Tuesday, July 28, 2015

The Afghan Girl

Update November 2021
https://www.cnn.com/style/article/afghan-girl-national-geographic-italy-scli-intl/index.html

This Quilting Mama Post from July 2015...........
Her name is Sharbat Gula, but for the tech savvy print media consumed First World, she was simply known as "The Afghan Girl". Her image as seen here was taken in 1985 by National Geographic photographer Steve McCurry in a refugee camp in Pakistan when she was about 13 years old. For the next 17 years all the world had was her image to represent the plight of children in war zones the world over.

Thousands of miles away and living a life of privilege and peace, I saw that original National Geographic cover and remember being consumed with The Afghan Girl. My inner dialogue was full of  preteen questions (for I was 12 at the time). "Did she have parents? Sibings? What does it mean to be in a refugee camp? Where is Pakistan? Wow, she is my age, I wonder if she has any friends there." My thoughts about her and her life came and went for many years ahead as we learned of the struggles in the Middle East.


Finally, in April of 2002, the Afghan Girl was found.  17 years later, she still lived in the war-torn countryside of Afghanistan with her husband and three daughters. She spoke little, but said much in the interview. Below is the full text from Steve McCurry's piece about his search for her.


I remember as a newlywed in 2002 and 29 years old, that I dreamed of having my own children, but couldn't ever imagine having three! Her oldest was 13 already! Then I was stopped and saddened by the idea that Sharbat Gula herself cannot read and that all she wants is education for her daughters. Some harsh realities of life come in waves. The idea of children NOT being educated at least to the level of basic literacy was new to me...or at least it truly sunk in with this moment, just as the idea of children living in a war zone was a revelation to me back in 1985 when I saw Sharbat for the first time. I felt deeply for this woman I did not know.




Finally in the Spring of 2015 at a the Northern Star Quilters' Guild Show in Somers, New York, Sharbat Gula returned and completely stunned me. I hadn't thought about her and her life in years, but here she was. All the feelings of connection and "relationship" (if you will) came flooding back. Quilt artist Marla Silbernagel of Warwick, NY created this piece during a workshop with Leni Weiner. The goal being to study color relationships as she recreated the original photograph.


I still don't really know what all this means, but I can say that Sharbat Gula's images from 1985, 2002 and 2015 have made me revisit many questions I still carry about the nature of war, the effects of war on the lives of children in war zones and beyond, our response to others even those who live on the other side of the planet, and how we can live daily keeping all of this in mind. 

How many others has Sharbat's life impacted?  We will never know, but I most certainly am thankful for my connection with her.

***


http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2002/04/afghan-girl/index-text

A Life Revealed

Her eyes have captivated the world since she appeared on our cover in 1985. Now we can tell her story.

By Cathy Newman
Photograph by Steve McCurry
She remembers the moment. The photographer took her picture. She remembers her anger. The man was a stranger. She had never been photographed before. Until they met again 17 years later, she had not been photographed since.
The photographer remembers the moment too. The light was soft. The refugee camp in Pakistan was a sea of tents. Inside the school tent he noticed her first. Sensing her shyness, he approached her last. She told him he could take her picture. “I didn’t think the photograph of the girl would be different from anything else I shot that day,” he recalls of that morning in 1984 spent documenting the ordeal of Afghanistan’s refugees.
The portrait by Steve McCurry turned out to be one of those images that sears the heart, and in June 1985 it ran on the cover of this magazine. Her eyes are sea green. They are haunted and haunting, and in them you can read the tragedy of a land drained by war. She became known around National Geographic as the “Afghan girl,” and for 17 years no one knew her name.
In January a team from National Geographic Television & Film’s EXPLORER brought McCurry to Pakistan to search for the girl with green eyes. They showed her picture around Nasir Bagh, the still standing refugee camp near Peshawar where the photograph had been made. A teacher from the school claimed to know her name. A young woman named Alam Bibi was located in a village nearby, but McCurry decided it wasn’t her.
No, said a man who got wind of the search. He knew the girl in the picture. They had lived at the camp together as children. She had returned to Afghanistan years ago, he said, and now lived in the mountains near Tora Bora. He would go get her.
It took three days for her to arrive. Her village is a six-hour drive and three-hour hike across a border that swallows lives. When McCurry saw her walk into the room, he thought to himself: This is her.
Names have power, so let us speak of hers. Her name is Sharbat Gula, and she is Pashtun, that most warlike of Afghan tribes. It is said of the Pashtun that they are only at peace when they are at war, and her eyes—then and now—burn with ferocity. She is 28, perhaps 29, or even 30. No one, not even she, knows for sure. Stories shift like sand in a place where no records exist.
Time and hardship have erased her youth. Her skin looks like leather. The geometry of her jaw has softened. The eyes still glare; that has not softened. “She’s had a hard life,” said McCurry. “So many here share her story.” Consider the numbers. Twenty-three years of war, 1.5 million killed, 3.5 million refugees: This is the story of Afghanistan in the past quarter century.
Now, consider this photograph of a young girl with sea green eyes. Her eyes challenge ours. Most of all, they disturb. We cannot turn away.
“There is not one family that has not eaten the bitterness of war,” a young Afghan merchant said in the 1985 National Geographic story that appeared with Sharbat’s photograph on the cover. She was a child when her country was caught in the jaws of the Soviet invasion. A carpet of destruction smothered countless villages like hers. She was perhaps six when Soviet bombing killed her parents. By day the sky bled terror. At night the dead were buried. And always, the sound of planes, stabbing her with dread.
“We left Afghanistan because of the fighting,” said her brother, Kashar Khan, filling in the narrative of her life. He is a straight line of a man with a raptor face and piercing eyes. “The Russians were everywhere. They were killing people. We had no choice.”
Shepherded by their grandmother, he and his four sisters walked to Pakistan. For a week they moved through mountains covered in snow, begging for blankets to keep warm.
“You never knew when the planes would come,” he recalled. “We hid in caves.”
The journey that began with the loss of their parents and a trek across mountains by foot ended in a refugee camp tent living with strangers.
“Rural people like Sharbat find it difficult to live in the cramped surroundings of a refugee camp,” explained Rahimullah Yusufzai, a respected Pakistani journalist who acted as interpreter for McCurry and the television crew. “There is no privacy. You live at the mercy of other people.” More than that, you live at the mercy of the politics of other countries. “The Russian invasion destroyed our lives,” her brother said.
It is the ongoing tragedy of Afghanistan. Invasion. Resistance. Invasion. Will it ever end? “Each change of government brings hope,” said Yusufzai. “Each time, the Afghan people have found themselves betrayed by their leaders and by outsiders professing to be their friends and saviors.”
In the mid-1990s, during a lull in the fighting, Sharbat Gula went home to her village in the foothills of mountains veiled by snow. To live in this earthen-colored village at the end of a thread of path means to scratch out an existence, nothing more. There are terraces planted with corn, wheat, and rice, some walnut trees, a stream that spills down the mountain (except in times of drought), but no school, clinic, roads, or running water.
Here is the bare outline of her day. She rises before sunrise and prays. She fetches water from the stream. She cooks, cleans, does laundry. She cares for her children; they are the center of her life. Robina is 13. Zahida is three. Alia, the baby, is one. A fourth daughter died in infancy. Sharbat has never known a happy day, her brother says, except perhaps the day of her marriage.
Her husband, Rahmat Gul, is slight in build, with a smile like the gleam of a lantern at dusk. She remembers being married at 13. No, he says, she was 16. The match was arranged.
He lives in Peshawar (there are few jobs in Afghanistan) and works in a bakery. He bears the burden of medical bills; the dollar a day he earns vanishes like smoke. Her asthma, which cannot tolerate the heat and pollution of Peshawar in summer, limits her time in the city and with her husband to the winter. The rest of the year she lives in the mountains.
At the age of 13, Yusufzai, the journalist, explained, she would have gone into purdah, the secluded existence followed by many Islamic women once they reach puberty.
“Women vanish from the public eye,” he said. In the street she wears a plum-colored burka, which walls her off from the world and from the eyes of any man other than her husband. “It is a beautiful thing to wear, not a curse,” she says.
Faced by questions, she retreats into the black shawl wrapped around her face, as if by doing so she might will herself to evaporate. The eyes flash anger. It is not her custom to subject herself to the questions of strangers.
Had she ever felt safe?
”No. But life under the Taliban was better. At least there was peace and order.”
Had she ever seen the photograph of herself as a girl?
“No.”
She can write her name, but cannot read. She harbors the hope of education for her children. “I want my daughters to have skills,” she said. “I wanted to finish school but could not. I was sorry when I had to leave.”
Education, it is said, is the light in the eye. There is no such light for her. It is possibly too late for her 13-year-old daughter as well, Sharbat Gula said. The two younger daughters still have a chance.
The reunion between the woman with green eyes and the photographer was quiet. On the subject of married women, cultural tradition is strict. She must not look—and certainly must not smile—at a man who is not her husband. She did not smile at McCurry. Her expression, he said, was flat. She cannot understand how her picture has touched so many. She does not know the power of those eyes.
Such knife-thin odds. That she would be alive. That she could be found. That she could endure such loss. Surely, in the face of such bitterness the spirit could atrophy. How, she was asked, had she survived?
The answer came wrapped in unshakable certitude.
“It was,” said Sharbat Gula, “the will of God.”

Thursday, July 2, 2015

Rainbow Quilts of the Vermont Quilt Festival 2015


"Circle of Life" earned Lisa McCarthy of East Kingston, NH an Exceptional Merit Purple Ribbon (that means the quilt earned 98, 99 or 100 points on the scale of 1 to 100). Lisa writes in her description, "I love the use of bright bold colors. When I saw this pattern by Jacqueline de Jonge, I added it to my 'must-do' list. I had fun playing with the color layout and it went together like a dream. Many thanks to  long-arm maching quilter Carrie Zizza, whose vision and artistic flare are amazing."



On the right is "Prism" by Linda Pearl of Nashua, NH. (I'm sorry that I did not get a better photo.) Here is Linda's description, "It is an interpretation of Flying Geese, with a modern layout and quilting scheme. This came from my desire to play with a bright palette. It is the second in a series I am currently working on. Quilted on a home machine."


Karen Viega's "Really? What was I thinking?" earned her a First Place Blue Ribbon.
From East Bridgewater, MA, Karen writes, "My quilt guild challenge for spring was Fall in Love with Color. We each chose a photo whose colors we wanted to work with, and then interpreted those colors into the design. I came up with this foundation pieced rainbow log cabin variation. 3700 pieced later, I thought to myself, "Really? What was I thinking?" Quilted on a home machine.


"Whoosh!" Deborah Rouse's Third Place Ribbon winning quilt caught my eye for not only the bargello factor, but also for the awesome antique buttons. She writes, "A fun bargello quilt using my stash of fabrics and new and vintage buttons! Inspired by a quilt designed by Nancy Altsman of Black Cat Creations. A class by Karen Dever at the Village Quilter in Mt. Holly, New Jersey. Quilted on a home machine."

Below is Margot Cohen of Cedarhurst, NY's "Field of Flowers." This Third Place Yellow Ribbon quilt is described by the maker in this way, "I fell in love with hexagons thirty years ago when I took my first quilting class. Since then I have made many hex quilts. My late husband told me I could have any quilt I wanted as long as "I made it." I saw a picture of this quilt and just had to have it, so I made it. It is hand quilted."



Below from the Instructor's Showcase comes Karen Eckmeier's "Random Rose Garden." She describes it like this, "Based on the words "finding center"-- this quilt was inspired by a hand drumming workshop. Each block was supposed to be an individual drum beat, but it turned into a garden instead!"


Instructor Kimberly Einmo's "Fire and Ice." She writes, "Fire and Ice is a variation of my original design called Lone Starburst. I wanted to create a vibrant, modern interpretation of the more traditional Lone Starburst pattern; giving it a fresh update with streamlined, simple techniques. There are no set-in seams used in the construction of this quilt! This quilt has won several national awards including Best Modern Quilt at AQS Quilt Week 2014 in Chattanooga, TN. Judi Madsen of Green Fairy Quilts did the exquisite machine quilting."


Finally, contestant Lee Sproull of Leeds, MA entered this "Cubic Kaleidoscope" and earned a Third Place Yellow Ribbon.  Lee writes, "Bright colors swirl around lively red centers. Quilted on a home machine."


Dedication:  In the middle of this year's Vermont Quilt Festival, as I was trying hard to absorb all the colors, all the people, all the techniques and all the gorgeous art in this amazing show, I learned that my sister and her girlfriend of many years will be married next June. I was then overwhelmed with joy to know that they too will have all the love, security, and legal benefits which come with marriage. Therefore, I dedicate this post to my sister Liz and to Jeanne in the name of LOVE, of support, and of all that is truly rainbow bright and beautiful!