Last month I profiled Afghanistan’s first female mayor Azra Jafari. The risks involved with being a female government official in a male dominated culture is real. This month we look at the challenges she faces and how she is overcoming them.
“Mr. Mayor’s” new digs.
When the new mayor first arrived at her office – a small, unheated room damaged by snow, there were no tables and chairs, just a few pillows and a couple of people there to help.
“Wherever it was necessary I picked up a shovel, kicked dirt, and gathered coal with my hands. Nili is not the sort of town where you can easily drive a car. I often had to walk from place to place through deep snow, getting my feet soaking wet.” The mayor said.
First order of business.
Nili is a small impoverished town of about 40,000 people at the center of Daykundi province.
Jafari had to earn the trust of her community by proving that she was serious about improving the lives of the people who called the town home.
Nili has no infrastructure so everything had to be built from scratch. “I had no budget” said Jafari. As a result, the mayor made regular trips to Kabul to implore ministry officials to release funds. A two day trip she takes with her daughter Indira.
A deadly journey.
The roads are normally perilous and deadly during winter, her commute often takes her through the insurgent-filled province of Maidan Wardak.
Violence is slowly encroaching on Nili. Daykundi has long been known as one of the least dangerous and most isolated provinces in Afghanistan. But the Taliban are making increasingly bold moves on Nili, advancing from a district called Gizab, on the border with Uruzgan and technically under that province’s jurisdiction.
For many years, it was the very lack of an insurgency that starved Daykundi of adequate attention from foreign donors. Now, Jafari says, that argument is running on borrowed time.
“Last year we were caught in a gunfight between Afghan forces and insurgents for three hours. We couldn’t move.” said Jafari.
In a phone interview with Guardian News UK edition, Jafari said that the small coach in which she had been travelling along with her daughter and 13 other passengers, had overturned and almost careered 1,600 ft towards a riverbed below.
“The windows were shattered. Thank God we were OK,” she said, adding that she had suffered a sprained neck and her daughter had cut her finger on some glass. “But she couldn’t stop shaking for half an hour afterwards.”
Being a woman.
Before Jafari, Nili had never seen a woman government official. She is passionate about how harshly women in office are judged.
“There are plenty of men here with no ambition to work, who are bad at their jobs and over whom a lot of money has been wasted. Because they are men, no one really questions them and asks ‘as a man, how successful have you managed to be?’ But as the only female mayor among 180 others, the first question I’m always asked, wherever I am, is ‘show us what you’ve done for your people.'”
The mayor fiercely rejects the suggestion that her promotion was an exercise in tokenism by a government under pressure from its western financiers to show it is bettering women’s rights.
“If our friends in the international community really made me mayor because I am a woman then they would have paid for the roads I built. Unfortunately they have contributed very little to the changes in Daykundi,” she said.
Making strides.
At the beginning of her term, a powerful mullah (Islamic leader) appeared in her unheated, makeshift office, wagging his finger at her, warning that Nili was not about to accept a female mayor who thought she could “exploit her femininity in order to complete a few projects and influence our women”.
“After three months, the same man came up to me and thanked me,” Jafari recalled, four years later. “He said, ‘If a man could do just half of what you’ve done here, our province will surely flourish.’ He now supports me and we work very well together – I have a great deal of respect for him.”
Jafari continues to work valiantly to combat poverty in Daykundi. Her efforts are fueled by the desire to make a difference in the disenfranchised community because she is a citizen and activist, not because she is a woman.
Source: Guardian News
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