Zarifa Ghafari - Zarifa - A Womans Battle in a Mans World

February 2022

Changa, Warda k province

Th e men wanted to know everything about Germany. A ft er the teenagers had cleared away the platters of rice and meat and half - fi nished bowls of milk pudding, fo lding up the orange pla st ic fl oor mat to catch the spilled grains and sugar wrappers inside, the elders fi xed their eyes on me and li st ened in intent silence as they sipped their teas. I took a breath, fi xed my headscarf, and st arted by telling them about the driving licences.

You have to do hours of classes! I told them. And then you have to tak e a te st .

Th ey exchanged surprised glances. None of them had ever had their driving abilities assessed be fo re they got behind the wheel. I ramped it up anot her notch.

And then, they take your licence away if you break the rules too ma ny times!

Now they were really shocked. Germany was the land of fr eedom, wasnt it? So what did they mean by denying a mans right to drive? I hadnt even got on to the real st u ff yet the jaw - dropping price of potatoes in the supermarkets, the money you had to hand over to the government be fo re you even saw your paycheque. I knew this would be st unning news to them, and that they wouldnt quite believe me. Here in Changa, a remote, rural village, sixty miles but eight hours by car on dirt tracks through the mountains fr om Kabul, it was assumed that anyone who had made it to Europe mu st be living a li fe of great luxury. And now here I was, the emissary fr om a promised land, a young A fg han woman, no less, telling them they had got it all wrong.

I could hardly blame these men: they had little else but hope. Changa was a collection of beige mud huts, with no running water or mains electricity. To get a phone signal you had to climb higher up the mountain. To go to the toilet, you had to squat in a hut on the hillside. School was a single - room madrassa fo r the boys, where Qurans and other religious literature were piled up along the walls next to huge heaps of prayer mats, and a courtyard classroom open to the elements. Th is is where the girls sat cross - legged on the ground fo r their lessons, when in February, the melting snow fa ll turned the hard - packed earth into mud. I would not have kept an ani mal there.

For the men, the imminent arrival of spring heralded an agreeable fe w months, when even those who believed Germany to be the land of Audis fo r all would proudly st ate that they pre fe rred to st ay in their village. In spring, the snow slides o ff the jagged mountains, revealing a layer of emerald - green grass, and new leaves on the bare branches of apple trees. Th e sun rises earlier and heats the earth a little deeper every day; within weeks, everything would bloom into a fr agrant canopy, and the men would wade into the river at the bottom of the valley in loose shorts and T - shirts to splash water at each other and shriek with delight. Th e women would not join in. Almo st all of them in Changa over the age of fo urteen were married; fo r them, there was little time fo r play.

Mo st of the amenities in Changa, including the school, had been provided by the Taliban. In the twenty years that the international aid organisations and NATO armies had spent in A fg hani st an, barely a penny of the billions of pounds that were poured into the country made it to villages like this one. Th ey might not even have known that the regime in Kabul had changed in 2001 had it not been fo r the air st rikes and night raids that came soon a ft er. Th e la st time fo reigners had come to Changa was in the 1980s, when two French doctors dropped in if you discounted the Americans who dropped fr om the skies with their parachutes and Robocop gear. Nobody had bothered to come and pave the road, or fu nd a market, or build a sewage sy st em. Th e carcasses of Russian tanks remained by the roadside, ru st ing heaps turning the same ochre as the earth a ft er thirty years. One Swedish aid organisation had fu nded a basic maternity clinic in the fo rmer school, and trained local women as midwives to assi st with st raight fo rward births. Otherwise, everything else here was provided by the Talibans parallel st ate, fr om education to security and the Sharia legal sy st em. One of the bigge st buildings in the area, which had once belonged to a governor of Wardak, was now the militants prison. And it was fo r that reason, as well as fo r their own protection, that everyone in the village supported th e Taliban.

Th e curious old men of Changa, the fa thers and supporters of those Talib boys, looked like a National Geographic st ereotype of A fg hani st an. Th eir turbans, elaborate rolls of pri st ine fa bric, increased the diameter of their heads by half again. Th ey wore huge woollen pato , shawls in earthy colours draped elegantly around their shoulders and necks. Outside, in the bitter mountain wind, they pulled the pato over their heads and wrapped them like a mask over their nose and mouth, and under their chins, exposing only their owlish amber eyes. Some teenagers adopted the st yle, adding a swoosh of kohl around their lashes fo r extra e ffe ct. Th ey had gathered to greet me, inviting me to eat in the be st salon of their homes, warmed by the fa milys sole gas - powered heater, all of us sitting com fo rtably on plump red cushions laid out around the edges of the room. Th e women were elsewhere, in a colder edge of the house, waiting fo r their turn to eat the fo od they had prepared f o r us all.

To an outside observer it may have seemed like nothing had changed in Changa fo r hundreds of years, that this was a place unmoved by the outside worlds march towards modernity. But one small detail gave the truth away. Hung up high on the turquoise - painted wall, fest ooned with pink and yellow garlands, was a photograph of a young man with a pencil mou st ache and side - parted hair. Th e print had clearly been pro fe ssionally taken decades ago, and Mohammad Jan, the man st aring out at his turbaned descendants, was wearing a suit and tie. In the early 1970s, when the picture was taken, he had been a young tra ffi c o ffi cer in Kabul, having le ft Changa to fo rge a new li fe in the capital. In Kabul, he had been seduced by le ft i st politics and its promise of a progressive, democratic A fg hani st an. Th at led him to join the Khalq Party (Peoples Democratic Party), a sociali st bloc with fr iendly ties to the Soviet Union. He married, st arted a fa mily, and had no reason to believe that his li fe and theirs would not continue in this moder n fa shion.