History...and Hope

We are returning to India! For the first time since the pandemic began.
On the day we booked the flights, India came off the Red List for Covid. An encouraging sign.

The ‘we’ are two Second Sight trustees and Jenny Matthews, the photographer whose beautiful photographs you see on our website and who has documented our work almost from the start.

Jenny spent lockdown very productively, producing the most extraordinary quilts incorporating a lifetime of photography from areas of conflict. I do urge you to take a look at her website https://jennymatthews.photoshelter.com/index and to buy her book Women and War.

Jenny’s usual modus operandi is to visit a war zone after the Press Pack has gone and to spend quiet time with her subjects. The results speak for themselves. Her silent witnesses face the camera so convincingly as themselves – regardless of whether they are brutalized and oppressed women in war zones or exuberant female fighters and empowered grandmothers. If you have ever been amongst such women in any corner of the world, look at her photos and you too may recognize the ‘thing with feathers ‘ that perches in the soul, singing the tune without the words and never stopping at all. To quote Emily Dickinson’s famous poem on Hope.

It is difficult to retain hope for the people of Afghanistan this week, as history repeats itself in a depressing way. But we must. And I feel it incumbent on me to write about this because neither Jenny nor I would be doing what we are now doing, were it not for a seminal trip we made to Afghanistan back in 1988. During this trip, 33 years ago, we both reset our plans for the future. I decided to stop being a journalist and to retrain as a doctor; Jenny decided to make women the focus of her photographic work.

The Soviets were the occupying foreign power then. We were part of an all female film crew making a documentary about women. Our team included a British sound recordist who was last there as a child in the 1960s, travelling freely around the country in a Fiat 500 with her Mum and sister.
The Afghan women we met and interviewed in the late 1980s were as varied as women all over the world. But what they wanted most, they agreed on: better health for their families, food, education, Peace and for women to be an integral part in any process to attain this.
Afghanistan was then, as it is now, one of the poorest countries in the world.

The Soviets pulled out, the varying Mujahedeen groups (backed by other foreign powers) continued to fight each other, the Taliban took control until pushed out by the Americans with help from the British. The US Bush administration, with supreme insincerity claimed that its War on Terror was ‘also a fight for the rights and dignity of Afghan women.’ So often has this been reiterated by well-known US women from Laura Bush to Hilary Clinton, that many in the West now think of the Americans as the ‘liberators’ of Afghan women.
Twenty years later, they are pulling out. And the Taliban, with a history of the most hardline oppression of women, is back in power.

This is what Afghan MP Fawzia Koofi said a few days ago: ‘Peace and security will only come if women are part of the peace process.’ The same message she has been trying to convey and working to implement all her life. The same message we heard back in 1988.
It is a sane, consistent approach to getting lasting Peace. The world has consistently ignored it.
Women like Fawzia Koofi will continue to work for this. She has survived two assassination attempts and has sat at negotiating tables opposite those who tried to kill her. She says ‘there is no option.’
Sometimes she sounds angry, frustrated, but I have never heard her sound hopeless. Not even now.

Meanwhile, as we plan to return to India, I actually look forward to history repeating itself in a good way.
Back in March 2020 I was due to meet up with my friend and fellow ophthalmologist Dr Helen Rao. (Covid cancelled the trip.)
We had rail tickets booked to Bihar and were to join up at the station in Bihar’s second city, Muzaffarpur. Then we were to travel together to eye hospitals in northern Bihar.
The trip was to be a triumphant accomplishment – the Return of the Legendary Dr Helen to Bihar where she has spent most of her working life and is so well-loved.
Now, I wanted to resurrect this abandoned travel plan.

 ‘Where are you?’ I asked over the remarkably good telephone connection.

I could hear a rooster crowing loudly in the background and a more distant, low grunt, probably a water buffalo.

‘I am on the globe’ replied Dr Helen Rao, tantalizingly.

‘Meaning?’

‘In Guntur, Andhra.’

So Helen was still in south India, where she had returned before the first Indian lockdown to be closer to her family.

Her rather teasing answer to my question was on account of the fact that she had just come out of a rather challenging period with some family members succumbing to Covid and others suffering from exacerbations of chronic health problems. For a while life had seemed very precarious and she was unable to make plans.

‘Now we are all OK’ she said.

‘Shall we meet in Bihar?’ I asked.

‘ From October 15 I am free to travel anywhere’ she replied.

Now wasn’t that a stroke of luck. We had booked to arrive in India just about then.

Buoyed up by this news, I messaged young Babul, a twenty something ophthalmic assistant at Laxman Eye Hospital in Muzaffarpur. He once told me that he had ‘the best job in India.’
He had always wanted to meet Dr Helen. He messaged back with his own news.

 ‘We have new lady doctor at Laxman Eye Hospital. It will have impact on majority of our patients. This is the first time for LEH and for me personally to work with lady surgeon. Her behaviour is very good with patients and staff. Also in recent Tokyo Olympics our Indian women’s team performance was very good and they won medal for India. Indian people appreciating the efforts and hard work of these ladies and our new doctor is no less than those Indian women Olympic team.’

Wow. With support like that who could ever fail?

Lucy Mathen

 #jennymatthewsphotogrpaher #hope

#historyrepeatingitself #fawziakoofi #womeninafghanistan