Ready for her close-up

A doctor, educator, human rights activist and mother, Habiba Sarabi longs for a chance to work -- legally -- back home in Afghanistan.

Editor's note: In covering the first Afghan Women's Summit in Brussels, writer Janelle Brown met dozens of women with sharply different backgrounds and compelling stories to tell. This is the second of three profiles of Afghan women determined to be involved in the rebuilding, and the new political life, of their country. Read the first profile.

By Janelle Brown

Dec. 12, 2001 | BRUSSELS -- Habiba Sarabi has a cold. She sits wearily on a leather couch in the lobby of the Crowne Plaza hotel here, coughing and clearing her throat every few minutes. Just a week ago, she was illegally crossing the mountains of Afghanistan on foot. After a quick stop in Pakistan, she arrived in this posh hotel, a participant of the first Afghan Women's Summit, worlds away from her daily life.

Sarabi had been returning from Kabul when she traversed the mountains. She had traveled home to check up on the literacy programs that she oversees there. Her husband had wanted her to ride a donkey during their trek through the mountains, she says, but she initially refused as a point of pride, wanting to show solidarity with her Afghan sisters. "I told him, 'I am an Afghan woman; I have to walk because of all the other women who have climbed through these mountains,'" she explains, proudly. It was a cold and difficult journey, and her cough is a legacy of the trip.

The journey between Kabul and Peshawar has defined Sarabi's life for almost five years now. A hematologist, pharmarcist and professor, she fled Kabul in 1996 with her three children, reluctantly leaving her husband behind. Since then, the couple has regularly traveled between the two countries to maintain some semblance of family life. Also, as one of the women behind HAWCA -- Humanitarian Assistance for the Women and Children of Afghanistan -- Sarabi's job is to slip across the borders to coordinate more than 80 literacy courses taking place all across Afghanistan.

Sarabi describes herself as an "educated and intellectual woman," and she definitely looks the part: Bespectacled, in a conservative suit with her graying hair pulled back from her face, she looks as if she just stepped out of a classroom. She is soft-spoken, articulate and convincing; her intelligence is matched only by the ferocity of her commitment and affection for the people of Afghanistan.

Certainly, she has lived a more priviledged life than many of her Afghan compatriates. Born in 1956 in the liberal and modern city of Mazar-e-Sharif, Sarabi spent her youth traveling around Afghanistan with her father, an agricultural systems expert. She went to high school and university in Kabul, where she studied medicine. After graduation, she was awarded a fellowship with the World Health Organization, and traveled to India to study hematology.

Until the Taliban marched into Kabul in September 1996, Sarabi and her husband -- also a doctor -- lived a comfortable urban life. During the Northern Alliance occupation of Kabul, life had become increasingly troubled and dangerous -- she and her friends were occasionally threatened because they wore "smart and elegant" clothing -- but Sarabi was still able to practice at a local hospital and teach at the Intermediate Medical Institute. Her children were on their way to a good education. But when the Taliban marched in, that all came to an end -- her daughter, then 12, was immediatelly forbidden to go to school. Within two months, Sarabi was packing her bags for Pakistan.

"It was very tough for me to see my children without education; that's why I came to Peshawar," she explains. Her husband remained behind in Kabul to keep an eye on the family's house and belongings. He took care of his aging father there while Sarabi organized her children's education in Pakistan. It was a difficult arrangement, she says, but typical for many refugees. "It's very hard for me and my children. But a lot of Afghans live like that, in the same situation," she says. "I would go to Kabul for my job, and sometimes my husband would come to Peshawar to visit me and my children."

Sarabi had enrolled the children in the best local school she could afford and secured a job as the health manager of the Afghan Institute of Learning, an NGO with a presence in the numerous refugee camps in Peshawar. She ran women's rights workshops in the camps, reaching out to impoverished women raised in a culture in which they had no value.

"You can divide the Afghan women into two categories: the educated woman who lives in the urban areas, and gives herself the right to express herself; and rural women," she explains. "The majority of Afghan women are rural. Women in rural areas are not considered even capable of opinion: Not only is she deprived of the basic right of expressing her feelings, but she can't marry the person she wants, and is forced to marry at an early age.

"Basically," concludes Sarabi, "they are being treated like animals; they are referred to in a derogatory way as if they have no rights."

Next page: She was crushed to find that 10 of the classes had disbanded; the teachers had fled the city