Former NPR reporter Sarah Chayes once described events in Afghanistan as an outside chronicler. She now calls Kandahar home and details her experiences of how life unfolded after the Taliban came to power in her new book The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban. We'll talk with the Massachusetts native about the complicated politics inside the country, and the depth of her personal interest in making an impact there.
***This interview originally aired October 24, 2006.
Tonight's program is a rebroadcast, and in anticipation of that Sarah Chayes sent Liz Bulkley an update on her life in Kandahar. Liz asked her about if recent violence had made her more or less determined to be in Afghanistan. Here's a portion of Sarah's letter in response:
"Every time I get all illusioned about the possibility of doing something revolutionary, like turn Kandahar around -- make it a beacon of good governance and civic inclusion that could be built out from -- appointments to local positions of power make it just abundantly clear that no one has the least intention of letting that happen. So I go into a slump, and turn inwards...to soap.
You see, by some miracle, we have actually created a...climate here, inside our walls: of security, collegiality, trust, and productivity.
We've grown to 12, counting me. We have an electric seed oil press that can process about 8 times as much raw material as the guys could press with the hand-crank model. So the women have volunteered to work three extra hours each day, cracking almonds and apricot kernels.
One has a voice. So she was singing all afternoon to keep the others entertained while they work. She recently lost both her sons in a suicide bombing. In Manhattan just before Christmas, a friend's mother was in one of our retailers, Domus, and heard two customers come in looking for "that fabulous soap from Afghanistan." What I'm saying is that we're actually doing something...small, albeit, but very important, I think. We're proving that in the middle of this hell and deprivation, a productive, democratic, good-hearted environment can be created, and result in a product that the most pampered and materialistic people in the world want to own. And we're proving that the pocket-book is a very powerful vote, and that by choosing to select something you'd buy anyway according to criteria to do with the conditions (human and environmental) under which it was manufactured, you can become part of a story, and make a genuine contribution to the wellbeing of folks a long way away. I know this sounds corny, but it's really how I feel. And THAT is worth being determined about."
I mentioned during tonight's show that I'd post a comment about my professional relationship to Sarah Chayes.
Sarah and I were colleagues during the 1990's when we were both at Monitor Radio, a part of the Christian Science Publishing Society in Boston. We worked together with me on the producer/editorial side, she as a budding reporter who eventually reported from Paris. We've remained warm colleagues ever since and I enjoyed watching her early reporting efforts transform into solid reporting skills at NPR, particularly in Afghanistan. After she stopped reporting she became a different kind of observer, and published her first book, on life after the Taliban. During the writing of that book Sarah was devoted to Afghanistan, and she's worked hard to create a viable business for a group of women in Kandahar.
Sarah did her preliminary research in New Hampshire before she helped get the Kandahar cooperative off the ground. She visited a small soap business here to learn about ways indigenous materials can be incorporated into a product, and to check out different ways to market the stuff. She has a rare passion for the people and culture of Afghanistan that keeps her in the country despite the apparent increasing violence and heated conflicts.