonderland, Alaina Podmorow went through the looking glass, and what she saw was confirmation of her formula for change.

Then she met Noorjahan and Anita, and they welcomed her into the global sisterhood and, as young enthusiasts do, talked excitedly with her about the possibilities for the future. After the fifteen years I’ve spent covering Afghanistan and the twenty-five years writing about women’s issues around the world, I was moved to observe this meeting of minds. It spoke of the kind of change that is possible as well as sustainable. Anita swept into the room in a long black dress with a cinch belt, a black hijab and high heels. Less than five feet tall, she is a woman with presence—one of those people who can stand in the doorway and seem to be in the centre of the room. She reminded Alaina that
the Taliban had stolen the childhood of the girls of Afghanistan, that girls her age had nothing to look back on. “People here talk about Islam all the time—women should do this and that for Islam. And women are not allowed to do this and that because of Islam. What about the men? For them it’s a free pass. No one confronts them and says, ‘You do not have the right to harass me in the street, to touch me when I walk past you, no matter what I am wearing.’ ”

Together they talked about the obstacles facing women in their struggle to change the mindset of men. Noorjahan, who was wearing a short red dress, also cinched at the waist, with black leggings and flat shoes and a skimpy hijab, said she had a level of pity for the “olders,” as she called them, who are “old traumatized people who have their own issues to deal with; they’ve been through wars, and for many of them refugee camps.” But her eye was focused squarely on the future for girls. “This new generation has also been through war, although we never played a part in it except as victims. We have new things to tell and new tools to use. The Internet and social media empower us and let us work to make Afghanistan a better country—one that’s not just about war but about promoting a diverse culture, one that tolerates different ideas about women’s rights and children’s rights, where 87 percent of women don’t face violence and 45 percent of children don’t face enforced labour. Youth and women are the solution to the dreams of Afghanistan.”

The topic that caught fire with the trio was how to end street harassment. The vile things that men and boys say to women and girls walking to school or to the grocery store in Afghanistan usually go unchallenged. Comments such as “I think you are not a virgin. I have a car; come with me.” Or, “I’m looking at your
dress, at your shoes. What I see is a whore.” Young Women for Change has made the stopping of that harassment a priority because they argue that it affects human rights as well as the safety of every girl and woman in the country. Although Alaina had only been in Kabul for a few days, she had already been a target herself, despite her long shirt, pants and brightly coloured hijab. She asked Anita how men get away with it, and Anita explained: “If you are followed on the street, you would never tell your parents because they would say it was your fault, there’s something wrong with you—you weren’t wearing your scarf properly, you weren’t dressed modestly enough. It’s always the girls who have done something wrong; it’s never the men.”

Noorjahan says she screams when men on the street touch her buttocks. “I do that so everyone will know. But the feeling here is you shouldn’t create a scene. You should shut up. They make you feel that you have committed a crime by walking on the street.” Anita added, “They think women’s rights are here to attack the culture and make all women westernized. Sending girls to school is Western. Giving them their rights is Western. Treating them like human beings is Western. If that’s the case, what is Eastern? What’s Islamic?”

Alaina was on the same wavelength. “[What can have] the biggest impact on change here is the minds of men,” she said. “Some men think women should be educated and have the same opportunities as the men do. Others think women should have a child every year and stay at home. Well, Afghan girls are powering their way through this: for every hundred who stay at home, there’s one who can see beyond that and think that she can make a difference. There will be another one and then another one.” She had already visited the schools that her group supported. The
kids she spoke to all wanted to finish school, go to university and become doctors and teachers. “There’s a powerful movement of women and girls here who will be successful global citizens.”

The journey to global citizenship that these young women seek for their sisters isn’t an easy one. Alaina knew that YWC had staged several protest marches against street harassment and asked Anita what it was like to defy the status quo so boldly. Anita told her the first march was a big event in the lives of local women and girls. “It was a Sunday. I was nervous. Afghan women don’t do things like this, but after hearing people talk about the need for change and the fact that now is the time for change, I felt all powered up and decided I was going to do it. No matter what happens, we have to do it today.” When it was over, Anita said, “I felt so powerful, like I owned the street and that I had a voice and a place to claim ‘I am doing this.’ ”

The YWC compound wasn’t hidden from view the way buildings occupied by most organizations, including the United Nations, are in bomb-battered Kabul. A large white banner with Young Women for Change in English and Dari stretched across the yellow doorway on busy Darul Aman Road, not far from the parliament buildings. Inside was an oasis of calm—beds of flowering plants, shade trees bent over the mud-brick walls of the courtyard and a surprising level of bustling activity—an art exhibit here, an Internet café there, with clutches of young women and men discussing the news of the day as tailoring lessons went on in the single schoolroom, where skills for the current job market are taught.