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Afghan Woman Fighting for Homeland Wins Salem Award
- The Salem News (April 5, 2005)
- By Tom Dalton, Staff Writer
SALEM – There was a moment yesterday when Fahima Vorgetts, the recipient of the 13th annual Salem Award for Human Rights and Social Justice, was so overcome by emotions she had to stop talking.
The native of Afghanistan, who has dedicated her life to improving conditions in her impoverished and war-torn homeland, had just made an acceptance speech for a prestigious award that, in past years, has gone to Chinese dissident and political prisoner Harry Wu and to Morris Dees, founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Vorgetts was starting to show a video she had taken on one of her many trips to Afghanistan since Sept. 11, 2001. It showed a 12-year-old girl in a hospital bed, almost totally covered by white tape and gauze, lying not far from her mother, who also was wrapped in bandages.
"Her mother burned herself and her daughter together," said Vorgetts, as the audience in the Hawthorne Hotel ballroom let out a collective gasp.
She said hundreds of women in Afghanistan have attempted suicide by self-immolation, often using gasoline or cooking oil, to escape abusive families and husbands, forced marriages or the sheer hopelessness of their lives.
"She said she had suffered so much she did not want her daughter to suffer anymore," said Vorgetts, who runs the Afghan Women's Fund for the nonprofit organization Women for Afghan Women, which is based in Annapolis, MD.
The film then shifted to a prison where women are locked up with their children. Some women are put in jail for years, she said, for talking to men on the street. As the camera showed the face of a small child who had been born in jail, Vorgetts started to say something but could not. She tried to get her composure but clearly was overcome by the memory of the child.
"Pictures can tell you everything," she finally said.
The film continued on a television monitor at the front of the hall, showing more mothers and children in prison. Vorgetts started to speak and once again stopped.
"I'm sorry," she said.
Vorgetts, 50, was born in Afghanistan, where she was the director of a women's literacy program. She fled during the Soviet invasion in 1979. She came to the United States, married an American and lives in Maryland.
Still a practicing Muslim and active in several causes involving her homeland, she visits Afghanistan several times a year, bringing food, computers, sewing machines, clothing and other supplies. She speaks widely in this country and has addressed the United Nations.
When she started her brief acceptance speech last night, she thanked the audience for listening to "the cry of the women of Afghanistan."
Vorgetts painted a picture of women and children living through 25 years of terror, including invasions by the Soviet Union and the United States, and surviving governments, or loose structures resembling governments, run by religious zealots, warlords and drug dealers.
While acknowledging that the election last year of Hamid Karzai as president was progress, she said it also created the illusion that life is improving. In the rural areas where she spends most of her time, she said war lords and drug dealers are still in charge and life is no better.
"We got rid of the Taliban terrorists, but we put another set of terrorists in power," she said.
Amid the gloom, Vorgetts also offered hope. Her nonprofit organization, run by volunteers, has opened schools, funded literacy classes and vocational training, provided clothing, dug wells, donated goats and cows and worked on dozens of other initiatives in small villages, she said.
"It's very little," she said.
But when her audience saw a film clip of once-barren ground covered by bright flowers and vegetables and a bathroom and kitchen area built at a women's prison, they broke into applause.
"I got the award," Vorgetts said, "but the people deserve the award more. I live in a comfortable house…but these people really deserve this. They live under a very inhuman situation and they still have hope, they still keep going and they still want their children to have a future."
Reprinted with permission from The Salem News.