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More than 90% of the people killed by a 6.3-magnitude earthquake in western Afghanistan last weekend were women and children, U.N. officials reported last week early October 2023.
There was clearly a gender dimension as many men migrate to Iran for work. The women were at home doing the chores and looking after the children. Women and children were more likely to have been at home when the quake struck in the morning. They found themselves trapped under the rubble. Yet this natural desaster is not the only challange women face.
© Cornelia Suhan/medica mondiale
There are social movements that shake the world. The Afghan women’s rights movement is one of them. Afghan women’s fight for freedom and equality spans generations. Their most fierce battle has been for visibility and presence in public life—for their names to be known, their voices to be heard, and their presence to be acknowledged and valued.
For women and girls the situation is particularly dramatic.
It took only a few months for the Islamists to act with incomparable severity towards women and girls as they took away their right to self-determination and wiped out 20 years of progress for the rights of women and girls in the country. Currently restricted freedom of movement, restrictive dress codes, no protection from violence, forced marriage are the norm in the society. To all of this adds now the forced closures of Afghanistan’s beauty salons.
As public space is vital for gatherings and cultural sharings between women, their closures have cost women much more than their blowouts and manicures.
© Sara Wais
Nevertheless, there are activists who want to build a bridge between local activists and those outside the country, continuing the efforts to uphold women's and human rights in Afganistan. A network of women for women. That is their aim and all hope for a better future.
Luckily, one of these activists, is my dear friend Sara Wais, who recently visited Afganistan and was kind to share her insights as a one-page contribution for the book Many Many Beginnings:
"I thought I could take myself out of a bad situation by Googling or researching a solution to a problem I faced because the internet is a secondary basic need for humans now. But what happens when the wires are pulled out from underneath us and we’re left to our own demise?
What do we do then? After spending seventeen days in remote and isolated villages of the Wakhan Corridor, I realized that I was ignorant of the world beyond the internet and I was far more dependent on the World Wide Web than I was on the World Wide Web of people.
On our drive to the furthest Northeastern point of Afghanistan, where Afghan mountains meet China’s border, our car broke down on the rocky, unpaved, winding narrow and flooded roads numerous times. In a place isolated from the world, where the primary source of transportation is donkeys, horses or yaks, there are no mechanics. A trip that would have taken us two hours, ended up being ten hours. In one incident we had our very own Titanic moment. Our 4x4 truck was lodged nose-down in a knee-deep rushing water. There was no tow truck. Ultimately we were rescued by eight men from a local village and a Land Cruiser of traders who happened to drive by. All eight men thigh thigh-deep in frigid, rushing water, using a basic rope and pulling our truck with another car also at risk of getting stuck.
In a Kyrgyz nomad camp, where I shared a tiny room built of mud with my husband and our driver, I was victim to excruciating pain that left me biting on a blanket an entire night to suppress screams, leaving my jaw aching from the constant clench and my eyes swollen from silent tears. Combine that with a blood oxygen reading of 82% due to high elevation, I was a wreck. There was no doctor or nurse to evaluate me, no Google to quickly type my symptoms in, no text messaging to send my doctor sisters, and besides first aid medication of Ibuprofen and anti-histamines, no other medication. Was it an infection? No idea. Was it abrasion? No clue. Was it an allergy? I couldn’t know. I had to endure the unknown. My only option was to talk to a woman in the village and tell her what I was going through. She couldn’t help my condition, but I depended on her for moral support and that was a balm. Her personal stories of how she lost five daughters to infant death, her own excruciating leg pain from squatting down three times a day to milk yaks, and her life filled with intensive manual labor helped me forget about my pain, and take a journey in her shoes, and connect on the basis of pain.
Both the sinking car and my health emergency have been transformative. The lessons here: depend on our community, to surrender to the unknown despite our plans, and to unplug from the internet as our main tool. In a world that is rapidly advancing technologically, we are in the process of losing the sense of what it means to be human. To be human is to err, to be constantly learning, to not know and have access to everything at any time and most importantly, to connect and to depend on each other.
Sara Wais
August 28th, 2023
Kabul, Afghanistan"
but more strikingly with an article
"Facing the Forced Closures of Afghanistan’s Beauty Salons, Kabul’s Women Remain Resilient Despite Losing Their Safe Spaces" to Vogue Arabia.
I consider it essential to be part of a worldwide, emancipatory movement to work towards positive social transformation for all women – with all of the differences. There are some organizations alread active to work to enhance the self-empowerment of women, also in Afganistan. This includes creating spaces for reflection, learning from each other, learning with each other and networking.
For more facts and support please check out https://medicamondiale.org/en/where-we-empower-women/afghanistan
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