The Dressmaker of Khair Khana

by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

  As the economy withered in the weeks following the attacks of September 11, the price for passage out of the capital skyrocketed. Trucks, buses, and taxis overflowed with families seeking safer places, with fares reaching as high as five hundred dollars. People rushed to money changers by the Kabul River to exchange savings they held in Pakistani and Iranian currencies into afghani so they could buy food and other supplies. But the rates moved against them by the day. The city's savvy traders were betting American dollars would soon be entering the country once the Taliban government fell. After the war.

  Mrs. Sidiqi heard the stories and watched her neighbor's preparations. But she remained convinced that her family was best off staying exactly where it was. There would be no fleeing for them. If something happened to her or her girls while they were in their own home, that was one thing, and she would leave it to God's will. But she would not have her precious daughters made vulnerable to the kidnappers, murderers, and bandits who awaited them once they left the security of their own courtyard. They were better off here, together, off the streets and far from the bedlam outside.

  Four weeks after Massoud's death and the attacks of September 11, the barrage began. Just after the girls finished dinner one evening, missiles whizzed across the night sky and the boom of explosions was heard around Kabul. Sitting in her bedroom, Kamila felt the windows shudder and the floors shake while Nasrin and Laila ran to look for their mother and their older sisters, crying out in terror as they ran down the long hall that connected the living room to the family's sleeping chambers. The house turned black in an instant as the Taliban cut the city's power supply in hopes of throwing off the enemy planes that roared overhead. They heard the sharp rat-tat-tat sound of the Taliban's lumbering antiaircraft guns chasing the foreigners' jets around the city in their black trucks, attempting in vain to hit the elusive American aircraft soaring unfazed up above.

  And finally, silence.

  Kamila sat with fourteen-year-old Nasrin for another hour, cuddling her in her lap. "It's all over," she whispered. "Everyone's okay. See? We're all here, just fine." She patted her little sister on the back and hoped the girl wouldn't notice how uncontrollably her own hands were trembling.

  Dawn arrived and a new day began as if it were any other. Shops and offices opened and the clear autumn sun shone cheerily. But terror and uncertainty had settled over the capital. Panicked families were clamoring to leave, struggling to find a way out before dark, when the bombs were likely to start pummeling the city once more. Rahim, returning from the market, reported that Khair Khana's streets looked like a graveyard. Finding food was no problem, he said; he had the shops to himself since everyone else was busy planning their escape.

  The fighting ground on for one week and then another, with an occasional break on Friday, the Muslim holy day. The family grew accustomed to early dinners followed by a tense, candlelit evening in the windowless bedroom waiting for the night air to fill with the boom of jets and the thud of explosions. Like many Kabulis, Rahim and the girls came to know the distinct sounds that each warplane made. They were fluent in the differences among B-52s, B-2s, F-14s, and AC-130s. They learned about "cluster bombs" and "smart bombs." And they were now sorrowfully familiar with the stench of sour smoke that steamed up from the ground in the wake of each night's air raids.

  Khair Khana reeled under the relentless pounding of the American air blitz, which sometimes began long before nightfall. Sara Jan was right, Kamila thought. No one is safe here. Bombs dropped from the sky sometimes landed so close that Kamila was shocked to open her eyes and see that her house was still standing. She now felt certain that she would not survive. American planes targeted neighborhood Taliban sites night after night, leaving behind deafening explosions and cratered streets. One afternoon a week after the aerial assault began, a bomb demolished two homes in another part of Khair Khana and killed seven people inside. The intended target appeared to be a military garrison a few miles away. Word of the deaths spread swiftly among the few families who were still living in Khair Khana, and with it came even more fear.

  "Stay in your houses!" Taliban soldiers shouted on the nights they patrolled the streets of Khair Khana. The government had blocked all of Kabul's main roads and instituted an even earlier curfew now that the Americans had attacked. They needn't bother, Kamila thought, hearing the soldiers' warnings pierce the silence on the street outside her gate. The whole city is under fire. Where are we going to go?

  Each evening Kamila and Saaman tuned the battery-powered radio to the BBC's broadcast to hear the latest on the fighting. The news anchors in London now regularly raised the possibility that the Taliban regime would be replaced; the men from Kandahar, they reported, would eventually be forced to retreat before the overwhelming air strikes of the Americans, who were deploying the twenty-first century's most powerful technology against their cars, trucks, bunkers, barracks, radio stations, airports, weapons depots, and trenches. None of the girls dared to discuss out loud what would happen if or when the Taliban government gave up, though the voices on the medium-wave suggested that Zahir Shah, the former king, might possibly return to rule the country. Kamila and her sisters had no way of knowing how much longer the war would go on. Or whether they would live through it.

  Kamila depended on her faith to help her endure the terrifying offensive and stay strong for her younger sisters. She prayed for her country, which had known nothing but war and bloodshed for her entire life. Despite the fighting that now engulfed her home and her city, she wanted to believe that whatever came next, the future would be brighter.

  Peace and a chance to pursue our dreams, Kamila thought to herself one night when it seemed there would be no end to the blasts that rocked the earth beneath her. That's all we can dare to hope for.

  For now, she thought, it would have to be enough.

  Epilogue

  Kabul Jan, Kaweyan, and Kamila's Faith in Good Fortune

  On November 13, 2001, the Taliban abandoned Kabul.

  Radio Sharia once again became Radio Afghanistan. And Farhad Darya's voice rang out in his song "Kabul Jan" ("Beloved Kabul"), this time in the open, for everyone to enjoy, with no Amr bil-Maroof to fear:

  Let me sing the hymn of the Afghan nation

  Let me go to Hindukush and recite the Holy Q'uran

  Let me sing to my homeless wandering people

  From Iran all the way down to Pakistan

  Northern Alliance soldiers in their crisp camouflage uniforms spread out across the capital, riding up and down city streets and shouting that the Taliban had gone. On Khair Khana's main road, Indian songs blared from shops and stalls. Cars honked their horns. Men shaved their beards on the streets. Children brought out their soccer balls. The city relaxed--and celebrated publicly--for the first time in five years.

  To most of Kabul's women, however, the party outside felt decidedly premature. Mrs. Sidiqi was so worried about the chaos in the streets and the sudden change of government that she sent all five of her girls into a crawlspace under the stairs that led up to Dr. Maryam's office and ordered them to stay there until she judged it safe for them to come out. "Who knows what will happen?" she said to the girls as she shooed them into the little windowless storage area. Who knew if marauding men would wander into their home now that the Taliban had fled? "Wait here until tomorrow; then we'll know better." All night long the girls listened to the muffled sound of street celebrations from their bunker.

  For days afterward, female visitors arrived at the green gate still wearing their chadri. Kamila agreed with her friends that it was wise to wait before shedding the veil they had gotten so used to over the past five years. No need to rush. If things really had changed, there would be plenty of time to adjust to the new order and embrace their hard-won liberties.

  By the time I met Kamila, in December 2005, the first stage of the war had long since passed, and so had the euphoria that greeted the American invasion and the retreat of the Taliban. Many Afghans I interviewed
wondered why things weren't getting better. They pilloried the free-spending foreigners for their wasteful ways: the big cars that hogged the torn-up roads, the expensive fortified compounds, the well-intended development projects--and their well-paid staffs--which left little behind once they ended. The more time I spent in Kabul the more I saw what they saw and the more I understood their frustration. I also wondered if this latest international foray into Afghan nation-building would end well for anyone.

  Perhaps that's why the first thing I noticed about Kamila--other than her ebullient youth--was her optimism. Her faith upended my own mounting despair. She spoke about her country's promise with conviction and hope. Not a trace of skepticism or cynicism. "When the international community returned to Afghanistan in 2001," she told me, "it was as though they suddenly remembered our country just as quickly as they had forgotten it, after they abandoned us once the Soviets left." And Kamila welcomed the world back with open arms. "This is a golden chance for Afghanistan," she said. An opportunity to help her fellow Afghans rebuild what war had destroyed: the roads, the economy, the country's educational system--all the vital infrastructure that had collapsed--and to give her generation and the next one the first chance they had ever had to live in peace. For the past four years Kamila had been doing her part, working with the foreigners on behalf of her countrymen, first with the United Nations and then with the global aid organization Mercy Corps. Women like her who had experience with the international community were in short supply and high demand.

  Kamila's work after the American invasion and the fall of the Taliban focused on women and business. Soon after the Taliban troops pulled out of Kabul she left the International Organization for Migration to set up and staff a Mercy Corps women's center in Kabul that offered literacy classes and vocational courses. She trained women in microfinance, teaching them how to use small loans to grow vegetables or make soap and candles, and how to sell these products once they were ready for market. The key was to help women help themselves so that they could support their families long after the foreigners left.

  As she got better at her work, Kamila began to train other business teachers, and she traveled around the country leading courses in entrepreneurship. She could connect to uneducated and illiterate Afghans much better than the highly paid foreign consultants could, and she was adept at bridging the gap between her international bosses and the people they had come to Afghanistan to help. Mercy Corps colleagues, including Anita, who first recruited her to the organization, and Shireen, a former journalist who had worked for AT&T, helped Kamila to fill any gaps in her knowledge.

  But as much as she enjoyed her work for the big global organizations, Kamila never lost the entrepreneurship bug herself. While working at Mercy Corps she started a construction business. The company thrived for a while, but it was hard to find the capital to keep it going, and competition was fierce. So she closed it down and began looking for other opportunities.

  Kamila's colleagues became part of her family just as they had when she ran her tailoring business. Only this time it was members of the international community who passed through the green gate, not determined young women looking for work. It was nothing unusual to have coworkers from France or Canada show up for dinner at the Sidiqi home, and one foreign friend even moved in with the Sidiqi clan so they could help her improve her Dari language skills. Ruxandra, a consultant with the International Labour Organization, whose work and research focused on women and business, was a regular visitor. Kamila's parents were amazed by the salaries the foreigners were paying. Young women like Kamila who had worked for the UN and NGOs under the Taliban now earned nearly as much in one week as they had in a year. The money Kamila brought home funded the university education of her brothers and sisters as well as the upkeep of the house in Khair Khana, where most of the siblings now lived.

  As always, Malika tried to encourage her younger sister, offering advice when asked but otherwise staying out of her way. She marveled at how quickly her sister adapted to the end of the Taliban and the arrival of the foreigners, and watched in pride as Kamila unleashed all the ambition and talent she had stored up in the Taliban days now that Afghanistan had rejoined the rest of the world.

  In January 2005, the Thunderbird School of Global Management, located in the United States, in Arizona, accepted Kamila to a two-week MBA program for Afghan businesswomen; already she had been invited to join Bpeace, a New York nonprofit that ran a mentoring program for high-potential entrepreneurs. And then one day in October the phone rang and Kamila learned that Condoleezza Rice, the American secretary of state, had invited her--the dressmaker from Kabul who had started a construction company--to Washington, D.C. Just days later she found herself speaking into a shiny microphone and peering out at a sea of tables set with linen tablecloths and glimmering crystal and around which sat Very Important People--members of Congress, businessmen, diplomats, and the secretary of state herself--who were there to hear her story:

  "I am Kamila Sidiqi," she began. "I am a business owner from Afghanistan. . . ." She told them how she started her first venture from the living room of her home in Khair Khana, and how today--with the help of Thunderbird, Mercy Corps, and U.S. government funding--she had trained more than nine hundred of her countrymen and women so that they, too, would have the skills to build and grow their own businesses. She spoke about how business and education transformed women's lives, and how this change had led to another extraordinary development: women in Afghanistan taking part in the political process. "This partnership between America and my country, it's a good and helpful beginning. Together, I believe that we can and will make even more progress in building a more stable and successful Afghanistan."

  I met Kamila for a cup of tea about a month after her Washington speech in the Mercy Corps' Kabul offices. It was a somewhat cheerless winter afternoon and she was at a crossroads. After attending a business development services training in Italy sponsored by Mercy Corps, she had decided to abandon her work for international agencies and begin her own business--again. She was about to turn down a good job that offered her stability and some security, and she had no doubts about her decision.

  "If I go to work with some international agency they will give me a very high salary but it really only benefits just my family and me," she told me. "It doesn't create jobs for other people, like we did during the Taliban. On the other hand, if I start my own private company, I can train a lot of people, and those people will go out and start their own businesses. And then maybe they will inspire even more people to do the same thing, and so on. I know this business could make a big difference for this country."

  It was her beloved brother Najeeb who came up with the name for Kamila's new enterprise. Her dressmaking business had supported him during the Taliban years, and the word that he found to capture his sister's energy and aspiration was Kaweyan, after an eastern Iranian dynasty that was known for its glory and good fortune. Najeeb confidently predicted that his sister would have the same lasting success.

  At this time, though, Kamila was Kaweyan's sole employee, and its only assets were a silver Dell laptop--courtesy of Mercy Corps--and the clear, passionate vision of its young founder.

  "Once I have launched this business," she said, "I will start training people--both men and women--and create mobile teams that can travel to different provinces all over Afghanistan and maybe even Pakistan and India. Kaweyan will teach people to develop their ideas and write a business plan, to make a budget and do profit-and-loss analysis. Later on we can work with private companies on marketing and business ideas, because Afghanistan needs business if it is going to keep growing once the foreigners leave. And I want to work with students, too, just as we did with the tailoring business: Kaweyan could give part-time work to university interns so they can write business plans for all different kinds of companies around the country. We don't have enough jobs for everyone in Afghanistan, and this way we'll create opportunities for young people as well as ent
repreneurs."

  Women, of course, would be a particular focus of Kaweyan. After so many years of war, women's entrepreneurship was about far more than business.

  "Money is power for women," Kamila said. "If women have their own income to bring to the family, they can contribute and make decisions. Their brothers, their husbands, and their entire families will have respect for them. I've seen this again and again. It's so important in Afghanistan because women have always had to ask for money from men. If we can give them some training, and an ability to earn a good salary, then we can change their lives and help their families."

  She paused for a moment to make sure I was following, then continued. "I was lucky. My father was a very educated man and he made certain that all nine of his daughters studied and learned. But there are families everywhere who have six or seven children and they can only pay for the boys to go to school; they don't have enough money for girls to go. So if we can train a woman who never had the chance to study, and she can start her own business, it will be good for the whole family as well as for the community. Her work will create jobs for other people and pay for both her boys and her girls to be educated. For the future of Afghanistan we must provide good education for our children--for the next generation. That's why business matters. And that's why I started Kaweyan."