Our Villages in Parwan

I haven't been in any developing country except for one afternoon of a tour in the country near Mazatlan, Mexico…which doesn't even count, really. There doesn't seem to be any city planning happening at all which makes for some very strange land use; the roads are merely swaths of mud in many places. Over the past week I've somehow gotten used to the fact that 95% of people on the street are men, every second one of them is packing some kind of a gun, the police drive around in jeeps yelling at drivers and pedestrians through loudspeakers… bizarre.

We've made some forays into the rural areas north of Kabul - Parwan Province - where we will be working with village-based women-farmers and their families. The women here are beautiful and strong and strident in their own way… and they DO wear those long baggy blue things (burquas) when leaving their own home or a womens' gathering - even in their own village compound. Seems unbelievable. The protocols for women's modesty are so strong that if I wear anything less than a full skirt to the floor and a long-sleeved shirt to my mid-thighs, I get a similar response from the local men if I were walking around in a bikini.

Back to the work at hand... The project focuses on assisting women to grow more and better produce, process and store it better and sell it to higher value markets. Ultimately, the goal is to shape the women's entrepreneurial abilities so that they can increase their incomes and become socially, as well as economically empowered. This will be a major step in post-war development in the area. The small city of Charikar in Parwan province, which is the hub very near our three villages, was a strategic site in the many years of civil war and during the Taliban regime. The area is called the "Shamali plains" and much fighting, devastation, and death happened in the area. In fact, locals say that there was blood pooled like floods of water and bodies piled over the ground in the fields where we walked.