AFGHANISTAN Kabuls raging Granny
Afghanistan Economic Development 29th Sep 2010By Kieran Green, CARE International
Roshan is a grandma to watch out for. She’s no mere widow – with the backing of her CARE widows’ group, she’s a force of nature.
Roshan has had a hard life. Her parents and brother were killed in conflicts. She was married at the age of 17. Her husband was a good man. After the fall of the Taliban, he became a driver for the district chief of police. Then one day insurgents ambushed his car to assassinate the police chief. The car was riddled with bullets. There were no survivors, and Roshan was a widow.
With no family income and six children to look after – including two who were disabled – Roshan qualified for CARE’s HAWA food distribution program for widows. She quickly moved from dependence on food distributions, graduating to a cash-for-work program making quilts. Then one day she heard about new support groups for widows being organized.
Roshan loves to help people. “It’s my hobby and my pleasure,” she says. So she approached the CARE community mobilizer and offered a room in her house to start a new widow’s group for her community. CARE accepted, and the group was launched. Roshan and her fellow widows began to learn about their rights: property rights, inheritance, child custody etc. Roshan saw an immediate application for her new knowledge.
One of her daughters had been divorced by her husband. She and her son were living back with Roshan. Then one day the estranged father showed up and tried to take custody of the child. Using her knowledge of women’s rights, Roshan fought back. She went to the authorities and demonstrated the father had never supported his wife and son after the divorce. Custody was awarded to her daughter. From there she went on to help her sister, a widow who had remarried and was having problems with violent in-laws. She intervened and got her sister out of the situation. Then she fought the uncle from her sister’s first marriage to get her grandchildren their due inheritance.
Having helped her own family, Roshan turned her boundless energy to her community. Seeing a need for job skills, she took out a loan and bought four sewing machines. With the help of her one daughter, she ran sewing vocational training classes in her home. For those who could afford it, she charged a very small fee to pay off the loan.
Feeling her home was not big enough to properly house the classes and the growing widow’s association, she went to the local Parliamentary representative and convinced them to grant her group a plot of land to build on. The land now houses rooms for meetings and training classes, and shop space for members to sell their handiworks for income.
Next Roshan turned her attention to the problem of transportation. The market was far away and her neighbours could not afford taxi fares to get themselves and their goods there. So Roshan went to a car company and requested a small three-wheeled motorcycle-cart. The company scoffed at her. They did not think women could handle a vehicle like that. Roshan argued back that women were equally capable. She’s a convincing debater, because the company gave the community on motor cart free. Roshan hired a driver, and set up a system where any community member can have use of the cart for a small fee. The fee goes to pay the driver, with any leftovers going into a pot to buy more motor carts.
Meanwhile Roshan has also become the one the entire community turns to when there’s a problem. She says she has done “hundreds and hundreds” of interventions, helping neighbours resolve marital disputes, family violence and other family issues.
Roshan has no plans of stopping any time soon, either. For the future she fully intends to launch literacy courses for her community, to establish a kindergarten, and when she’s done that, she says she’s going to work on getting her neighbourhood streets paved. It’s a good bet it will happen. With her CARE widow’s association behind her, it seems there’s nothing she can’t accomplish.
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