Anne recently returned from an extended stay with the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) in Pakistan. We decided to try the idea of my "interviewing" her as a way to create some summary reports for others to read. Below is the first part of our interview. After reading it, feel free to post to the list any question you have and either Anne will reply directly or we'll fold it into a future "interview" (We figure we may do a couple more.)

Please note: You are welcome to forward this to others who might be interested, as long as you make certain that Anne's name and contact info (at the bottom) stay attached so that people will know the source and how to reach her. Thanks! - Alicia Lucksted (aluckste@psych.umaryland.edu).

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Q: What was the purpose / focus of your trip?

I recently returned (Feb 2002) from 7 weeks with RAWA in Pakistan (not Afghanistan), doing research for a book I am writing that will explore RAWA as an organization and community that fosters women's resilience.

Building on my 2 years of in-person and email relationships and support with RAWA and several individual members, I started talking with them more than a year ago about our collaborating on a project that combines my skills and interests in qualitative research and women's resilience in community contexts with their needs and desired to better document their 25 years of experience and struggle.

Q: What did you do while there?

I lived in a variety of RAWA's communities in cities across Pakistan where RAWA has activities, and for 10 days in a refugee camp where RAWA has extensive programs from orphanages and schools to a handicraft center and other social, humanitarian and outreach activities. Unlike my first visit there this past summer for 2 weeks, in which I visited lots of RAWA's projects and mostly talked to the people they serve, this time I spent most of my time this time talking to members of RAWA's community.

While there I engaged in participant observation, and talked formally and informally with over 100 RAWA members and Afghan supporters, as well as additional Pakistani supporters.

Rather than asking them to orchestrate special programs or arrangements just for this project, I was mostly able to be part of the daily activities and to interview people in their usual surroundings, while balancing security needs.

Q: In your note to the list last week, you mentioned that your time there reinforced your commitment to helping RAWA. Do you want to say any more about that here?

As I said in that first note, being there, seeing their work and talking to a wide variety of people who are connected to RAWA in various ways, reinforced my beliefs that this is a remarkable organization doing amazing work under very difficult circumstances.

The difficult circumstances are not only those that come from their being an underground humanitarian and political organization with enemies on multiple fronts, but also from being a women's organization operating in a religious, social, and cultural context (in Pakistan) in which women's lives are severely restricted. Clearly these risks and challenges are even more amplified in Afghanistan.

Q: Since Sept 11th and the start of the war, how have RAWA's activities changed?

For the first several months after Sept. 11th, especially those RAWA members who deal with the international community were completely overwhelmed by email and phone requests for information and interviews. They talked about 10-12 hour days of doing nothing by interview after interview, back to back, meeting journalists from around the world in public locations in Pakistan's major cities.

Demand was so great that even members who are not fully confident or fluent in English were called upon to do interviews. Phone calls came in at all hours of the day and night, with no attention to time differences. They even told me of one call from Europe in the middle of the night where the journalist only asked them what the local time was in Pakistan!

During this time the needs of refugees also increased significantly. Many people fled the U.S. bombing in Afghanistan with only the clothes on their backs.

While there was and is always much more need than RAWA can meet, because of limitations in money and people power, there have been some increased donations since Sept. 11th which have allowed them to expand their assistance activities. A couple examples:

During a one-week period, while I was with them in Islamabad, there were 5 food and supply distributions to urban encampments of refugees. This is a great expansion as previously they had been able to provide fewer than one per week in the same area.

People often picture refugees in large rural camps, but one of the communities that RAWA helps is a squatter's community of 50-75 families who have put up tents and mudbrick buildings on a vacant lot at the end of a street in a middle class Pakistani neighborhood. Relations between the refugees and their neighbors are mixed. There are some tensions across the economic, language and cultural divides, but the neighbors also provide water to the refugee community in the summer and some allow the refugees to tap into their electrical lines to bring light to the makeshift camp.

RAWA's helping this encampment is the result of a slow and gradual building of relationships with leaders and community members, asking the people what they need. As a result, they opened a school there for children and started literacy classes for women, in addition to providing some medical care and humanitarian supplies.

RAWA is also now (post Sept 11th) able to support more schools due to increased donations. This includes opening several new schools and literacy programs ranging from ones housed in buildings with intact roofs and a desk for each student to those held in residential courtyards with a portable blackboard and the kids' mimeographed textbooks as the only physical markers that it is a school.

Also, since the fall of the Taliban, RAWA has recently been able to have their first open [identified as RAWA] activities in Kabul, I believe in the entire history of the organization. They distributed food to orphans at the largest orphanage in Kabul.

Q: What about their activities in Afghanistan post Sept 11th?

I was not in Afghanistan, but I did talk to a number of RAWA members who recently came from various parts ranging from some who had crossed the border just 2 days before I talked to them and others who left Afghanistan right after the bombing started.

As an aside, sitting in a refugee camp with one such member I had the chance to sample a food packet dropped by the US government on Afghanistan. While the fruit pastry tasted a lot like poptarts, I'm not sure most Afghans would appreciate the bean enchilada fillings in the plastic pouch. Also, it was interesting to note that the package was marked with nutritional information using US standards, and that it was produced by a company in Texas. I couldn't help wondering if the allocation of that contract by the military was more than a coincidence.

Regarding RAWA's Afghanistan programs during the bombing, members said various things. In some places the bombing did disrupt RAWA's activities due to safety concerns and the fleeing of the civilians. In other places activities continued as usual.

For example, they told me a story of a RAWA school near a likely bombing target. The RAWA member I was speaking with told the teacher that they probably should suspend classes due to the risk. The teacher said she would not do so without talking to the students first [dk if child or adult classes]. The students said they did not want to stop, and that it would be an honor to die while learning. So the school continued. To my knowledge it was not bombed.

I also talked to a number of people who had lost family members in the bombing, but it seems that no RAWA members or core supporters were killed.

RAWA expects that as long as there are fundamentalists in the government, there will be need for RAWA to continue its educating children and women, especially in rural areas. They also are not sure the government will be able to / willing to do what they have said in reopening all the schools in March, to girls as well as boys. Even if this does happen in the urban areas, it will probably be slower to reach the rural areas. And, there may be some continued resistance to educating girls and women by some of the more traditional regional leaders*so that RAWA's schools and classes will still be needed.

Additionally, until there is democracy and secular government, they feel there will always be a need for their political education toward building a free Afghanistan.

Q: Is RAWA able to operate more openly since the Taliban are out of power?

Other than the open food distribution in Kabul, I don't know of any more open activities. RAWA members in Afghanistan are still not able to agree to meet journalists in Afghanistan, nor to take people into Afghanistan from Pakistan because it is not safe.

Q: It seems to me that the changes since Sept 11th and the possibility of a new future probably pose some decisions and developmental questions to RAWA - did you find that to be the case?

Post - Sept 11th, when Afghanistan and RAWA were catapulted into public attention, they have been having to think a lot about figuring out how to position themselves in the rapidly changing and uncertain context. On one hand they have received, and accepted, some invitations to "sit at the table" - such as having a RAWA member attend the Bonn meetings as part of the former king's delegation.

On the other hand, they strongly believe that as long as fundamentalists and criminals are included in the government there really is no room for their voice at that table, and that having a presence there may be taken as tacit approval of a process and of participants who will bring about no positive change for Afghanistan in the long run and in fact will continue to stand in the way of democracy and women's rights.

Q: Given the focus of your project and book with RAWA, is there anything you want to say at this point about RAWA's structure as an organization?

One thing is that some visitors and journalists have assumed that RAWA is made up completely of young women. This mis-perception is, I think, based on the fact that most of the publicly visible members are the youngest members, chosen for the public roles because they don't yet have the longstanding security risk exposure of older members and because they have been able to attain fluency in English through RAWA schools.

In actuality, RAWA is an organization with members ranging from 17 (the minimum age at which you women can join) to at least their late 60's. RAWA members vary greatly in terms of education, family background, religion, ethnicity, region of origin in Afghanistan, age joined, and level of involvement.

Some RAWA members have been members since Meena formed the organization in 1977, and others have spent their entire life within RAWA, coming though RAWA schools and living in RAWA communities. Others joined as adults through literacy programs in Afghanistan and Pakistani refugee camps where they were adult students.

Male supporters also vary on all these same terms, and many have been instrumental in encouraging their female relatives to go to RAWA schools, classes, activities, and to become members.

Anne Brodsky, PhD (RAWA_afg@yahoo.com)