Posted on: Sunday, January 30, 2005
Land left behind
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| Aria Arari has a photo of herself with her father, who disappeared before she and her family fled Afghanistan when she was 6.
Deborah Booker • The Honolulu Advertiser |
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By Zenaida Serrano
Advertiser Staff Writer
Among the remnants of Aria Arari's life in Afghanistan are a few pieces of her mother's jewelry and a photo of her father, Fazul Ahmad Ahrary, who disappeared when she was a toddler.
The items are a reminder of an unstable time in Arari's life, when she and her family fled the country following the Soviet occupation in 1979. Afghanistan was a country in turmoil and would continue to suffer under the Taliban's regime from 1995 to 2001. When Arari, 29, imagines what her life might have been like if they had never left, she cringes.
"I think I would've been dead by now," said the McCully resident, who moved to Hawai'i from Indiana in 1992 with her mother and three of her four brothers.
Like Arari, Shafiqa Ahmadi and her family left practically everything behind when they fled in 1984. But the Manoa resident, 29, has taken with her distinct memories of a country in disorder.
"I remember gunshots and fires almost every night. You couldn't sleep unless you heard the gunshots," Ahmadi said. She moved to Hawai'i from Wisconsin in 2003 with her husband, an education professor at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa.
Arari and Ahmadi — who are among only a handful of Afghans in the Islands — will take part in An Evening in Solidarity with Afghan Women and Girls, a benefit Feb. 12 at College Hill. Proceeds from the fund-raiser will go to the Shuhada Organization, a nonprofit group dedicated to the welfare and progress of Afghan people and focused on the empowerment of women and girls, who have struggled with diminished rights since the rise and fall of the Taliban.
"The Afghan women's biggest challenge is lack of security and lack of law enforcement," said Shuhada founder and director Sima Samar, via e-mail from Afghanistan. "It is indeed a long way to go and we cannot do it on our own. We need more support and solidarity."
The welfare of the Afghan people should be a concern for everyone; not just those with ties to the country, Ahmadi said.
Advertiser library photo • Oct. 18, 2001 "For women and children of Afghanistan, their rights are being violated by the same people who violated us on 9/11," Ahmadi said. "We need to stand up together and fight for our rights, our human rights. We're a global community."
Based in Kabul, the Shuhada Organization was established in 1989 and is the largest Afghan woman-led nongovernmental organization. Shuhada runs projects in health, education, literacy, job training and more. It operates 11 clinics and three hospitals in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and 71 schools for boys and girls throughout Afghanistan, as well as three for refugees in Quetta, Pakistan.
Money donated to Shuhada will go to improving health care and educational programs and facilities, said Samar, who's also Afghanistan's first minister of women's affairs and chairwoman of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission.
The event will feature keynote speaker Mavis Leno, a member of the Feminist Majority Foundation women's-rights organization, and a poetry reading by Raofa Ahrary, Arari's mother and editor of an Afghanistan women's magazine. Ahrary will read her poem "Dast bar Dast," Persian for "Hand in Hand." There will also be Afghan music, art, photography and food.
"It's a very unstable situation and it's so profoundly in the interest of our children and our children's children that we not let this country sink back into chaos again," said Leno via telephone from Los Angeles. Leno is chairwoman of the foundation's campaign to help Afghan women and girls.
The Taliban regime fell in 2001, but women and girls in Afghanistan still face daily oppression. Education remains restricted in many areas and women's health care is poor.
Deborah Booker • The Honolulu Advertiser Despite these conditions, women determinedly took part in Afghanistan's recent national elections, an indication of their courage in defining their own futures.
"Life has changed and is getting better, but still, all these violations of human rights — you name it — is happening to women and children in Afghanistan," Samar said.
The fund-raiser is organized by the Afghan Women's Hui and sponsored by the Globalization Research Center at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa, in partnership with the Feminist Majority Foundation.
Spearheaded by Nancie Caraway, director of the Women's Human Rights Project at the Globalization Research Center, the Afghan Women's Hui members include Arari, Ahmadi, diplomat Ann Wright (who helped open the U.S. embassy in Kabul after the U.S. occupation), and local author and illustrator Jim Rumsford, a former Peace Corps volunteer in Afghanistan.
"I think that if we are at all to consider ourselves ethical human beings, then empathy with others in need would be the founding principle," Caraway said.
Meanwhile, Arari and Ahmadi are grateful for their new lives in the United States.
"If I never left, my life would not have been as fulfilling as it is now, because of the opportunities I've received here," said Ahmadi, a graduate of the Indiana University law school in Bloomington. Ahmadi and her husband are also the proud parents of 7-month-old Zaki.
Arari, a striving actress and Screen Actors Guild member, wants to use her background in television to promote the Afghan cause (she's appeared in "North Shore" and "Hawai'i," among other shows).
"I've been wanting to do a documentary, to show my life here as an actress ... then comparing my life to 'what if I never left Afghanistan?' " Arari said.
Both women remain hopeful that Afghan people someday, with the help of others, will enjoy the basic human rights these two women cherish.
"I want people to be aware of what's going on around the world and to care," Arari said, "and to not forget Afghanistan."
Reach Zenaida Serrano at zserrano@honoluluadvertiser.com or 535-8174.
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Q: Why should what's happening to women and children in Afghanistan matter to us in Hawai'i?
"It matters because it did affect us. Look at 9/11. ... to help (the Afghan women and children), a little would mean a lot. Like, if you donate just a dollar, it would help a kid have school supplies for a whole semester."
— Aria Arari | 29, of McCully. — Mavis Leno — Sima Samar
Displaced Afghan children lean on the wall in Khwaja-Bahauddin shortly after the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001.
"In other areas of Afghanistan, the insurgents are still there and the Taliban is still there," Ahmadi said. "... so there's still that danger, and a lot of women are really afraid of that, afraid of going back to work and being kidnapped and raped and a number of other atrocities committed against them."
Shafiqa Ahmadi, a U.S. law school graduate who lives in Manoa with her husband and son Zaki, fled her native Afghanistan in 1984.
Born in Afghanistan, Arari and her family fled the country in 1981.
"I hope that ... (guests at the fund-raiser) walk away with a heightened consciousness of the fragility of everybody's situation in this world if we don't pull together. If you think you can sink back into your chair, put your feet up and not worry about things because they aren't happening directly to you, you're not evading or escaping it, you're just postponing it."
Chairwoman of the Feminist Majority Foundation's campaign to help Afghan women and girls
"I think the Afghan women are (like) part of the female human body: If we are hurt as an organ, the rest of the body will also hurt."
Founder of the Shuhada Organization and Afghanistan's first minister of women's affairs
| Uneducated and marrying young
Despite the fall of the Taliban in 2001, women and girls in Afghanistan still face daily struggles. Among them: • Girls' primary school enrollment rates: Approximately 34 percent of 4 million Afghan children enrolled in school are girls. In 10 provinces, however, fewer than one out of every four girls ages 7 to 12 attends primary school. Only one out of every 100 girls ages 7 to 12 attends primary school in Zabul and Badghis provinces. Of girls attending primary school, only 9 percent continue to secondary school. • Early marriage: Approximately 57 percent of girls marry before the age of 16. • Women's reproductive health awareness: 72 percent of married women under age 50 are unaware of any methods to prevent pregnancy. • Maternal mortality: Maternal mortality rates during the Taliban era were estimated at 1,900 deaths per 100,000 live births. The country still has the world's second-highest maternal mortality rate, at 1,600 deaths per 100,000 live births (compared to a federal count of 11.8 deaths per 100,000 live births in the United States from 1991 to 1999). The eastern province of Badakshan has the highest recorded rate in history, at 6,500 deaths per 100,000 live births. • Women's voter registration: 41 percent of the 10.5 million registered Afghan voters are women. These figures have been inflated by multiple registrations. Women's registration rates in southern provinces were significantly lower than the national average: 9 percent in Zabul, 10 percent in Uruzgan, 16 percent in Helmand and 27 percent in Kandahar. — Compiled by the Afghan Women's Hui Connections To learn more about the organizations involved in An Evening in Solidarity with Afghan Women and Girls and how to help women of all backgrounds: • Globalization Research Center, University of Hawai'i-Manoa: call 956-4609, e-mail global@hawaii.edu or visit www.globalhawaii.org • Afghan Women's Hui: e-mail afghanwomenshui@yahoo.com • Feminist Majority Foundation: visit www.feminist.org • Shuhada Organization: visit www.shuhada.org |
