Nancy Antle

One of the AWWP friends and supporters in Afghanistan, Rosemary Stasek, died yesterday in Kabul.

There is a news article about her death here: http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_13417205

There is a June 2008 MSNBC piece on her work here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/25413632#25413632

She will be missed.

Whenever I teach I assume I’ll learn something from my students – about writing in new and unique ways, about topics I’ve never considered -- about life. I thought this would be especially true of the Afghan Women’s Writing Project so I readily agreed to participate. I was not disappointed.

These young women wrote heartfelt essays, articles and poems that taught me more than I could have imagined. I learned about life for women under the Taliban -- the secret schools, the attacks on girls. I learned about the growing threat of kidnapping for ransom and about children feeling the obligations of adults -- to work to support themselves and their families.

What I did not expect to feel from reading their words was hope. These strong, brave women are the face and future of change in Afghanistan. They give me hope because they have not given up. When a dream is lost they create another one – like Freshta deciding that she could find power in being a writer when she couldn’t become a doctor. Or Seeta who has become a journalist even though she encountered resistance and distrust at first. Or Meena who dared to openly protest a law allowing marital rape. I was expecting to encourage these women but instead they did that for me.

And they have taught me to pay attention. For me, Afghanistan is no longer some vaguely distant place where US soldiers are fighting and dying. I know these young women and something about their families now. My hope is that more and more people in the US can read their words and know them too.