February 15th, 2005
American Group Aids Afghan Women Caught In Crisis

Nergies Khwaja, 17, is a translator for students at the Women for Afghan Women Center. (Serena Hedison/CNS)

Esther Hyneman, right, a board member at the Women for Afghan Women Center, teaches a Saturday English class. (Serena Hedison/CNS)

Shoes belonging to Muslim women left in the foyer of the Women for Afghan Women Center. (Serena Hedison/CNS)

Nergies Khwaja, 17, is a translator for students at the Women for Afghan Women Center. (Serena Hedison/CNS)

In a hospital room in Herat, Afghanistan, only the eyes and lips of a 12-year-old girl peek through the layers of cotton that cover her burned face. Her mother sits close by, nursing her own blistered skin while a third woman lies dying of burns in a nearby bed.

After years of enduring family violence, the young girl’s mother had made a desperate decision. She tried to kill herself and her daughter by setting them both on fire.

“This woman said her mother had suffered, she had suffered and she didn’t want her daughter to suffer,” said Fahima Vorgetts. She can still hear the woman’s exact words: “I did not want my daughter to live in this world anymore.”

Vorgetts, an Afghan who now lives in Annapolis, Md., is one of eight board members of Women for Afghan Women, a New York-based organization that aims to protect Afghan women’s rights through community outreach, advocacy and humanitarian assistance. Since its founding in 2001, the group has raised more than $200,000 to rebuild schools and health facilities as well as provide vocational training for Afghan women.

Now, the Herat project will expand the group’s reach to women who, because of forced marriage, extreme poverty or domestic abuse, have contemplated or attempted suicide by self-immolation.

The timing could not be more critical.

The Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission documented 123 cases of women in the province of Herat who tried to commit suicide by self-immolation in the six months between March and September 2004 alone, the most recent statistics available.

Officials say 110 of those women died.

“By supporting women's economic empowerment, the international community can respond to this problem,” said Nader Nadery, a commission member.

In the past year, Women for Afghan Women has raised $30,000 from donors across the United States to provide basic health care and prevention education for these women. The group began collecting money after a story about Afghan women setting themselves on fire appeared in Marie Claire magazine in February 2004.

Women from New York to Anchorage, Alaska, mailed in checks, but so did donors from smaller cities like Lexington, Ky., Poplarville, Miss., and Chelsea, Vt.

Because of the positive public response, board members at the nonprofit group saw an opportunity to expand their efforts and recently partnered with two women-led, nongovernmental organizations in Herat.

Women for Afghan Women will raise money, provide technical assistance and help coordinate projects; two organizations –- Voice of Women Organization and the Women’s Activities and Social Service Association –- will carry out the projects on the ground.

“This epidemic has not slowed down,” said Esther Hyneman, a retired literature professor at Long Island University and a board member. “There is a real problem with depression among women and desperation so we want to work on prevention.”

Rather than compete for scarce funds, the three groups have developed a joint grant proposal that will be sent to both American and international foundations this month.

The two organizations in Afghanistan will continue to supply medicine as well as operate a safe house for women who survive their suicide attempts but can’t return home.

The partnership between the three groups will focus on educating women in some of the most conservative, inaccessible and resource-poor areas of three local provinces, places that are rarely targeted by larger international aid organizations. Trainers will teach craft-making and sewing as a means of economic independence. They will also provide women with seeds for staple crops as well as basic education about the best agricultural techniques. And a lawyer will offer legal advice about domestic violence, divorce and other family issues.

A mother who has a 12-year-old daughter might not force her to marry a wealthy 50-year-old man as soon as she gets her first period if the mother has a way to earn an income, organizers explained.

Trainers will also show a fire safety video as a conversation starter about self-immolation, said Vina Nadjibulla, a board member for Women for Afghan Women and the representative of the United Methodist Church to the United Nations.

“You can’t just walk into a community and start talking about women setting themselves on fire,” she said. “We’ll be using the video as a segue.”

Women in the rural areas of Afghanistan will gather in schools and homes much the same way they do at the organization’s office in Queens every Saturday morning for English classes. With their kids following close behind, they slip off their shoes and then greet women like themselves –- uneducated but interested in learning about their rights.

“Most of them are illiterate in their own languages,” Hyneman said. “They have no idea what it means to advocate for themselves or others.”

Although Women for Afghan Women is a secular organization, it works within the context of Islam. “It means awakening them to their rights in Islam: to education, to work, to their rights within the family,” Hyneman said.

A young woman who becomes her husband’s third wife and is abused by her mother-in-law will learn, for example, that even though divorce is not practiced widely in Afghanistan, it is her right to seek one. She does not have to live under those conditions, Nadjibulla said.

“Sustainable peace in Afghanistan cannot be achieved without Afghan women,” she said. “In order to ensure Afghan women’s participation in their country’s reconstruction and rehabilitation, their basic right to life with dignity needs to be protected.”