A Long-Distance Friendship

Gho

tair sits in her dingy hut in Kandahar, nursing one of her four children and slapping another who is wailing for attention on the mud floor. Orphaned at an early age, Ghotair was married to a cousin because, in war-torn Afghanistan in the early 1990s, no girl was safe unwed. At 24, Ghotair has been married 12 years and her husband, a pickup-truck driver—when he finds work—can barely support the family. Asked to describe her life, Ghotair smiles, but her answer is somber: "Finding bread to eat during the day, sleeping at night and looking for bread again in the morning."

That is a life 26-year-old Rangina Hamidi managed to escape. Her family left Kandahar in 1979, and after 10 years as refugees in Pakistan, ended up in the U.S. Her father became an accountant, and Rangina went to the prestigious University of Virginia. In her sophomore year, though, she started wearing a head scarf, puzzling her American friends and perturbing her liberal relatives. "I was very comfortable in America," she says, "but I always felt there was something missing." After the Taliban fell in 2001, Rangina said goodbye to her friends and family members, got on a plane to Pakistan and then drove to Kandahar: "I wanted to come back and work with my people."

Now, the earnest 26-year-old with a degree in religion is best friends with Ghotair, who can barely write her own name. They are both devout Muslims born in the same city. But when these new friends meet, two worlds collide: the old life of an Afghan woman, which reached a nadir under the Taliban, and a new kind of existence that's mightily struggling to be born. And while the faltering government in Kabul has made big promises to liberate Afghanistan's women, this struggle mostly occurs behind the closed doors of houses like Ghotair's.

Rangina works on women's issues—including self-sufficiency projects—for Afghans for Civil Society, a nongovernmental organization founded by Qayum Karzai, brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Every morning, she walks the crooked lanes of Kandahar urging women to learn to read and encouraging families to send their little girls to school. Refusing to wear a hijab, Rangina is an unusual sight in deeply conservative Kandahar, where most women remain cloistered at home. Hers is not a universally popular pitch. Some husbands forbid their wives to listen to her.

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But Rangina gets a warm reception at Ghotair's lane. Children playing outside alert their mothers and elder sisters. Clad anonymously in the customary blue-pleated hijab, they head for Ghotair's hut, carrying shawls and tablecloths they have embroidered. Behind the dirty rag that serves as a front door, they give Rangina their work, for which she pays from the ngo's funds. (They are sold through a loose network of friends and family back in the U.S.) "It has changed our lives," marvels Ghotair. "We can get clothes for our children and milk powder for the babies." She points to one of her sisters. "She has six daughters, and her husband used to say, 'I have no help because we have no sons.' Now that the girls are earning, he says, 'I don't need any sons.'"

The visitors in her room are all related: in fact, the nine couples who live in the adjoining mud houses on the lane are brothers, sisters and cousins who have cross-married to avoid paying dowries. When they shed their hijab, Afghan women lead a feisty life. Ghotair is the family hairdresser, and all the women have short, styled hair. The husbands enjoy it when their wives apply makeup and dress in transparent, low-cut outfits so that they look like Bombay movie stars. "They have many desires," grins Ghotair. The other women chortle happily, swapping stories of conjugal demands.

The women say they envy and admire Rangina. "If my daughters could become like you," Ghotair tells her, "it would be the greatest gift I could receive." In fact, none of the female children in Ghotair's lane attend school. Ghotair's pretty seven-year-old niece, Farzana, has already been promised to a man to whom the family owes $2,300. (He has agreed to write off $450 in exchange.) Rangina hears the story in horror. She admits to suffering from what returning Afghans ruefully refer to as "survivor guilt," wondering how she escaped the horrors that still enslave her new friends. As she leaves Ghotair's hut, pushing through the dirty rag, she sighs: "There is still a lot to do."