I cannot stop thinking about the women. I’ve been reading their stories all week.
Fatema Hosseini, a journalist for one of Afghanistan’s leading news agencies, who was the center of a military-style rescue operation and barely escaped with her life. The members of Zohra, Afghanistan’s world-renowned all-female orchestra, who tried to escape but were stopped at the Kabul airport, 100 yards from freedom. The female judges – more than 200 of them – who now live in hiding, changing locations every few days, hunted by the men they convicted. Roya, a 20-year-old under threat because she led a US-sponsored girls club, who endured a harrowing trip to the Pakistan border and is stuck in immigration limbo.
There are thousands more – women who imagined and worked to build a better future for their Afghan sisters, with opportunities for education, careers, and the kind of basic personal freedoms I take for granted. Under the Taliban, their own lives are in danger and they’ve lost everything. But as we know, Silence = Death. And so our show this week, "What Afghan Women Want You to Know," celebrates the voices of Afghanistan’s women – their fierce courage, their poetry, their vision for the future. Let’s listen with love.
–Anne