Gathering Strength:. Peggy Kelsey
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our biggest challenge when, walking among northern hill tribes’ villages, Bill came down with typhoid fever. All the way uphill, I had seen the villages as cute and enchanting, almost a primeval Garden of Eden. Our first host said he was planning to move out of the mountains down to the road. As someone healthy and well-educated, I privately mourned the loss of his "pure and idyllic" life.
When Bill fell sick two days later, we hurriedly retraced our steps dragging ourselves back to civilization and a hospital. Now those same villages looked squalid, dirty, and poor, and I began to understand our former host’s fervent desire to be close to a road with access to medical care, schools, and other vital services.
Bill soon recovered and we eventually made it to Jordan and were married by my father-in-law. We spent our official honeymoon with my parents traveling in Jerusalem and the Galilee.
We worked in Bahrain and Yemen before returning to the US. Yemen in the late 1970s had the highest number of researchers and foreign aid workers per square foot of any nation in the world, due to its strategic location across from the Horn of Africa. One could encounter North and South Koreans, mainland and Taiwanese Chinese, and Soviets and Americans engaged in aid and development, espionage, or anthropological research.
I had studied Arabic while in Jordan and found work with Save the Children in Yemen. I felt close to local friends there but during one conversation was put in my place. I had said that the Soviet people I’d encountered were stone-faced and unfriendly, always keeping to themselves, "so different from us." My Yemeni friend corrected me, saying that Soviets and Americans were like peas in the same pod while Yemenis, being very traditional and Muslim, were from an entirely different garden.
Bill and I realized that to have meaningful careers overseas, we needed concrete skills besides language facility. We returned to the US.
My childhood dream had been to live on a "ranchette" near an interesting city. In 1980 Bill and I bought ten acres near Austin, Texas. We began building a small house, doing the work ourselves, and started a magazine distribution business. We weren’t ready to give up the simple life of our Yemen experience. As soon as the walls were up and the roof was on, we moved into the shell and tended our goats, pigeons, chickens, and a few years later, our daughters. By the 1990s the house was nearly finished. We’d saved enough money for Bill to pursue his dream of flying airplanes and for me to follow my long-buried interest, photography.
Ever since our trip around the world, we’d talked of giving our kids the experience of living in another culture. In 1997, Bill got a job as a bush pilot for Airserv, in Quelimane, Mozambique, a city with a quarter-million people but that felt like a small town. I closed my portrait-and-wedding photography business, packed up our 11- and 13-year-old daughters, and followed.
In Quelimane, I loved going around with my friend Keika, a Japanese photographer whose husband worked for the United Nations (UN). We had a routine for our bicycle jaunts out beyond the paved roads. When we’d spot something interesting, one of us would make a big show of slowly taking out her camera, leisurely focusing and refocusing, setting up everything just exactly right, while the children who inevitably appeared mugged in front of the camera. Meanwhile, the other one was quickly grabbing the shots she wanted.
I had homeschooled the girls for a year-and-a-half when they begged to go to a boarding school in South Africa like the children of other aid workers. Sending my daughters off to school gave me freedom to take my own excursions.
One trip took me down the Zambezi River to visit Mary Livingstone’s5 grave. I hired a boat in Caia and the captain, his assistant, and I motored three hours downstream to Chupanga, where the colonial cemetery lay. I eagerly jumped onto land to begin exploring but the captain and a man on the dock shouted at me. "Stop!"
"Landmines," they explained. I was suddenly reminded that Mozambique’s eleven-year war of independence from Portugal and the ensuing fifteen-year civil war had ended only seven years earlier. So I carefully followed the guide’s steps to Mary’s picturesquely overgrown grave. Just as I was pulling out my camera, another man came running down the hill to say that I first had to go with him to get official permission. We marched uphill, where the governor and I had tea and a nice chat. I returned to the gravesite with the required permission just in time to see workers clearing up after extensive pruning. To my chagrin, all of the charm had been clipped away.
In 2000, we moved our family back to Texas, this time inside Austin. I resumed my photography business while keeping my eyes open for something more meaningful.
That "something" happened the evening of Alan Pogue’s photography exhibit. Creating the Afghan Women’s Project was like having a baby. I had the conception. It took nine months to develop the vision, raise funds, make connections to meet women in Afghanistan, and attend to the many details. The project would have collapsed many times without Bill’s encouragement and support. My life coach also held my feet to the fire. Joia’s6 most important question came at a time when I was losing sight of my vision. "OK," she asked, "What if you don’t go?"
People think I must be brave to visit Afghanistan, a land of violence and war. Certain areas were very dangerous, and I avoided them. Others were quite safe. Years of world travel in developing countries have given me a good sense of how to dress and carry myself in traditional societies and what to do if things go wrong.
I was terrified, however, when I stood before a sympathetic group of American Sufis on a ranch outside Austin to ask for money for my project! At the time, I wasn’t sure I could pull it off. When I began my speech, my quivering voice and shaking legs pained the audience so much that someone spoke up to tell me that this was a very accepting group and I could relax! Getting through that speech and not running away shamefacedly afterwards required much more courage than I ever needed in Afghanistan.
To prepare for my trip, I contacted friends who might have connections or be interested in supporting my endeavor, as well as aid agencies working in the area. Offers of help and rejections took me on a dizzying roller coaster ride until I finally learned not to get attached to any particular possibility and just trust that my overall efforts would bear the needed fruit. Inspired by the courageous and dedicated Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) members I’d encountered on the internet, I contacted them for interviews, too.
As in pregnancy, the gestation finally came to an end, and in August, 2003, I set off for Kabul.
Airserv, the company Bill had worked for in Mozambique, put me up in their crew house in Kabul in exchange for photographs of their flight operation. They also flew me around the country on their scheduled flights when space was available. My situation was nearly ideal. I had the companionship of Westerners and access to an office with "safe" electricity; that is, without random spikes that could fry my computer. I also had access to a printer and could share photographs of the women I met with them.
Kabul was relatively safe at that time. People I met were grateful the US had driven out the Taliban, despite innocent Afghans having been killed in the process. I felt at ease, although remaining alert while walking alone and taking taxis.
Pictures I’d seen on American TV suggested that Kabul was a moonscape-like, ruined hellhole. It wasn’t. Yes, thousands of random civil war rockets had left piles of rubble and destroyed entire neighborhoods, but the TV and newspaper cameras hadn’t shown areas where life continued as usual. Some buildings were untouched, or only pocked with bullet holes. Even in damaged areas, buildings with their upper floors destroyed housed shops below that were open for business. Squatters had bricked in parts of broken building shells for shelter. People walked around the scars of war on sidewalks lined with vendors as they made their way to bustling markets. Life carried on.
My first few interviews went sufficiently well, but