Spoken from the Heart (54 page)

My first stop was the Women's Teacher Training Institute, which I had helped found in 2002. The program, overseen by the U.S. Agency for International Development, is designed to train teachers from the rural provinces. After completing the program, they return to their provinces to train other teachers. The idea was to create a cascading effect, so that as many teachers as possible could be trained as quickly as possible and more small villages could open their own schools. That spring the institute's first class would be graduating. The institute trained both men and women, but they were kept segregated, taught in separate classrooms.

When I entered the women's classroom, the women were sitting on the floor on cushions, their backs propped against the wall and their papers spread across their laps. The institute had few chairs or desks. Many of the women were completely covered in blue burkas, and I was immediately struck by the sheer weight of the material. These were small women, drowning in cloth, each forming a kind of triangle on the floor, as if they were pinned to the ground. And they seemed afraid even to lift their mesh-covered eyes and peer up at me. Perhaps they were wary of looking at me in my Western pantsuit, with my uncovered face and hair. But these women were brave enough to leave their homes and come to Kabul, to live in a dorm, go to school, study, and be trained. Two Kabul University students showed me the dorm rooms where the female teachers slept on bunk beds. Without these rooms, without this program, these women would have no chance for any kind of education, no chance at all to come to Kabul.

In the men's classroom, there were only cushions around the wall, not even a rug. The men had short beards, and most wore shirts that hung below their knees. Two had donned Western-style blazers over top. A lone man in the corner stood and struggled to say his name in English and to welcome me to Afghanistan.

I gave a speech in the university's cafeteria and announced the establishment of two new schools, the American University of Afghanistan and the International School of Kabul, a high school. "These are more than just development projects," I said, "they also signify the bond between the American and Afghan people. They are symbols of our shared hopes and dreams for the future. That dream is of a prosperous, peaceful, and above all, a free Afghanistan, where both men and women stand upright in equality. "

A nearby room had been set up like a grand Afghan bazaar, with piles of hand-woven rugs and rows of dresses on display. There were twenty booths, each showcasing goods made by women entrepreneurs, rug makers, weavers, embroiderers, and clothing makers, all microenterprise projects. The driving force behind many of these programs was a woman named Mina Sherzoy, who had escaped to California in 1979 after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. She had returned in 2002 following the fall of the Taliban to help her fellow countrywomen. But there were also women with no prior connection to Afghanistan. Connie Duckworth, the first female sales and trading partner at Goldman Sachs, had helped to found the Arzu rug company. "Arzu" means hope in the Dari language of Afghanistan. As an enterprise, Arzu works to preserve the traditional Afghan craft of rug weaving and pays women bonuses for high-quality workmanship. In return, Arzu weavers must agree to send their sons and daughters to school, to take literacy classes themselves, and to receive pre- and postnatal medical care for themselves and their babies. After I had returned home, I ordered two Arzu rugs for the White House collection to place in the hallways of the residence. I purchased a third rug for the small library at our ranch, so that we might always have something created by these Afghan women.

On the grounds of Kabul University, I helped plant a tree in a new grove on what had been barren land. That cluster of trees is still green and growing.

Behind the scenes, Anita had been in negotiations with the Secret Service to see if I could leave the grounds of the university and go into Kabul itself. The agent in charge, Joe Clancy, finally said yes, but the outing could not last more than twenty minutes. We had to be onboard our airplane and in the sky by nightfall. We drove into the city in a convoy, along one of Kabul's major streets, and stopped in front of three little stores, clustered together, sharing walls. One was a bakery, with a picture of a white frosted cake and a smattering of English words on its wooden sign. Through the window I could see shelves of fluffy breads and pastries. The sidewalk in front of the shops was concrete, but just beyond, the concrete gave way to packed dust. Trash, empty bottles, and papers, carried by the wind, came to rest where the fresh concrete lip rose. Three children in a nearby house peeked out from their windows, and Therese Burch, one of my advance staff, walked over and invited them to come outside. The older boy knew a few words of English, but his younger brother and sister looked at me in silence. They wore only thin jackets, and in the chill of March, the younger children had no shoes for their feet.

I said hello and offered them one of the small gifts that we had brought, a kaleidoscope. I held it up to my eye and turned the tube to show them how it worked. Their faces broke into smiles. Inside the bakery I looked at the display, and the employees insisted upon pressing a bag filled with sweet Afghan cookies into my hands. I paid for the bag and thanked them. The pastries looked delicious, but of course, the Secret Service agents wouldn't let us eat them.

In those few minutes, I had exhausted my unscheduled off-site visit time. We piled back into the convoy and returned to the helicopters that ferried us to the Presidential Palace, where Hamid Karzai was waiting.

The palace is old and, after years of neglect, was in terrible shape. Crumbling blocks had been repainted and fresh plaster patches hid aging bullet holes in the walls. It was a stark place, several years away from even a modest garden or grounds. The inside was furnished in heavy, carved wooden pieces and old, slightly worn tapestries. Only the official meeting area, where we sat on gold-trimmed claw-foot chairs, beneath a crystal chandelier, had any look of opulence. As we talked, President Karzai's staff served us bright glasses of pomegranate juice. The Secret Service blanched as I raised my glass. Lindsey, my assistant, rushed over to whisper that they didn't want me to drink it, so I left the beautiful glass of deep red liquid untouched; I was dying to drink that pomegranate juice.

After our meeting President Karzai walked me out of his offices and across a long, enclosed courtyard to a smaller, modern, rectangular building, made of concrete and blocks of stone. The woman who appeared in the doorway was his wife, who is so private that she is rarely seen in public. Zeenat Karzai wore a long, gray coat, and her head was tightly swathed in a full white scarf. Unlike some Muslim women, who push their scarves back above their hairlines to reveal a tantalizing bit of their dark tresses, she concealed every strand of hair. In a nod to Western ways, she clutched a gray purse in her hand as we were introduced.

Sitting beneath a painting of her husband in her living room, Dr. Karzai offered me tea. She is a trained obstetrician-gynecologist in a nation with the world's second highest mortality rate for women in childbirth. In 2005 an Afghan mother would die every half hour trying to bring a child into the world. Dr. Karzai told me of the desperate need for a maternity hospital in Kabul. The French hospital that Bernadette Chirac had discussed at the previous year's G8 Summit had yet to materialize, and Dr. Karzai pleaded for help, hoping that the United States could do more. Clasping her purse in her hand, she walked me to the door and took a few brief steps into the sunshine before retreating inside. I turned around to wave as we hurried to the helos for the thirty-minute flight back to Bagram.

At the base, in a bare prefab room with Afghan throw rugs to warm the cold floor, I listened to a briefing by Lieutenant General David Barno and Major General Jason Kamiya on provisional reconstruction and military projects. As they pointed at provincial maps, my eyes were drawn to the vast, mountainous border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, the reputed hiding place for Osama bin Laden and the refuge for the Taliban. Even on paper, it looked formidable. By 4:55 that afternoon, I was standing in the chow line to eat dinner with the troops in the Dragon Chow Dining Hall. We ate chicken tenders, ketchup, and broccoli under a large American flag. Sitting on one side of me was a female soldier, wearing camouflage fatigues, her sandy hair pulled back into a ponytail. These were the two worlds, burka-clad women and women in combat fatigues, now inhabiting the same dusty Afghan ground.

At 5:45 p.m., we were on board the plane, chasing the setting sun. Touchdown was at 1:45 a.m. at Andrews Air Force Base.

I had told the Afghan students that it was "an extraordinary privilege" to be with them that day. It was. It was a privilege to see Kabul and to be able to thank our troops in Bagram. But it was powerful to see with my own eyes the complete devastation in Afghanistan. As years of Soviet war and then Taliban rule had shown, it is easy and quick to destroy, and slow and hard to rebuild. I can understand the impatience of many with the halting progress made by new democracies around the world. From our vantage point, our own democracy and government may appear to have come easily. But they did not. Thirteen years after America declared its independence, we had to completely revamp our government. And though in 1789 we started with a near perfect document, the Constitution, it took decades, even centuries, for us to build a more perfect country. It took over seventy-five more years to achieve the abolition of slavery. It was fifty-five years after the surrender at Appomattox before women earned the right to vote and another forty-five years beyond that before real civil rights came to our own nation. Only in hindsight do we feel the onward rush of progress and think of it as inevitable and unstoppable. In the moment, it looks like something else indeed.

Two days after I returned from Kabul, Pope John Paul II died in Vatican City. George and I, accompanied by Gampy, Bill Clinton, and Condi Rice, flew to Rome for the largest gathering of heads of state in history. In total, seventy presidents and prime ministers, four kings, and five queens gathered to mourn his passing. Four million other mourners packed the streets around the basilica, and millions had walked past his body as it lay in state. We too went to pay our respects, kneeling at the communion rail. Before us lay the once vibrant man who had helped rally millions in Eastern Europe to the cause of freedom and the end of communist oppression, and who had worked so tirelessly on behalf of the poor and the downtrodden. No effort had been made to cover his skin, which had grown mottled with age and illness. But his was a life of devotion, a life of blessings, a life well-lived.

Throughout the funeral service, the skies threatened rain. Then, at the precise moment when John Paul's plain pine casket with a simple inlaid cross was lifted high to be seen one final time by the mourners before it was carried into the Basilica of St. Peter's, a ray of sun broke through the clouds and shone bright upon the casket.

I thought of John Paul again the very next month as my motorcade raced along the flat desert highway leading from Jordan's main airport to the capital city of Amman, where stacked dwellings rose up the mountainsides and the colors were muted desert browns and beige. I had arrived in the region where the world's three major faiths converge, moving from Jordan to Israel to Egypt.

In Amman I ate dinner at the private residence of King Abdullah and Queen Rania, whom we had hosted a number of times in the United States, including for a weekend at Camp David. We ate at a long, rectangular wooden table, and during dinner Queen Rania excused herself to tend to her fourth child, a four-month-old baby, whose mews and cries drifted downstairs.

I was in Jordan to speak at the World Economic Forum, which was meeting at the edge of the Dead Sea. I would be addressing a large group of delegates before heading off to a smaller roundtable. As UNESCO's honorary ambassador for its Decade of Literacy, I spoke about education and literacy, and while I did, a desert fly buzzed around my face, attracted to the bright spotlight of the speaker's podium. My speech proved to be a different kind of irritant to some of the attendees. The message about education and opportunity for all citizens, including women, coming from the wife of a conservative American president, was too much for some of the men. "In my country," I said, "women didn't secure the right to vote until more than a century after our nation's founding. But now we know that a nation can only achieve its best future and its brightest potential when all of its citizens, men and women, participate in the government and in decision making." I continued, "I'm reminded of what V'clav Havel, the former president of the Czech Republic, once told me, 'Laura, you know, democracy is hard because it requires the participation of all the people.'"

Below me, in the audience, there was a rustling, then a murmur, and then a delegation of white-robed men in red-checked head coverings walked out. They were from Saudi Arabia, where women cannot vote and cannot drive. They are not permitted to travel freely, and many have no chance for anything beyond the most rudimentary education, if that. I spoke of how, across the broader Middle East and North Africa, more than 75 million women and 45 million men are illiterate. Then I spoke about freedom. "As freedom becomes a fact of life for rising generations in the Middle East, young people need to grow up with a full understanding of freedom's rights and responsibilities: the right to discuss any issue in the public sphere, and the responsibility to respect other people and their opinions." I added, "Freedom, especially freedom for women, is more than the absence of oppression. It's the right to speak and vote and worship freely. Human rights require the rights of women. And human rights are empty promises without human liberty."

No one in the press reported the walkout--probably better for the delicate balancing acts of global diplomacy--but it was a clear reminder of how long the journey is for women to become men's equals in the wider world.