Dear Zari: Hidden Stories from Women of Afghanistan Read Free

the help of senior BBC producers, I learnt how to put together different kinds of material relating to Afghan women’s lives. The programme had a variety of different slots – for example, a discussion section where an important topic like domestic violence or early marriage would be considered – and both experts and ordinary women would be invited to share their knowledge and experience. We also broadcast educational reports on issues like child mortality and contraception, and shone a spotlight on such female high achievers as Habiba Sarabi, who became the first female governor in Afghanistan in 2005. She was invited on to the programme as a guest interviewee, as were a variety of femalepoets, writers and musicians. Meanwhile the cultural diversity to be found amongst Afghanistan’s different regions was celebrated through songs and recipes. Some days we tackled such taboo subjects as rape, divorce and virginity, on others we exchanged recipes. Each week we featured women from all over Afghanistan cooking healthy meals good to feed a hungry family. The aim of this slot was to draw on and share the vast repository of recipes from the country’s different ethnic groups and tribes. The programme also covered any newsworthy achievements of Afghan women. The objective was quite simply to cover the wide range of issues that matter to women – our listeners often told us precisely what subjects they wanted the programme to cover.
    It was this intervention from our listeners that led to the development of our most popular slot: the life stories. Every woman who told us her life story effectively represented hundreds of others from any number of different ethnic backgrounds. Both Afghan women in Afghanistan and those in refugee camps in Pakistan wanted to hear about other women. They wanted to share their life stories, and they wanted to tell others about the hardships they had endured. Some were ready to share the problems they’d experienced in their marriages; others wanted to seek medical advice from doctors or family planning experts here in the UK. Some were keen to know about their legal rights, and others to share their skills and experiences with us. We organised the programme as a series of different slots; the first consisted of an interview or discussion with experts mainly on taboo topics relating to gender, the rights of women in a family and society, and the practicalities of dealing with domestic violence. The second slot was all about jobs, and this was where women shared with the audience their skills, the story of how they acquired them and their experiences of working in Afghanistan.
    It wasn’t possible to do all this with just a producer and an editor in London. I returned to Afghanistan regularly to do interviews and also communicated with reporters there. It was Afghan Woman’s Hour’s aim to train Afghan women to make a radio programme for themselves, and to this end we’d begun to hire and train women from the country’sdifferent provinces, often those who loved the show and were full of new ideas for developing it. The programme first started with two reporters in Kabul but after a couple of months we managed to find young women in provinces across Afghanistan who could send audio material to us via the internet. Discussions and interviews with guests and experts were mainly conducted by me from London over the phone, or down the line to the Kabul studio.
    Radio is the main source of mass communication in war-torn Afghanistan. Most people in the cities and rural areas have access to it. If you travel to even the most remote part of the country it is very rare to find a home without a radio, and so it was after just a few months of being on the air that I started receiving letters, phone calls and emails from our listeners. These were mostly from men – some of whom wrote on behalf of the women in their families – but women and girls also started getting in contact with our local Afghan