Bakery project empowers Afghans

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- In a crumbling, mud-walled kitchen, a dozen Afghan women are baking their way to financial independence and challenging age-old prejudices.

The housewives and widows who staff the Women's Bakery Project in the ultraconservative southern city of Kandahar are using skills learned at the family's hearth to earn a basic wage, most for the first time in their lives.

In Kandahar, that's slicing against the grain. As in much of the deeply religious Afghan hinterland, women here have traditionally remained confined to their homes, unlikely to leave unless covered head to foot in the sacklike burqa and accompanied by a male relative.

More than two decades of near continuous warfare, desperate poverty and exposure to the outside world have started to chip away at those strictures, and the women workers of the bakery seem anxious to dispense with them altogether. For too long, they say, women have seen their potential squandered while the country collapsed in war and chaos around them.

"Our people are suffering a lot because of the bad economy damaged by 20 years of war. They are so poor and, especially the women, are wasting their time and their abilities," said Fozia Salavel, the bakery's 35-year-old supervisor.

"If women sit at home, they would do nothing," Salavel said in an interview this week.

Around her, women prepared dough for baking while Salavel took coupons from customers who buy bread at subsidized prices and handed them the still-hot loaves.

The bakery, and 13 others like it, each serve about 2,500 loaves of the long, flat Afghan bread called "nan" daily, for a total of about 34,000. While bread on the market costs about 4 Afghanis each, or 8 cents, the price here is just 1 Afghani.

Supported by the United Nations World Food Program, the project has a mandate to run for another two years.

Women workers are paid 3,000 Afghanis, about $65 a month, enough to support a family day to day but not enough to save for the future. Yet, just as important, some say, is the sense of contributing to the reconstruction of their war-devastated homeland and gaining a greater sense of self-worth.

"The main purpose of the Women's Bakery Project is to empower women," said Asadullah Mutawakil, 28, the project's managing director.

One of the workers at Salavel's bakery, Sahra, a 38-year-old widow, knows of female relatives living abroad who work side by side with men. She wonders why it can't happen here.

"Women should come out and leave this culture which forces a woman to stay at home. In foreign countries women are studying and working. It should make no difference if women work here in Kandahar," said Sahra, who like many Afghan's uses just one name.

It isn't clearly how widely such views are embraced by Afghan women, much less by Afghan men, still strongly beholden to traditional values. Despite the scrapping of many draconian restrictions on women's freedoms under the former Taliban, conservative religious leaders retain considerable influence in the new interim government. Already in some part of Afghanistan, girls' schools have been attacked and the wearing of the burqa remains almost universal.

Sahra says she dreams of a time when gender barriers in the workplace are broken down altogether.

"My dream is that peace and stability takes place in our country and man and woman work together for Afghanistan. I have five kids, I hope my two daughters and three sons get education and can be successful," she said.

Copyright C 2003 Deseret News Publishing Co.
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.