Editors
Jennifer Heath is an independent scholar, award-winning activist,
cultural journalist, curator, and the author and/or editor of twelve books of fiction and non-fiction, including A House White With Sorrow: A Ballad for Afghanistan, The Scimitar and the Veil: Extraordinary Women of Islam, and The Veil: Women Writers on Its History, Lore, and Politics.
She came of age in Afghanistan and is the founder of Seeds for
Afghanistan and the Afghanistan Relief Organization Midwife Training and
Infant Care Program, now International Midwife Assistance. She lives in
Boulder, Colorado.
Ashraf Zahedi, Ph.D., is a sociologist and has conducted research at the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara; the Beatrice Bain Research Group at the University of California, Berkeley; the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Stanford University; and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She has published many articles in academic journals and co-edited Land of the Unconquerable: The Lives of Contemporary Afghan Women with Jennifer Heath.
Ashraf Zahedi, Ph.D., is a sociologist and has conducted research at the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara; the Beatrice Bain Research Group at the University of California, Berkeley; the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Stanford University; and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She has published many articles in academic journals and co-edited Land of the Unconquerable: The Lives of Contemporary Afghan Women with Jennifer Heath.
Contributors
Hangama Anwari has worked for human rights in Afghanistan since she was fifteen years old, when her father helped her type articles. After civil war forced her family from Kabul to northern Afghanistan, she graduated from university in Balkh province with a degree in law and political science, lectured there, and worked at a community-based organization, Community for Development Organization. The Taliban conquest of the north, coupled with the loss of her father, forced her, at twenty-two, to move to Islamabad, Pakistan, where she could work and care for her young siblings. On staff at United Nations Habitat, she traveled to Afghanistan to assist underground, home-based organizations working on education, income generation, and other key services. She returned after the fall of the Taliban to create a non-governmental organization, The Women and Children Legal Research Foundation designed to illuminate the impact of harmful traditional practices enforced by Afghanistan’s informal justice system and to render a clear picture of their negative influence “not only on women, but on children, society, and the process for development and democracy.”
Fitsum Assefa is a public nutrition specialist working with UNICEF. She has twenty years’ experience in Africa and Asia working with non-governmental organizations and the United Nations, in assessment, design, implementation, and management of nutrition and food security programs both in humanitarian and development contexts. Her work experience in Afghanistan dates back to 1995. She is one of the lead professionals who supported national public nutrition assessments, programs, and policy in Afghanistan during the period of 2002 to 2005. She currently resides and works in Zimbabwe.
Annalies Borrel has twenty years of program and policy experience with United Nations organizations, non-governmental organizations, Tufts University, and governments in Africa, the Balkans and Afghanistan, in humanitarian, transition, and development contexts. Her work has been predominantly in the area of food and nutrition security, but she is also experienced in poverty reduction, disaster risk management, social protection, livelihoods, public health, and national capacity development. Throughout her career, she has supported a multi-sectoral approach to food and nutrition security, recognizing the complex and diverse social, political, and economic factors that impact on food and nutrition, and their implications for analysis, policy, research, and programs. She currently resides and works in Ethiopia.
Delphine Boutin works on issues of child labor and youth employment at the University of Bordeaux with a specialization in child soldiering. She is also a consultant for the International Labor Organization and the Understanding Children’s work project. She has written two articles published in French by the Université Bordeaux Montesquieu, referring to the repercussions of child soldiering and the market for child soldiers in the African Great Lake region --Analyse des répercussions de l’enrôlement des enfants dans les conflits armés and Analyse des répercussions de l’enrôlement des enfants dans les conflits armés, respectively.
Anne E. Brodsky received her Ph.D. in Clinical/Community Psychology from the University of Maryland, College Park. She completed her clinical internship at Massachusetts Mental Health Center, Harvard Medical School, and a Postdoctoral Fellowship at The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She is currently a professor of psychology and Associate Dean in the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her teaching, research, and practice focus on resilience, psychological sense of community, and the role of communities in creating and resisting societal risks and oppressions, including violence, poverty, racism, and sexism. Between 2001 and 2007 she made regular research trips to Pakistan and Afghanistan, interviewing more than two hundred Afghan women, children, and men about Afghan women’s risk and resilience. She is the author of more than thirty articles and chapters, as well as one book With All Our Strength: The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan.
Teresa Cutler-Broyles has a Master's Degree in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies with a focus on American Orientalism and Film Theory, and teaches film classes at the University of New Mexico. She is the author of A Dream That Keeps Returning (2007), a series of travel essays about Italy, and One Eyed Jack (2012), a young adult novel. A chapter in Communities in Motion, looks at the globalization of dance. She also owns a small business, InkWell International LLC, through which she runs writing workshops in Italy and Turkey, and provides a variety of writing and editing services.
Charlotte Dufour has been working on food security, nutrition, and livelihoods since 2000, predominantly in Afghanistan. After obtaining a Masters in Public Health Nutrition, she worked with Action Contre la Faim in Afghanistan, Paris, and Ethiopia. She returned to Afghanistan regularly between 2002 and 2005, while working with Groupe URD on project evaluations and training. She moved to Kabul in 2005, with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in the Ministry of Agriculture as nutrition officer until end of 2008. She continued regular consulting in the health and agriculture sectors until early 2010. She lives in Rome and works with FAO on nutrition in Sub-Saharan Africa. In 2011, Amitiés Afghanes – dix ans de vies partagées was published by Editions Fayard.
Mark Eggerman (M.Phil.) is a Research Scientist at the Macmillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University, and an independent fieldwork management consultant specializing in the Middle East and Islamic societies. His work in Afghanistan has included studies of public opinion, media use, education, politics, and mental health for clients such as the BBC World Service Trust, Intermedia Survey Research Institute, Durham University, and Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit. He has provided expert witness reports for legal aid caseworkers representing Afghan child and adolescent asylum-seekers in the United Kingdom. http://www.yale.edu/macmillan/crh/
Esther Hyneman is a professor emeritus of English at Long Island University. She received her B.A. from Goucher College and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University. She sits on the board of directors of Women for Afghan Women and spends about six months a year in Afghanistan.
Amina Kator-Mubarez graduated from University of California, Berkeley with a B.A. in Political Science and Minor in Global Poverty and Practice and is currently pursuing an M.A. in National Security Affairs from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. Her love and passion for Afghanistan has led her to travel there on several occasions and conduct extensive research about the region. She was a fund recipient of the Afaf Kanafani Scholarship for the best paper on the topic of women in South Asia and received a travel grant through the Blum Center at UC-Berkeley to conduct research and interview Afghan youth in Afghanistan regarding their hopes and aspirations for the future. In addition, she’s actively been involved in events such as the Rebuild Afghanistan Summit and has provided project-level technical leadership on gender and other social issues related to design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of international development projects in Afghanistan.
Lael Adams Mohib specializes in rural development in Afghanistan, and has an M.A. in International Relations from Boston University. She has worked for the Afghan Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development, and FLAG International, Afghanistan, and currently works for the BBC's media-for-development international charity, Media Action. She is also project manager for the Enabled Children's Initiative, a fundraising project hosted by the Afghan Professionals network to support disabled orphans in Afghanistan. Her writings have appeared on Foreign Policy's AfPak Channel, the New York Times At War blog, Islamica magazine, and the Boston Globe online. She recently produced a documentary film, Voice of a Nation: My Journey through Afghanistan. www.enabledchildren.org
Lauryn Oates is a human rights activist focused on education in conflict zones. It was in 1996 that, at age 14, Lauryn read a newspaper article describing the new regime in Afghanistan called the Taliban, and their treatment of women and girls. She wrote up a petition demanding that the world respond to the Taliban’s misogynist policies, and has continued this work ever since, working in close partnership with a variety of Afghan women’s organizations and international charities. Lauryn is currently Programs Director with Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan, managing education projects including teacher training, village libraries, literacy classes, schools and training programs. Lauryn is a fierce proponent of the universalism of human rights, and frequently speaks out against cultural relativism and for global citizenship in the Canadian and international media. She is the recipient of several awards and distinctions, including a Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal awarded by the province of BC in 2013. She holds a BA in international development (McGill University), an MA in human security (Royal Roads University) and a PhD in education (University of British Columbia), and teaches graduate students at the School of Humanitarian Studies at Royal Roads University. In 2008, The Globe & Mail named her as the first of Ten Canadians to Watch in 2009. www.cw4wafghan.ca; http://www.readysetglobal.com/lauryn.html
Wahid Omar was born in Kabul and left Afghanistan shortly before the Soviet invasion in 1979. He lived in France as a political refugee until 1987 and received his Ph.D. from the University of Colorado in 2010. He has worked in Afghanistan since 2001 in project development, implementation, and feasibility studies, and as an educational advisor for the United Nations Development Program, training university professors and building capacity at the University of Kabul. Under his leadership, forty- five projects have been implemented, ranging from school and community centers, teacher training, water improvement projects, and micro lending to humanitarian aid and relief efforts. He has won many awards for his teaching and writing, and his work in collecting and preserving Afghan folklore has garnered the attention of the Smithsonian Institution. He is the author of Afghanistan: A Nation in Performance— A Comparative Study between Medieval France and Contemporary Afghanistan.
Catherine Panter-Brick (D.Phil.) is Professor of Anthropology, Health, and Global Affairs at Yale University. Her focus on youth in global adversity has included research with street children, refugees, famine-stricken families, and war-affected communities in areas of conflict and humanitarian emergencies. She has directed more than forty international projects, including the first large-scale survey of child and caregiver mental health in Afghanistan. She is the Senior Editor (Medical Anthropology section) for the international and interdisciplinary journal, Social Science &Medicine. She received the 2011 Lucy Mair Medal for Applied Anthropology, an award that honors excellence in the application of anthropology to the relief of poverty and distress, and to the active recognition of human dignity. http://www.yale.edu/macmillan/crh/
Louise M. Pascale has been an Associate Professor for Lesley University in the ITA Creative Arts in Learning program for more than fifteen years. In 2003 she launched the Children’s Afghan Songbook Project, a project that strives to preserve traditional Afghan children’s songs and return them to the children of Afghanistan. These songs almost completely disappeared from Afghan culture due to the devastation that has afflicted Afghanistan over the past thirty years. The project is rooted in her years as a Peace Corps volunteer during the late 1960s. More than 30,000 copies of the songbook, Qu Qu Qu Barg-e-Chinaar: Children’s Songs from Afghanistan have been distributed to and are in use in schools and orphanages across Afghanistan. In 2008, Pascale published the English translated version of the songbook which is distributed primarily in the U.S. and Canada. www.afghansongbook.org
Ian Pounds began his education traveling 10,000 miles on the angle of a genetically transmitted hitchhiker’s thumb. He sailed around the world with Semester at Sea, a shipboard campus devoted to global studies. He acquired his B.A. in creative writing from The Evergreen State College, and later studied Elizabethan literature at Oxford University. For three years he practiced Vipassana meditation, and for three years he homesteaded an otherwise deserted island in Southeast Alaska. His plays have been showcased at Seattle’s New City Theatre and Olympia’s Black Box. He’s been a stonemason, a performance poet, a counselor of runaway teens, and led workshops with the Association for Experiential Education and the Vermont Stage Company. He was a scholar at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, where he served for more than ten years on the admissions committee and coordinated the Bakeless Literary Prizes. He recently completed a draft of a memoir Undestroyed, about his four years as a volunteer living with and teaching orphans in Kabul, Afghanistan. https://ianpounds.wordpress.com/2013/08/13/2/
Omar Qargha is a doctoral candidate in the International Education Program of the University of Maryland, College Park. He has a B.S. in Chemistry from the University of North Florida, a Masters of Education in Curriculum and Instruction from George Mason University, and an M.A. in Comparative International Education from Stanford University. His experience includes serving as Assistant Director for the non-profit organization Help the Afghan Children; developing a teacher competency framework for Afghanistan’s Ministry of Education as part of the USAID-funded Building Education Support System for Teachers (BESST) project; developing standards for teacher education programs for Afghanistan’s Ministry of Higher Education; and training professors in science and mathematics pedagogy as part of the USAID-funded Afghanistan Higher Education Project.
Mamiko Saito was the senior research officer on migration at the Afghanistan Research and Evalution Unit (AREU) in Kabul. She started working in Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2003 with a particular focus on refugees. She holds a master’s degree in Education and Development Studies from the University of East Anglia.
Sharifa Sharif is an Afghan-Canadian independent consultant/ expert on Afghanistan culture and society, mainly in the field of women, culture, and development. She has worked in adult education, women and development, community development, journalism, and politics in Afghanistan, Canada, India and the Czech Republic. She obtained her Ph.D. in Education Policy at the University of Illinois. Her published works include a memoir, On The Edge of Being: An Afghan Woman’s Journey, two collections of short stories, The Guilty Judges of Stoning (in Dari) and Window (in Pashto).
Joanna Sherman co-founded Bond Street Theatre in 1976 and has served as Artistic Director since 1986. Under her directorship, the company received a MacArthur Award for its innovative intercultural programming. As director, choreographer, and actor for Bond Street Theatre, she directed productions that toured to major theatres and festivals worldwide, and initiated company projects in East Asia, South America, Eastern and Western Europe, the Middle East, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan and Myanmar. Sherman has been a speaker on the role of the arts in areas of conflict at the United Nations, the National Council on Women, the UN Conference on Women in China in 1995, the UN Youth Assembly, the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, Theatre Without Borders, arts councils, and arts-in-education forums, and been featured on CNN, BBC, and National Public Radio, among many others. She has directed, lectured, and taught internationally at universities worldwide, her writing has been published in numerous periodicals and she has received various grants and awards. Recent projects include collaboration with Afghanistan’s Exile Theatre to depict true stories of life during wartime. The piece was presented in Afghanistan, Japan, and the United States, and is the first US-Afghan theatre collaboration in history. She is currently conducting a theatre-based conflict resolution project in Afghanistan with support from the US Embassy and US Institute of Peace. She plays tenor saxophone with Bond Street Theatre’s Shinbone Alley Stilt Band. www.bondst.org
Amanda Sim is the research and evaluation specialist for the child protection and women’s protection and empowerment sectors at the International Rescue Committee. She currently oversees evaluations of family strengthening and child mental health programs in Thailand, Ethiopia, and Liberia. Prior to her current role, she managed the child and youth protection and development programs for the IRC in Afghanistan and Liberia. Amanda was with the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, based in Kabul from 2007-8, where she led a research project on child labor. Her research interests include children affected by conflict, child psychosocial well-being and cross-cultural research in conflict and displacement settings. Amanda holds an MA from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, where she specialized in humanitarian studies.
Deborah J. Smith has worked in Afghanistan for the past six years, primarily in the fields of gender, community based dispute resolution, and justice. Prior to this she researched public health issues in Malawi and Zambia. Deborah holds a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and Political Science for which she conducted field work in India. She currently works as an independent consultant.
Steven Solter has worked in international public health since 1971, mostly on long-term projects in Asia. He has spent nearly six years in Afghanistan (including three years prior to the Soviet invasion of 1979). He has also worked for twelve years in Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Philippines, and Cambodia) as well as two years in Iran. He has mostly worked with Ministries of Health at central or provincial levels in an effort to reduce maternal and child mortality, especially through the use of community health workers based at the village level and through using data for decision-making. He has worked since 1976 for Management Sciences for Health, a non-profit group based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was based in Kabul from 2008 to 2010 as Technical Director of a large USAID-funded project aimed at enhancing the capacity of the Afghan Ministry of Public Health. He is now based in Cambridge, where he backstops several overseas projects. He received his MPH from Johns Hopkins University and his MD from Stanford University.
Cover photo by
Beth Wald, http://bethwaldphotography.com/
Interior photos by
Anne E. Brodsky
Sam Chen
Ginna Fleming, http://www.ginnafleming.com
Sheryl Shapiro, http://www.sherylbshapiro.com
UNICEF/Valerie Gatchel, courtesy of Fitsum Assefa
Fitsum Assefa is a public nutrition specialist working with UNICEF. She has twenty years’ experience in Africa and Asia working with non-governmental organizations and the United Nations, in assessment, design, implementation, and management of nutrition and food security programs both in humanitarian and development contexts. Her work experience in Afghanistan dates back to 1995. She is one of the lead professionals who supported national public nutrition assessments, programs, and policy in Afghanistan during the period of 2002 to 2005. She currently resides and works in Zimbabwe.
Annalies Borrel has twenty years of program and policy experience with United Nations organizations, non-governmental organizations, Tufts University, and governments in Africa, the Balkans and Afghanistan, in humanitarian, transition, and development contexts. Her work has been predominantly in the area of food and nutrition security, but she is also experienced in poverty reduction, disaster risk management, social protection, livelihoods, public health, and national capacity development. Throughout her career, she has supported a multi-sectoral approach to food and nutrition security, recognizing the complex and diverse social, political, and economic factors that impact on food and nutrition, and their implications for analysis, policy, research, and programs. She currently resides and works in Ethiopia.
Delphine Boutin works on issues of child labor and youth employment at the University of Bordeaux with a specialization in child soldiering. She is also a consultant for the International Labor Organization and the Understanding Children’s work project. She has written two articles published in French by the Université Bordeaux Montesquieu, referring to the repercussions of child soldiering and the market for child soldiers in the African Great Lake region --Analyse des répercussions de l’enrôlement des enfants dans les conflits armés and Analyse des répercussions de l’enrôlement des enfants dans les conflits armés, respectively.
Anne E. Brodsky received her Ph.D. in Clinical/Community Psychology from the University of Maryland, College Park. She completed her clinical internship at Massachusetts Mental Health Center, Harvard Medical School, and a Postdoctoral Fellowship at The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She is currently a professor of psychology and Associate Dean in the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her teaching, research, and practice focus on resilience, psychological sense of community, and the role of communities in creating and resisting societal risks and oppressions, including violence, poverty, racism, and sexism. Between 2001 and 2007 she made regular research trips to Pakistan and Afghanistan, interviewing more than two hundred Afghan women, children, and men about Afghan women’s risk and resilience. She is the author of more than thirty articles and chapters, as well as one book With All Our Strength: The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan.
Teresa Cutler-Broyles has a Master's Degree in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies with a focus on American Orientalism and Film Theory, and teaches film classes at the University of New Mexico. She is the author of A Dream That Keeps Returning (2007), a series of travel essays about Italy, and One Eyed Jack (2012), a young adult novel. A chapter in Communities in Motion, looks at the globalization of dance. She also owns a small business, InkWell International LLC, through which she runs writing workshops in Italy and Turkey, and provides a variety of writing and editing services.
Charlotte Dufour has been working on food security, nutrition, and livelihoods since 2000, predominantly in Afghanistan. After obtaining a Masters in Public Health Nutrition, she worked with Action Contre la Faim in Afghanistan, Paris, and Ethiopia. She returned to Afghanistan regularly between 2002 and 2005, while working with Groupe URD on project evaluations and training. She moved to Kabul in 2005, with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in the Ministry of Agriculture as nutrition officer until end of 2008. She continued regular consulting in the health and agriculture sectors until early 2010. She lives in Rome and works with FAO on nutrition in Sub-Saharan Africa. In 2011, Amitiés Afghanes – dix ans de vies partagées was published by Editions Fayard.
Mark Eggerman (M.Phil.) is a Research Scientist at the Macmillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University, and an independent fieldwork management consultant specializing in the Middle East and Islamic societies. His work in Afghanistan has included studies of public opinion, media use, education, politics, and mental health for clients such as the BBC World Service Trust, Intermedia Survey Research Institute, Durham University, and Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit. He has provided expert witness reports for legal aid caseworkers representing Afghan child and adolescent asylum-seekers in the United Kingdom. http://www.yale.edu/macmillan/crh/
Esther Hyneman is a professor emeritus of English at Long Island University. She received her B.A. from Goucher College and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University. She sits on the board of directors of Women for Afghan Women and spends about six months a year in Afghanistan.
Amina Kator-Mubarez graduated from University of California, Berkeley with a B.A. in Political Science and Minor in Global Poverty and Practice and is currently pursuing an M.A. in National Security Affairs from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. Her love and passion for Afghanistan has led her to travel there on several occasions and conduct extensive research about the region. She was a fund recipient of the Afaf Kanafani Scholarship for the best paper on the topic of women in South Asia and received a travel grant through the Blum Center at UC-Berkeley to conduct research and interview Afghan youth in Afghanistan regarding their hopes and aspirations for the future. In addition, she’s actively been involved in events such as the Rebuild Afghanistan Summit and has provided project-level technical leadership on gender and other social issues related to design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of international development projects in Afghanistan.
Lael Adams Mohib specializes in rural development in Afghanistan, and has an M.A. in International Relations from Boston University. She has worked for the Afghan Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development, and FLAG International, Afghanistan, and currently works for the BBC's media-for-development international charity, Media Action. She is also project manager for the Enabled Children's Initiative, a fundraising project hosted by the Afghan Professionals network to support disabled orphans in Afghanistan. Her writings have appeared on Foreign Policy's AfPak Channel, the New York Times At War blog, Islamica magazine, and the Boston Globe online. She recently produced a documentary film, Voice of a Nation: My Journey through Afghanistan. www.enabledchildren.org
Lauryn Oates is a human rights activist focused on education in conflict zones. It was in 1996 that, at age 14, Lauryn read a newspaper article describing the new regime in Afghanistan called the Taliban, and their treatment of women and girls. She wrote up a petition demanding that the world respond to the Taliban’s misogynist policies, and has continued this work ever since, working in close partnership with a variety of Afghan women’s organizations and international charities. Lauryn is currently Programs Director with Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan, managing education projects including teacher training, village libraries, literacy classes, schools and training programs. Lauryn is a fierce proponent of the universalism of human rights, and frequently speaks out against cultural relativism and for global citizenship in the Canadian and international media. She is the recipient of several awards and distinctions, including a Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal awarded by the province of BC in 2013. She holds a BA in international development (McGill University), an MA in human security (Royal Roads University) and a PhD in education (University of British Columbia), and teaches graduate students at the School of Humanitarian Studies at Royal Roads University. In 2008, The Globe & Mail named her as the first of Ten Canadians to Watch in 2009. www.cw4wafghan.ca; http://www.readysetglobal.com/lauryn.html
Wahid Omar was born in Kabul and left Afghanistan shortly before the Soviet invasion in 1979. He lived in France as a political refugee until 1987 and received his Ph.D. from the University of Colorado in 2010. He has worked in Afghanistan since 2001 in project development, implementation, and feasibility studies, and as an educational advisor for the United Nations Development Program, training university professors and building capacity at the University of Kabul. Under his leadership, forty- five projects have been implemented, ranging from school and community centers, teacher training, water improvement projects, and micro lending to humanitarian aid and relief efforts. He has won many awards for his teaching and writing, and his work in collecting and preserving Afghan folklore has garnered the attention of the Smithsonian Institution. He is the author of Afghanistan: A Nation in Performance— A Comparative Study between Medieval France and Contemporary Afghanistan.
Catherine Panter-Brick (D.Phil.) is Professor of Anthropology, Health, and Global Affairs at Yale University. Her focus on youth in global adversity has included research with street children, refugees, famine-stricken families, and war-affected communities in areas of conflict and humanitarian emergencies. She has directed more than forty international projects, including the first large-scale survey of child and caregiver mental health in Afghanistan. She is the Senior Editor (Medical Anthropology section) for the international and interdisciplinary journal, Social Science &Medicine. She received the 2011 Lucy Mair Medal for Applied Anthropology, an award that honors excellence in the application of anthropology to the relief of poverty and distress, and to the active recognition of human dignity. http://www.yale.edu/macmillan/crh/
Louise M. Pascale has been an Associate Professor for Lesley University in the ITA Creative Arts in Learning program for more than fifteen years. In 2003 she launched the Children’s Afghan Songbook Project, a project that strives to preserve traditional Afghan children’s songs and return them to the children of Afghanistan. These songs almost completely disappeared from Afghan culture due to the devastation that has afflicted Afghanistan over the past thirty years. The project is rooted in her years as a Peace Corps volunteer during the late 1960s. More than 30,000 copies of the songbook, Qu Qu Qu Barg-e-Chinaar: Children’s Songs from Afghanistan have been distributed to and are in use in schools and orphanages across Afghanistan. In 2008, Pascale published the English translated version of the songbook which is distributed primarily in the U.S. and Canada. www.afghansongbook.org
Ian Pounds began his education traveling 10,000 miles on the angle of a genetically transmitted hitchhiker’s thumb. He sailed around the world with Semester at Sea, a shipboard campus devoted to global studies. He acquired his B.A. in creative writing from The Evergreen State College, and later studied Elizabethan literature at Oxford University. For three years he practiced Vipassana meditation, and for three years he homesteaded an otherwise deserted island in Southeast Alaska. His plays have been showcased at Seattle’s New City Theatre and Olympia’s Black Box. He’s been a stonemason, a performance poet, a counselor of runaway teens, and led workshops with the Association for Experiential Education and the Vermont Stage Company. He was a scholar at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, where he served for more than ten years on the admissions committee and coordinated the Bakeless Literary Prizes. He recently completed a draft of a memoir Undestroyed, about his four years as a volunteer living with and teaching orphans in Kabul, Afghanistan. https://ianpounds.wordpress.com/2013/08/13/2/
Omar Qargha is a doctoral candidate in the International Education Program of the University of Maryland, College Park. He has a B.S. in Chemistry from the University of North Florida, a Masters of Education in Curriculum and Instruction from George Mason University, and an M.A. in Comparative International Education from Stanford University. His experience includes serving as Assistant Director for the non-profit organization Help the Afghan Children; developing a teacher competency framework for Afghanistan’s Ministry of Education as part of the USAID-funded Building Education Support System for Teachers (BESST) project; developing standards for teacher education programs for Afghanistan’s Ministry of Higher Education; and training professors in science and mathematics pedagogy as part of the USAID-funded Afghanistan Higher Education Project.
Mamiko Saito was the senior research officer on migration at the Afghanistan Research and Evalution Unit (AREU) in Kabul. She started working in Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2003 with a particular focus on refugees. She holds a master’s degree in Education and Development Studies from the University of East Anglia.
Sharifa Sharif is an Afghan-Canadian independent consultant/ expert on Afghanistan culture and society, mainly in the field of women, culture, and development. She has worked in adult education, women and development, community development, journalism, and politics in Afghanistan, Canada, India and the Czech Republic. She obtained her Ph.D. in Education Policy at the University of Illinois. Her published works include a memoir, On The Edge of Being: An Afghan Woman’s Journey, two collections of short stories, The Guilty Judges of Stoning (in Dari) and Window (in Pashto).
Joanna Sherman co-founded Bond Street Theatre in 1976 and has served as Artistic Director since 1986. Under her directorship, the company received a MacArthur Award for its innovative intercultural programming. As director, choreographer, and actor for Bond Street Theatre, she directed productions that toured to major theatres and festivals worldwide, and initiated company projects in East Asia, South America, Eastern and Western Europe, the Middle East, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan and Myanmar. Sherman has been a speaker on the role of the arts in areas of conflict at the United Nations, the National Council on Women, the UN Conference on Women in China in 1995, the UN Youth Assembly, the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, Theatre Without Borders, arts councils, and arts-in-education forums, and been featured on CNN, BBC, and National Public Radio, among many others. She has directed, lectured, and taught internationally at universities worldwide, her writing has been published in numerous periodicals and she has received various grants and awards. Recent projects include collaboration with Afghanistan’s Exile Theatre to depict true stories of life during wartime. The piece was presented in Afghanistan, Japan, and the United States, and is the first US-Afghan theatre collaboration in history. She is currently conducting a theatre-based conflict resolution project in Afghanistan with support from the US Embassy and US Institute of Peace. She plays tenor saxophone with Bond Street Theatre’s Shinbone Alley Stilt Band. www.bondst.org
Amanda Sim is the research and evaluation specialist for the child protection and women’s protection and empowerment sectors at the International Rescue Committee. She currently oversees evaluations of family strengthening and child mental health programs in Thailand, Ethiopia, and Liberia. Prior to her current role, she managed the child and youth protection and development programs for the IRC in Afghanistan and Liberia. Amanda was with the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, based in Kabul from 2007-8, where she led a research project on child labor. Her research interests include children affected by conflict, child psychosocial well-being and cross-cultural research in conflict and displacement settings. Amanda holds an MA from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, where she specialized in humanitarian studies.
Deborah J. Smith has worked in Afghanistan for the past six years, primarily in the fields of gender, community based dispute resolution, and justice. Prior to this she researched public health issues in Malawi and Zambia. Deborah holds a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and Political Science for which she conducted field work in India. She currently works as an independent consultant.
Steven Solter has worked in international public health since 1971, mostly on long-term projects in Asia. He has spent nearly six years in Afghanistan (including three years prior to the Soviet invasion of 1979). He has also worked for twelve years in Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Philippines, and Cambodia) as well as two years in Iran. He has mostly worked with Ministries of Health at central or provincial levels in an effort to reduce maternal and child mortality, especially through the use of community health workers based at the village level and through using data for decision-making. He has worked since 1976 for Management Sciences for Health, a non-profit group based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was based in Kabul from 2008 to 2010 as Technical Director of a large USAID-funded project aimed at enhancing the capacity of the Afghan Ministry of Public Health. He is now based in Cambridge, where he backstops several overseas projects. He received his MPH from Johns Hopkins University and his MD from Stanford University.
Cover photo by
Beth Wald, http://bethwaldphotography.com/
Interior photos by
Anne E. Brodsky
Sam Chen
Ginna Fleming, http://www.ginnafleming.com
Sheryl Shapiro, http://www.sherylbshapiro.com
UNICEF/Valerie Gatchel, courtesy of Fitsum Assefa