For the first question, I'll start with the women. In the valley, almost all the women wear burkas when they're out on in public. I don't know how common that is across the entire country - I've heard that Kabul is more progressive and that a lot of women there walk around dressed conservatively (but not in burkas) and that some even drive. That certainly isn't the case here. It's hard to judge age, but I think pretty much every girl beyond the age of about fourteen wears the burka. Every now and then you'll see an old lady without one, but it's fairly uncommon, and they're all elderly enough that they can get away with it.
For the most part, if a group of women is walking down the side of the road and nobody is around, they'll pull the front of the burka back over their head and wear it almost like a cape, so that they can see. If pedestrians or a car are coming, they pull the burka back down and cover up. I can only think of one occasion when I saw someone who apparently just didn't care and stood openly watching us as we drove by. She looked relatively young, and since she was waiting at a bus stop, I got the impression that she wasn't from around here and that she was more curious to see us than she was interested in covering up.
There are a lot of cultural differences that I can accept without a problem, but the treatment of women around here is the one that I think I have the hardest time with. When the women on our team have had the chance to meet with the local women, the reaction from the women about the burka is typically that it's not really an important issue, and that they have bigger things to worry about, particularly health care. I understand that, but as an outsider, the burka is a ubiquitous presence that seems oppressive and degrading. If you can't even go out in public openly without being persecuted for not covering up, something seems seriously wrong.
To go right along with that, the male-dominated nature of this place is apparent every day. Obviously you never see women, and even in people's homes the women are always separated. In five months here I have never spent any time in the company of a local Afghan woman. If they have a role larger than raising children (lots of children), I'm not sure what it is.
One of the most troubling sights I've seen happened a few weeks ago. We had a general who came to visit, so we drove him off the end of the paved road to try to show him why we need funding for new road projects around here. At our turn-around point I ended up standing by the vehicles while the general walked around the village. There was a group of girls standing on the other side of the road, all of whom were probably six or seven years old. They were just standing there quietly watching us - watching the Americans being a common spectator sport around here - when a boy about the same age walked over by himself and started harassing them. He said something that I didn't need an interpreter to understand as "go away", then he hit one of the girls twice. It wasn't a gentle tap. He hit her twice on the back, hard enough to make the hollow thumping sound you hear sometimes when somebody gets hit in the torso. Then he kicked her shoe down the road, which I guess was enough to convince them to leave.
You see kids fight around here occasionally. There are thousands of kids in each village; you're bound to see a scuffle now and then. This was different, and I think the reason why was that the girls just walked away. They didn't cry (including the girl who got hit) and they didn't protest, they just turned around and left. These girls were six years old, and they had already come to terms with the way they were being treated. And the boy seemed to think nothing of it. It's hard to be optimistic that older girls and women are any better off; kids learn about what's acceptable and how to act by watching what goes on around them.
That probably sounds harsh. I'm not accusing Afghan men of being wife-beating mysoginists. It's a different culture, and I'm sure that women are respected in ways that I just don't have way of seeing. I guess it's only an observation, one that I've had a harder time figuring out.
Okay, this has been a lot more serious than I expected, and it's probably kind of a downer. Hopefully the picture will help. We were on our way back from a five hour trip up north and the guy in the car in front of us was handing out stuffed animals and backpacks to pretty much every kid we passed. These girls were adorable, and it was one of the first times I've seen where no other kids were around, since usually if we give things out to girls a group of boys runs up as soon as they realize what's going on. A teddy bear may be pretty inconsequential in the big scheme of things, but its makes ten hours of driving worthwhile to see a group of kids so happy.
1 comment:
Thanks for the informative post, Lee. I just read "a Thousand Splendid Suns" by the same guy who wrote "The Kite Runner". It brought up a lot of questions for me about how a society, one that has mothers, sisters, aunts and grandmothers can treat its women so poorly. But it would seem that it is systemically ingrained from a young age.
As a character in the book says, "Like a compass needle that points north, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman."
I would argue that this is not unique to Afghanistan or Muslim countries, but rather any society that purports to "protect" women by hiding them and keeping them from gaining education and meaningful work.
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