USU honors Afghan women for strength and example
Students tried on burqas worn by women in Afghanistan after a showing of a
documentary of Afghan women’s lives in the Sunburst Lounge Wednesday.
The event was one of several in honor of National Women’s History Month, held every March. Colleen Hayes, who lived in Afghanistan for four years in the
1960s, provided the Afghan clothing, as well as other artifacts such as a
prayer rug, for students to examine as part of the presentation.
“I think they’re so mistreated,” said Dale Hayes, Colleen’s husband, of the
Afghan women. “The president is pro-American, so there’s a possibility [of
life improving], unless they’re overwhelmed again. We’re hanging on to see
what happens.”
The documentary was made by journalists Cliff Orloff and Olga Shalygin, a
husband-and-wife team that has made several documentaries about life in
Afghanistan. The film followed the lives of a family in post-Taliban
Afghanistan.
Colleen Hayes said when she and her husband lived in Afghanistan, life was better for the women who lived in urban areas than those who lived in the countryside.
“In Kabul, they began wearing more modern clothes,” she said. “First they wore trenchcoats and head scarves. Eventually, many took off the coats and even the scarves.”
Coleen Hayes said even she had to adhere to a dress code when she lived among the Afghans, wearing a head scarf that covered her hair and a smock-like shirt that went down to her knees.
“The Taliban and some mullahs (religious leaders) have taught that women are supposed to be in burqas,” she said. “Women don’t want their faces covered.”
The Hayes went to Afghanistan in the ’60s as part of an international effort
to build a university. Colleen Hayes said the university they worked for, the University of Wyoming, sent agricultural and engineering professors to teach at Kabul University. Other schools and countries sent staff, as well, including Columbia University, which sent English professors; France, which sent medical professors, and Germany, which sent science professors, Colleen said.
She said she worked in the first open-stack library in “that part of the world.
“They were absolutely ecstatic,” she said. “They had never been allowed to take a book home.”
However, the Hayes said being affiliated with Americans became very
dangerous.
“We graduated about 250 boys a year in about 10 or 11 years,” Dale said. “After the war started, all the graduates were rounded up and killed.”
Colleen said even those who had been servants of Americans were targeted.
In 1990, she said she and her husband went back to Afghanistan to help those who had been displaced in the war return to their country, but learned that those who tried to move back were killed by their countrymen.
“I hope the teachings of the Taliban will be removed from that country,” she said. “I would hope they get back to at least the state they were in in the ’60s, when women went to the university and girls were educated.”
-ella@cc.usu.edu