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| Afghanistan |
| Park offers women in Kabul some freedom |
| 2010-05-21 |
| Kabul — On a recent day when the sun was finally strong enough to dry the Afghan capital's muddy streets, Habiba Sarwe sought her husband's permission to visit a spot that her daughter and all the neighborhood wives were talking about: a park, with swings, benches, flowers and a gazebo. A park for women only. "Please, let me go," begged Sarwe, who is 44 but whose tired eyes make her look far older. "It's a good place." Her husband decided it would be OK. So that afternoon, Sarwe put on her favorite fitted gray wool suit under her shapeless, head-to-toe burqa and set out with three of her children for the dusty park on the edge of Kabul. Once inside the two metal gates, she pushed up the visor of her burqa and stood still, the sunshine warm on her face, while her two daughters and youngest son raced to the swings. She smiled as they soared higher and higher. "This is the one place that's ours," said an out-of-breath Fardia Azizmay, 19, Sarwe's older daughter, as she jumped off a swing and looked over a pile of a dozen blue burqas, tossed off by women as they entered. "For us, home is so boring. Our streets and shops are not for women. But this place is our own." The small park, protected by a half-dozen gun-toting guards, has become a favorite destination for Kabul women wanting a safe, quiet place to meet with friends, complain about their husbands, discuss their kids, line one another's eyes with black kohl or just shed their burqas and play, female activists here say. But play is not the only draw. The park, paid for by India, also feels like a miniature college campus. India's Self-Employed Women's Association, or SEWA, which runs it, has set up a training center on the grounds for mothers and daughters who may never have been to school. In classrooms overlooking the park, women learn embroidery and organic farming. They pickle tomatoes, bottle jam and sew at a row of new machines. It is all part of a $1.3 billion Indian aid program for neighboring Afghanistan that includes building roads and power plants as well as reaching out to women and girls through clinics and classes. Although women make up more than half of Afghanistan's population, fear of fundamentalist militant groups has caused them to nearly disappear from public life, especially in the rural south, where U.S.-led forces are trying to root out Taliban fighters. Some of those insurgents still pressure women to cover up and to avoid schools and workplaces, defying the Afghan constitution's guarantee of equal rights for both sexes. "Our classes and our park are so busy - but only because India went to the Kabul slum areas and talked to the women about coming," said Tamana Ghaznewil, 19, an Afghan who works at the park. "For many women, having someone come from another country and offer this little garden was really new. Some asked me, 'Why would they see me, an Afghan woman, as important?' " |
| Posted by:john frum |