There are a lot of negative ways in which we treat women in this country. Child marriage, forced marriages, violence against women, preventing women from education, women's harassment in public and at work, lack of women's access to services, etc. All this makes life very dim and difficult for women in Afghanistan. I have written ten things that make me happy about our life with the hope that the list will grow and we will only have positive things to say about our lives as women some day. This list does not mean we have it easy; we have it really hard and things seem to be getting worse for women, but it is just a reminder of the fact that even in the hardest times, there are rays of hope if you search for them.
1. I love our physical and emotional strength and resilience of spirit. I have met Afghan women who work all day on the fields, pushing and pulling cows and weeding the land. They never complain about how heavy the work is and how hot the sun is. I have met women who have given birth to seven children and are looking forward to their eighth. Don't you dare tell me women are physically weak, because I will believe that when I see a man push seven babies out and go work on the field next week. I know an Afghan woman who has lost her husband and her son but has been a champion at raising her daughter as a single mother. She has never given up on the education and wellbeing of her daughter and her resilience has never allowed her to believe that she should stop fighting because she is a woman.
2. I love our sense of humor. I know an Afghan woman who is able to make misogyny, violence, and heart break funny not to lose hope and to allow others to see the light at the end of the long dark tunnel. I love all the funny songs about forced marriages and being married to older men that serve both as advocacy and humor and point to the resilience of Afghan women.
3. I love our stories! Unlike Snow White or Cinderella, where the princess is saved by some magical prince, the stories that my grandma told us about those of powerful witches and queens. We have hundreds of stories about how women chose their husbands through having several conditions for the men and how the smart princess throws off an entire kingdom by marrying a shopkeeper that she picks.
4. I love our dolls. Growing up we made our dolls with cloth, instead of buying plastic Barbie dolls that are so thin that they look like they are on the verge of collapsing. We would spend days and days building these dolls from the old cloth that our mothers would throw away and the pieces of stick that we found laying around the street. We used pencils to draw eyes and eyebrows; they were not skinny, blue-eyed and blond, but creative and soft with dark black eyes drawn with color pencil.
5. I love that our beauty is not measured by our pounds/kilos. Weight has never been our unit for beauty and elegance; in fact we are always taught that a few kilos of fat here and there make you beautiful and healthy. We actually use the word "healthy" about women who are not thin or skinny.
6. I love our songs! Women's Pashtu Landay, Uzbeki, Hazaragi and Persian Dubaiti, and the long story-songs in Badakhshan, are all so powerful. These songs focus on our lives as women and bring out our voices. They empower our little girls and keep our old grandmothers busy. They are written in the notebooks of every girl who can read and write and they will remain the feminist side of our history.
7. I love our history. While there are dark pages in the history of women in Afghanistan, the numbers of women (and some men) who have risked everything for us to be able to live a better life are living inspirations in our hearts. From Rabia Balkhi, who was killed for her poetry, to Anahita Ratebzada, who proved that women can be excellent ministers, to Mahmood Tarzi, who prioritized the education of her daughter, to Meena, who advocated for a free Afghanistan, to King Amanullah Khan, who started women's freedom from his own family, to Setara Achakzai, who fought peacefully for women's empowerment to her last breath, and Safia Ahmedjan, who never gave up no matter how much they threatened her, these women and men will remain with us forever reminding us of the risky journey that one must take for the worthy cause of freedom.
8. I love our sense of unity. I have talked often with my friends about how women in Afghanistan are much more likely to make friends with women of different ethnicities that most men are. There is a growing sense of solidarity that no matter where you are from and what you look like, if you are a woman; you should support other women- now there are exceptions to this, sadly. As a wise woman once said, "There is a special place in hell for women who don't support each other," and I think most of us, Afghan women, understand that.
9. I love our diversity. Just traveling to a few provinces in Afghanistan you will witness how diverse women's cultures are. Our stories, songs, gatherings, ceremonies, and clothing are so diverse and stunning. Walking through Kabul you will see another face of diversity. Women wear different things, talk in different accents, work in different places, believe in different ways of struggling for their rights, eat different things, but at the end of the day, they are all women.
10. I love our Afghan dresses. The colorful and embroidered dresses- short and long- are probably my favorite style of clothing. There are hundred kinds of dresses, from the long Hazaragi dress to the Kochai dress to the more modernized dresses that you can wear with leggings or tights and high-heeled boots and the long dresses that you can wear to a dance and shine like nobody's business- they are all so beautiful! I am on a mission of getting one from every area of the country, so if you have one for sale, let me know! And if you don't have one, you are missing out on elegance and beauty. Go, get one.