A DEVELOPMENT PROJECT THAT WORKED:AFGHAN PASHTUN WOMEN, THEIR TEXTILES, THEIR FAMILIES AND THEIR LIVES

QUETTA, BALUCHISTAN, PAKISTAN

AN AFGHAN WOMEN’S INCOME GENERATION PROJECT QUETTA, BALUCHISTAN, PAKISTAN

1987-1992

• In December 1979 the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. The invasion was intended to support the pro-Soviet government fight off a growing civil war taking place in many Afghan provinces.

• The Soviet Union has a long history of involvement in the region. The Afghan government requested that the Soviet Union help fight the Afghan civil war. The Soviets invaded the country and stayed until 1989.

• The Soviet involvement in Afghanistan was bloody and violent. The war destabilized the entire country causing millions of urban and tribal village people to flee their homeland. Millions of Afghan refugees fled into Pakistan and were allowed to enter on humanitarian grounds. UNCHR plus many other main international humanitarian organizations started numerous projects aimed to provide daily necessities to the traumatized refugees.

• Many of the refugees fled to the North-West Frontier province of Pakistan because it was the closest to the conflict. However, a million or more refugees arrived in Quetta and stayed throughout the Soviet Afghan war through to the end of the Afghan civil war - ending in 1992. Afghan refugees were “encouraged” by UNCHR to return to their homeland after the civil war ended. Funding for UNCHR projects in Pakistan were severely slowed and services to the refugees were almost halted.

• The project was implemented by World Learning Inc. a non-governmental agency based in Washington DC. The project received funding from UNCHR and the Bureau of Refugees – State Department from early 1988 through the end of 1992. The first 8 months of my stay in Baluchistan was spent researching Pashtu embroidery, designing products and helping to write the proposal for the Afghan Women’s Income Generation Project.

• The project aimed to help widows and female heads of household upgrade their embroidery skills and learn to make products that would sell locally. We started with 15 women, one staff member and myself. By the end of the project we were supporting over 400 women producers and 9 local Afghan staff.

• The production was geared to sell locally rather than internationally. Due to the love of embroidery by the Pakistani population I knew there would be a high demand for these products – however – no one had tried this approach before so it was a gamble that ended positively since the project was very successful and sustained itself – although in a different manner - after funding stopped.

OLD PASHTU EMBROIDERY USED AS SAMPLES

AFGHAN PRODUCERS WEARING OLD EMBROIDERY

AFGHAN PRODUCERS WEARING OLD EMBROIDERY

AFGHAN PRODUCERS WEARING OLD EMBROIDERY

WHERE DID THESE WOMEN COME FROM:HOW DID THEY LIVE THEIR LIFE BEFORE LEAVING

AFGHANISTAN• Gulla-batoon is the golden and silver threads used in Afghan and Pakistani

embroidery. It is called zari in Pakistan and is used by Pashtu groups of producers on both sides of the boarder. It is the traditional embroidery of the Pashtun peoples of Afghanistan before they left their country to become refugees in Pakistan.

• The group of women with whom I worked with were from the Province of Jawz Jan in northern Afghanistan. These people lived in small villages around Sar-i-Pul(Ajrum, Aksai, Ganda, Khar Kush, Dara-i-Bund, Hajji Moh'd Noor Kali).

• Pashtun people originally lived mainly in the south of the country yet the people I worked with had traveled from northern Afghanistan where their tribe’s forefathers were encouraged by the then king to move to - over one hundred years ago. This was thought of as a good way to spread Pashtun peoples throughout the country - mainly for political purposes. The women said they consider their homes to be in the north even though their origins were in Kandahar southern Afghanistan.

• These people traditionally lived a semi-nomadic life. They left their northern homes in the spring and made a yearly trek to the area of Siah Band. According to the people themselves most of the young and middle aged men and women would load donkeys, camels and a few horses and either ride or walk to their summer encampment. All their farm animals went with them. There they grazed their animals and enjoyed cool weather and the abundance of water for themselves and their animals. Plenty of pasture was available and the women talked about how easy their life was. Their gardens and fields in the north were left fallow during their sojourn in the south. Summer food consisted of meat and dairy products as well as fruit which was traded for or taken from the wild.

CONTINUED• The women talked of this migration with fond memories and refered to this time

as a "picnic". They talked of the wind on their faces, the small children and new born animals packed on the camels and all women and children having fun. They tell of women having babies and a few hours later lashing the baby to their backs and catching up with the moving families. When asked what they missed most many said their lack of the migration in the spring is what is hardest for them to adjust to. They remembered feeling "free and self sufficient“, as if they “were all one". They remembered these times fondly and said "this was before we knew what rations were and we were not dependant on anyone".

• As refugees they felt "closed in“ and stated “life had lost the fun“. They felt there was nothing to look forward to except their small refugee compounds in the camp. Before the project started they felt everyday was drudgery with only the making of bread and cooking food to break up the boredom. They also said they missed their animals and the dairy produce made from the cows milk which they would have spent so much time making in their homeland.

• The cow was the women's responsibility and they often hand fed the animal to conserve on grasses but more importantly to make sure that the beast was well fed. They milked it, made local cheeses, yogurt, sauces, cooking oil, butter, and a local favorite sour dried yogurt called kroot. As a refugee they had none of these things including passing their time embroidering and making traditional kilimcarpets – which would have been the norm.

• According to the women in Afghanistan they would have spent their time in varying activities which included spinning and dyeing wool from their sheep and weaving kilims. Their compounds were larger in Afghanistan and often included guest rooms for visiting relatives. These rooms were decorated with indigenous kilims which they had woven or bought from friends. The rooms were also decorated with woven pillows and covers for floor cushions. They had embroidered cloths for dust covers and mantel decorations as well as having embroidery on their clothing. Finely woven floor covers were made (dhasterkhans) for serving meals on. Different woven or embroidered cloths were made to wrap bread and to serve it in.

BEAUTIFUL VIEWS SEEN WHEN DRIVING TO THE REFUGEE CAMP

DRIVE TO NEW SARANAN CAMP

SETTING UP CAMP IN NEW SARANAN A TWO HOUR DRIVE FROM QUETTA

THE PROJECT STARTSTASKS TO BE ACCOMPLISHED BEFORE PRODUCTION BEGAN

• SET UP QUETTA OFFICE• HIRE A TRANSLATOR/COUNTERPART• HIRE A DRIVER • BUY SUPPLIES FOR PRODUCTION• MEET WITH ELDERS AT THE CAMP • CHOOSE FIRST GROUP OF 15 WOMEN PRODUCERS• MEET WITH WOMEN TO EXPLAIN PROJECT GOALS • DETERMINE WAGES FOR WORK• DETERMINE WOMEN’S SKILL LEVEL - LOOK AT PAST

CONTEMPORARY WORK• DISCUSS FIRST ITEMS TO PRODUCE• PREPARE EMBROIDERY MATERIALS TO HAND OUT TO THE WOMEN• HAND OUT MATERIALS AND DISCUSS DESIGNS – QUALITY

EXPECTIONS AND CONTINUE TO INFORM WOMEN ABOUT PROJECT GOALS

• These women had never been trained for the possibility of being left to support themselves and others. Their skills were domestic and they knew nothing of markets and bazaars in which they could sell their products. Up until now they had produced mainly for home use, for their families and for themselves.

• I knew that the first thing we had to do was to get to know the women and have the women know us. We needed to develop trust in order to succeed.

THE PROJECT STARTS• Traditionally the golden and silver threads would have decorated the women's

dresses in the form of a heavily embroidered shirt front, wide sleeve cuffs, pant cuffs and always a wide heavily embroidered strip adorning the top half of their chadors.

• This fashion had been worn for decades and all women remember their mothers and grandmothers making and wearing this type of adornment. As young girls these women were taught the craft by their mothers and grandmothers and in turn they would have taught the young girls of the next generation how to create these unique silver threaded "ice tops", as they were referred to by these northern tribeswomen. The "ice tops" were named after the snow which covered the ground of their home area in the winter. Later the golden threaded embroidery was also referred to as ice embroidery despite the different color.

• The women said that all the women from their area knew how to produce the gulla-batoon needlework and before New Years, a wedding or Eid celebration the women would start creating new embroidery which would be worn or given to a relative for the celebrations. Those women who possessed superior skills were often asked to create items for the women who had not perfected their skills to such high degree. The skills required for production were abundantly present but the selling experience was absent among the rural women: this embroidery was never sold.

• The women told me that those families who had a lot of money would have new dresses and embroidered tops, made by the women of the house, for all special occasions. Poorer families would only produce one top a year thus the poorer women would have developed less skill in embroidery since they could not afford the materials required and hence could not have the practice in producing fine artistic embroidery. Our project was to work with the poor, widowed women.

• On coming to Pakistan all traditional weaving and embroidery activity ceased. The women had only the old dilapidated remnants of what they had produced years before. The old women were not active, the middle age women were unadorned and the young girls were not learning their folk art and heritage.

TRIAL AND ERROR

• The rural village women had little contact with new ideas nor were they at first, adaptable to small changes which it was felt would help place the embroidery in the market place.

• They knew how to make the shirt fronts which they had worn but to ask them to make the front a little longer or the sleeves a little narrower was very difficult for them to understand. Tradition and an innate conservatism was easier to cope with than abstract notions of market and customer preferences. After all they had never produced for people other than women like themselves with similar tastes and backgrounds. It was easier for them to see an exact sample of the item requested and then they would try to produce it. But in the beginning they considered it very strange and even funny that anyone found their embroidery extraordinary or would actually be willing to buy it.

• The first item produced was an exact replica of a dress worn by one of the women. After the dress was produced long embroidered strips like those the women wore on their chadors were tried. When the suggestion was made to next put the long strip embroidery on an item other than a chador - this was hard for them to understand and carry out but through patient negotiations a start was made and corrections and communication of new concepts did begin and shawl production commenced.

• By using the method of trial and error the project acquired a collection of samples on which future production could be patterned and samples could be shown to future participants thus making it easier for them to visually conceptualize the item or shape of item which the project wanted to produce. Many combinations and configurations initially proved unbelievable to the women even though they differed little from their traditional items. The fact that anyone would want to buy these curious things really intrigued some women to the point of disbelief. They continued to ask me “who will buy this”?

PROBLEMS WITH THE FIRST PRODUCTION

• The mistakes which were made in the beginning seemed endless. If a woman was given one color of material to incorporate into the embroidered item she would often decide she wanted to keep that color of cloth for herself and would replace part of the original color with a different one which was not to the buying publics taste.

• In the beginning the women were given shawls which were three yards long onto which embroidery was to be applied. They would cut one yard off the cloth provided for embroidery and work on the remainder and hand it back as a finished shawl. Back in the office while the shawl was being washed it was discovered that the work was beautiful but the shawl was now too short to be worn! Later we would find that the women made home decorations for themselves out of the cloth they had cut off.

• We had a lot of trouble with design symmetry. Their own shirt fronts are smaller than those the local Pakistani women desired. As the shapes were elongated and widened the women seemed to loose all ability to keep a straight line. Tops came back crooked with the traditional geometric design loosing all its appeal due to bad proportions.

• We found that as we worked with a new group of women that each group would go through the same mistakes. No matter what we did this seemed to be the case.

• We hired three refugee women to act as camp coordinators. They were to supervise quality while we were not in the camp. These women were expert embroiders as well as two of them being widows with children to support and the other having an old and infirm husband. Once these women understood what was to be produced they were very good at explaining to the other women and production improved.

• This unfortunately did not eliminate inconsistent work but it helped a lot and allowed for questions to be answered when the Quetta based staff was not in the camp. The goal was for the women themselves to produce and regulate for a consistent quality so that they could eventually utilize the many local markets which were being developed.

MARKETS

• Markets were an unknown factor when the first pieces of gulla-batoonembroidery were being completed. It was felt that the local foreign clientele could not be counted on and the export market was an option which seemed unlikely to be able to be carried on by the camp women themselves. The local Pakistani market is a large one with millions of potential customers. The Pakistani women are used to buying embroidered pieces and having their local tailor complete the garment. This is traditional in Pakistan and the market is unlimited if the item meets certain standards and is within a moderate price range. But would the buying public take to the "ice" embroidery of the Pashtun women?

• Small amounts of sample items were produced and the market tested. At first the product was shown at small teas and at women's afternoon meetings, which fashion conscious Pakistani women attended. Adjustments were made due to requests and comments and other samples produced.

• Within a six month period a show was held at the large international hotel in Quetta and sales began. The production was taken to some of Pakistan's larger cities, shops carrying this type of item were approached and local designers contacted. Slowly these types of contacts as well as word of mouth and two or three shows in Quetta and outside of Quetta produced a flourishing local market.

• Local urban Quetta women often bought shirt fronts from the project to create their own dress designs and these were sold in boutiques throughout Pakistan. National magazines picked up on the trend and featured the embroidery, made by the Afghan village women in New Saranan, and designers purchased the items to incorporate into the latest Pakistani fashions. The products were often seen in major fashion spreads in Pakistani fashion magazines. This free and unsolicited advertising created a market larger than that which could be addressed in a timely manner even as the project enlarged.

PROJECT PRODUCTION

PROJECT PRODUCTION

PROJECT FINISHED ITEMS

PROJECT FINISHED ITEMS

PROJECT FINISHED ITEMS

PROJECT SHIRT FRONTS

SHIRT FRONTS

THE PROJECT CHANGED WOMEN’S LIVES

• The self esteem of the women participating in this project increased tremendously. They were able to contribute to their family's well being and as they said "we now know that we will have food and will be able to buy medicine for our children".

• When asked how the women spent the money they made from their embroidery work they all stated that it was used for family needs which could be anything from life saving medicine and doctors visits to food, giving to other families in crises, children's shoes and winter clothes and blankets.

• Some women supported family agricultural activities or contributed to assuring the availability of water through paying for part of the construction of the family well. Many became financial contributors, whereas, in the past they did not have the money to do so.

• Photo of Surco, Durkani and Pasta – camp staff

PASTA – CAMP COORDINATOR AN EXTRAORDINARY EMBROIDERER

• Pasta is an example of one widowed woman and the changes which occurred while working on the Afghan Women’s Income Generation Program as a staff member.

• Pasta was married when she was seventeen years old. Her husband was a man of forty who was married and had four daughters. As Pasta tells it "he wanted a son so he married me." Pasta had two sons and one daughter. Her husband became sick after the birth of the last child and he died from an unknown illness.

• Pasta continued to live in her husbands house utilizing the many goats and sheep which belonged to the family and as she said "she did not remarry because her children were small and she did not want any other father for them". Her husband's brother had offered to marry her (as was the custom) but she said she would "rather beg than accept him as her husband" so she refused. She realized that this was "unusual" but "this was because of her children and just didn't want any other man telling them what they can and cannot do". She is the sole disciplinarian and even though she shared a compound with the brother-in-law in New Saranan camp "he cannot tell my children what to do".

• After her arrival to Pakistan begging is exactly what she did do to provide food and shelter for her family. She said that this begging continued for a year at which time the tribal leader became aware of her bad situation and he provided for her seeing to it that she was registered with UNHCR officials to qualify for the food rations.

• Pasta was amongst the first twenty women who started working on the project. At that time she was wearing rags, looked very thin and was extremely cowed and deferential in her manner. She was always the last to request work and always sat in the back of the group as though she was hoping not to be thrown out. She never said anything, unless she was really coaxed to answer a question and when she did talk she always covered her face and mouth with her hand or her chador. She did not have any interchange with the other women and once she received her work she would leave the room and go home.

• This is not unusual behavior for widowed women or women who are living on the margins of camp society. Evidently the life of a widow was different in Afghanistan but in the camps, due to a lack of the total community, the scraps available to abandoned or widowed women, especially if their familial relatives are dead or not present, are often small. There is no one to represent them to the authorities and they often did not receive full rations or even any rations. The custom in Afghanistan was to stay away from the table of a widowed woman, not to eat her food nor drink her water until her son has grown and married. At that time she is let back into full community life. This was not as devastating to a family when they had provisions of their own and a home which was traditionally handed to the family. But in a camp situation when all are in need the marginalization of women who are alone was often detrimental to their physical and mental well being and sense of worth.

PASTA• It did not take long to discover that Pasta's embroidery was beautifully done. From the

beginning she responded to the praise which this beautiful work deserved and when it came time to hire a new camp coordinator Pasta was the logical choice. This would allow her to continue her own work but also teach others and obtain a monthly salary.

• At first she said she couldn't think of any way in which she could be of help. She did not feel worthy of a “job”. Her duties were to help less skilled women upgrade their skills, circulate amongst the women on a daily basis to ensure that they were not cutting the length off the shawls or installing multiple colors in a piece meant to contain only one color, to be present when the Quetta based staff made their regular twice or thrice visits per-week and to help with the work collection and distribution.

• She was hesitant to accept this opportunity but with persuasion she accepted this her first job and as she said "I have never been paid for anything and I hope that now my husband's brother doesn't have to give me food from his own family. Now I will be able to buy my own".

• During the life of the project Pasta went through a transformation. Outwardly visual changes occurred. She was much more vocal than before. She not only was able to assert herself with the other women but she participated in numerous meetings with male tribal leaders and she began to look at them and others when she talked.

• She purchased clothes for herself and her children and on special occasions was seen wearing four or five rings which she purchased for herself to exhibit her new status. The compound, which she shared with her deceased husband's family contained many upgrades such as a kitchen garden, trees and a flowers. These things had been purchased with Pasta's money and she and her children could now hold their heads high and know that they contributed to the family rather than just receiving “charity” as a widow.

WOMEN OF THE PROJECT • Other women responded in similar

positive ways as did Pasta. They started to see themselves as income producers and to see that there were possibilities not before thought possible.

• Many women on the project were young women who were second wives of much older men. Often these new brides are immediately pregnant and ended up with four or five young children to look after.

• With the changes in the refugee society it was not uncommon for these young women to be the sole provider and care person for the old and infirm husband, his old wife and her own young children. Traditionally these women would have had their extended families to assist them and the older man would have had enough money to support all of the members of the household. That was not the case as refugees.

CHILDREN OF THE PRODUCERS

CHILDREN OF THE PRODUCERS

CHILDREN OF THE PRODUCERS

WOMEN COLLECTING WORK• When setting up the placement of home compounds in New Saranan UNHCR divided the

tribe into immediate families and each group was appointed a “leader”. Each group built small adobe compounds and the camp became very much like an Afghan village.

• In order to work within each compound the project had to receive approval from individual “leaders”. Once we had an agreement to work with the women inside a compound we carried out a survey to determine which of the women in each group were the neediest.

• The next step was to determine the skill level of the chosen participants and to have them make their first item to determine skill levels. We delivered cloth, thread and other needed materials every 2-3 days - working each day in a different compound.

• Afghan women are very shy of having their photos taken but through the years I was able to take photos of the women as they waited to pick up their work. Picking up work became something they very much looked forward to as they met and visited with friends.

WOMEN COLLECTING WORK

WOMEN COLLECTING WORK

WOMEN COLLECTING WORK

WOMEN COLLECTING WORK

WOMEN COLLECTING WORK

WOMEN COLLECTING WORK

BIBI GUL• Bibi Gul’s story represents the life of many Afghan women and especially the women

living in New Saranan and working on the income generation project.

• Bibi Gull married into a family of seven brothers at the age of sixteen. She left her parent's home and moved into her husband's family dwelling to live with his parents and the wives and children of the husband's six brothers. She tells of a large compound with separate quarters for the individual families. Each family had three rooms and all the women had their own kitchen. Women would cook separately but come together and eat.

• The men would eat in one location and the women and children in another. After a breakfast, of freshly baked bread, milk from their own cows, kamat (hard milk) and tea, the women would divide the housekeeping chores with one washing all the dishes, another woman washing the clothes and one sweeping the compound. Bibi Gull would sew for the family as she was proficient on the sewing machine and had purchased one after her marriage.

• After breakfast in Ganda all but the youngest boys would walk to the mosque and study the Koran with the Mullah. After these lessons the boys would ride the family camels to graze, go to the mountains for melons or other fruits and vegetables and come home at dusk. The boys would follow similar activities during the summer retreat in Siah Band except they would gather under a tent for the mullah's lessons as no mosque was available.

• The girls had household chores to do. The small girls chores were also similar whether in Ganda or in Siah Band. Looking after the smaller children, making and playing with dolls and at ten years of age they started learning how to cook. After that the young girls would help in the kitchen and often walk to the fields to deliver the lunch meal to their fathers and kin who would be gardening or tending the goats and sheep.

BIBI GUL• Bibi Gul's extended family had fifty cows, eight camels and flocks of sheep and goats. She

missed the activities which were associated with animal care and missed the friendship of the extended family as this was disrupted since when space was distributed in the refugee village of New Saranan it was done according to immediate family rather than having the entire extended family located together. Extended family segments were often situated in different physical locations which for many women, forced them to live more insular lives as they were not by tradition and custom allowed to move between houses outside their immediate compounds. They felt isolated.

• This group of Afghans were settled in New Saranan refugee camp and came to Pakistan in l986. They left their home area of Sar-i-Pul because the locality was being bombarded in the fighting between the government troops and the Mujahaddin. The women tell of the men being away from their villages, either fighting or on other business when government troops would come and scare them by threatening to harm them or engage in stealing their livestock and food stores.

• They also remember the bombs and rockets falling and told of how entire families were killed. They related on how they would cover the children with their full skirts and long chadors in the hopes that this would protect them. As the fighting increased it was decided that a large collection of families from this area would leave for safety. It was winter time and very cold. The area was still under fire and being bombarded by government troops.

• Families had been separated, women had lost husbands and the traditional tribal and cultural traditions had changed. No longer did the widowed women have the inheritance of their husbands to support them. That had all been lost. The age old accepted custom that a widow with young children would be taken in by the brother of her husband, as his wife, and if he had a wife and family there would have been enough for both families, was often not possible since most probably that brother was off fighting the war. If he was there to marry her he had nothing to offer, especially if he already had a first family to look after. These widowed women, as well as her sisters whose husbands were possibly alive yet physically removed, fighting or trying to find work in Iran or other localities, were now left on their own to provide for themselves, their children and often old and infirm in-laws.

WOMEN WORKING• Women completed their items in a timely fashion depending upon their home chores and

young children to look after. Some of women would pay other women to help them in the home in order to complete their work quickly, thus helping others to earn an income.

• Over time the project eventually developed a core of 50-70 women who could be depended upon to finish items in a timely manner and to high standards. This allowed the project to start taking orders from designers in Karachi which increased our sales and allowed us to increase the numbers of women who worked on the project.

WOMEN WORKING

WOMEN WORKING

WOMEN WORKING

THE WOMEN WANTED TO MAKE KILIMS• As the embroidery project entered its third year the women told us they missed making kilims and

asked if the project could help start this activity. The women were loosing their traditional rug making skills and were unable to teach their daughters.

• Since the refugees had fled without their property we needed to first collect items of traditional Pashtun designs in order to refresh the women’s memories and to use these as samples.

NEW KILIM PRODUCTION

NEW KILIM PRODUCTION

STARTING A GIRLS SCHOOL

• The women of the camp often told staff members that they wanted their daughters to be literate. The boys in the camp went to religious training where they learned to read and write - but girls were not allowed. The women, staff and myself tried to think of a way that training in literacy could be achieved. We came up with an idea that the men might accept. We decided to teach the girls how to make their traditional embroidery by learning how to embroider the Pashtu alphabet.

• Girls and women's education was associated with the communist regime which swept into power by force of arms, educating the females in the cities, having them remove their veils and coming out of traditional society to participate in modernizing the country. The men of the camp did not want this type of behavior to start within their own very conservative society.

• Formal education of girls in New Saranan seemed out. Informal education, done in small groups and in the privacy of compounds was an idea that the male members of the refugee group did not disagree with. They approved of their daughters learning the techniques of the gulla-batoonembroidery and the fact that letters and numbers were the items embroidered did not bother them.

• A group of twenty two girls were organized and these girls met with a trained Afghan woman teacher who, together with a few of the girls mothers, started them on a course to embroider the Pashtu alphabet and numbers from one to a hundred. The mothers started immediately passing their own designs down to their daughters and these techniques were used to create the “Alphabet Quilts”.

• Girls who, up until now, had minimal access to traditional training, were now learning a skill which could later earn them an income or adorn a dress which they would later wear, thus enhancing their status within their community. Yet at the same time the girls were learning letters and numbers which then led to reading sentences, studying the history of their homeland and other basic educational subjects.

• It is proven by research that girls who obtain even an elementary school education are more likely increase the lives of their children as they are more likely to take their child to a heath professional earlier than an uneducated women. Educated girls make better wives and mothers and are better able to feed their families healthily. It is imperative that girls receive at least a basic education in order for Afghan families to thrive and be good healthy members of their society.

GIRLS LINE UP ON THEIR FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL• Before the girls could start school we needed a school room. • Chase Manhattan Bank gave the project a grant to cover the costs of building a school

room, money to hire a trained Afghan teacher and to run the school for one year.

SCENES FROM SCHOOL

SCENES FROM SCHOOL

FAIZIA – OUR TEACHER

STAFF• The Afghan income generation staff were all refugees themselves – however – these were

urban women, mostly from Kabul, educated and most were school teachers in Afghanistan before becoming refugees in Quetta.

• A few of the women were widows, one had been divorced by her husband and the rest were married. They were all energetic and happy to obtain employment allowing them to be of help to the rural women of their country.

• The women came from varying ethnic and social backgrounds. Some of them were required by their families to wear chardors to the refugee camp, others had more liberal families who did not dictate how they dressed. But in general most of these women held strong opinions within their families and were not afraid to voice their thoughts and opinions.

STAFF

STAFF FAMILY PICNIC - QUETTA

STAFF FAMILY PICNIC – QUETTA

SUMMARY

• I have often been asked how do I explain the success of this project when the commonly held belief - is and was – that it is impossible to work with Pashtu tribes people. I did not find this to be the case. The reasons I attribute to our successes are:

• The initial first year funding did not demand impossible goals to be met, which is often the case with international development projects, thus we had time for the community to trust what the project was tasked to accomplish.

• Additionally, we made sure that we had a good relationship with the various leaders and we depended upon a high profile Pashtu man as our advisor to interface with the “elders”and “leaders” as needed.

• Establishing viable markets for the items was essential since the project needed to pay for the labor costs and materials from the sales of finished products.

• Could this project model succeed in today’s Afghanistan or Pakistan? I am sure that it could succeed as there is still a market for these items. Why are there not many projects working on the grassroots level helping women earn income from embroidery made for the local market? Ask those making the decisions within the aid donor community.

• From what I have observed most of the current aid money handed out within Pakistan and Afghanistan focus on high profile” infrastructure projects which can be completed quickly and posted on the internet as “successes” and to advertise “accomplishments” as quickly as it possible. Projects like the income generation project need more than three months to obtain results – but once the ground work has been laid the rewards continue for years and benefits accrue to all members of a producers family.

• There do exist a few projects inside Afghanistan which are carrying out grassroots work helping women earn income but usually these are not funded by the large main donors and they rather depend upon individual donations for their continued work in this arena.

THE END