Grushenka
Literotica Guru
- Joined
- Oct 7, 2006
- Posts
- 516
I like the idea, the crazy woman, the hope, and the humor.
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Kabul’s Silent Revolution Begins at the Beauty Salon By WILLIAM GRIMES, NY Times, April 13, 2007
When Deborah Rodriguez arrived in Kabul in 2002 as part of a charitable aid mission, what she saw appalled her. Years of bloody conflict and oppressive rule by the Taliban, driven out in 2001, had stripped Afghanistan of its beauty infrastructure. It was a land of bad haircuts, poorly applied makeup and no styling gel. To Ms. Rodriguez, a Michigan hairdresser with a can-do attitude, task No. 1 was obvious: get these poor people some beauty salons.
“Kabul Beauty School” is the rollicking story of one of the strangest foreign-aid projects ever conceived, the creation of an academy to train Afghan beauticians. A surprisingly successful venture, it gives Afghan women practical training convertible into cold cash and personal power, a radical idea in a country where women have the approximate status of dirt. “I knew from my own experience as a hairdresser back home that a salon is a good business for a woman— especially if she has a bad husband,” Ms. Rodriguez writes.
There are plenty of those in the country that Ms. Rodriguez sometimes calls “Manistan.” The eager students who flock to her school, cobbled together with donations from American beauty companies and a German charity, recite a ghastly litany of domestic woes: forced marriages to ugly older men, constant beatings, oppressive confinement, rape.
The highly emotional, impulsive Ms. Rodriguez, known to her American friends as Crazy Deb, spends a lot of her time sympathizing and crying. Beauty salons are good for that. Sometimes her students cry for her. There’s a lot of crying and a lot of laughing, but “Kabul Beauty School” transcends the feel-good genre largely because of the author’s superior storytelling gifts and wicked sense of humor.
Teaching beauty techniques turns out to be tough sledding. For some reason, the students cannot understand the concept of the color wheel, essential for doing a professional dye job and correcting the contributing pigment that underlies a person’s primary hair color. At the end of her tether, Ms. Rodriguez reaches for a religious analogy: Think of contributing pigment as Satan. “It’s this evil thing in the hair that you have to fight,” she says. “You have to use the opposite color to keep it from taking over.” The light goes on.
When a woman from a government ministry comes in for a haircut, Ms. Rodriguez pulls out a hand-held blow-dryer to finish the job. The woman gasps. “She had never seen a blow-dryer before and had no idea why I was pointing it at her head,” Ms. Rodriguez writes. “When I turned it on, and hot air blasted out, she screamed and jumped out of the chair.”
Students and clients alike rejoice at Western lipsticks, facial creams, shampoos and conditioners. Ms. Rodriguez marvels at the Afghan technique of removing hair by rolling a thread across the skin and then looping it around each individual strand. Even so, she returns from one of her trips to the United States bearing a suitcase filled with 45 pounds of wax.
As the Afghans learn about makeup, their teacher learns about them. Naturally pugnacious, she bristles at the high-handed way that men deal with women in Afghanistan, and at the systematic suffocation of female independence, or even female presence, wherever she looks.
Early on, she begins to suspect, shrewdly, that the Taliban closed the country’s beauty salons not because they made women look like prostitutes, or served as fronts for brothels, as they claimed, “but because they gave women their own space where they were free from the control of men.”
Ms. Rodriguez fights back, American-style. In one of the book’s most satisfying moments, she confronts a man who has been groping her in a marketplace and, drawing on her experience as a prison guard, hits him with a haymaker straight in the face. He goes down hard.
. . .
Ms. Rodriguez fights many battles, both bureaucratic and cultural, to get the school up and running. She wins some, she loses others. The Afghans do not really understand American beauty. They like to lay on the color with a free hand and throw in a few sequins and rhinestones while they’re at it. “By Afghan standards, Americans wore so little makeup that we looked pretty much like men — and homely men at that,” Ms. Rodriguez writes, conceding defeat on that front.
On the other hand, once the Satan concept of hair coloring was introduced, students soared, easily fielding questions like “You’ve got a woman who’s a natural level four and she wants to be a warm eight, so what do you do?” It’s like the old war movies in which an ill-assorted platoon is whipped into fighting shape by a tough but soft-hearted sergeant. Osama bin Laden may still be at large, but never let it be said that there have been no triumphs in Afghanistan.
The victories are sweet. Ms. Rodriguez, who lives in Kabul and still runs the school, claims that her graduates go on to increase their family incomes by 400 percent, a statistic hard to evaluate out of context.
The story of Nahida, a prize student, is more specific. Scarred by beatings from her husband, and tormented by his first wife, Nahida opens a salon in her provincial town and begins squirreling away money. Eventually, she persuades her husband to divorce her. The salon expands, taking on several employees. Nahida begins exporting local handicrafts. Chalk up one for the Kabul Beauty School.
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Kabul’s Silent Revolution Begins at the Beauty Salon By WILLIAM GRIMES, NY Times, April 13, 2007
When Deborah Rodriguez arrived in Kabul in 2002 as part of a charitable aid mission, what she saw appalled her. Years of bloody conflict and oppressive rule by the Taliban, driven out in 2001, had stripped Afghanistan of its beauty infrastructure. It was a land of bad haircuts, poorly applied makeup and no styling gel. To Ms. Rodriguez, a Michigan hairdresser with a can-do attitude, task No. 1 was obvious: get these poor people some beauty salons.
“Kabul Beauty School” is the rollicking story of one of the strangest foreign-aid projects ever conceived, the creation of an academy to train Afghan beauticians. A surprisingly successful venture, it gives Afghan women practical training convertible into cold cash and personal power, a radical idea in a country where women have the approximate status of dirt. “I knew from my own experience as a hairdresser back home that a salon is a good business for a woman— especially if she has a bad husband,” Ms. Rodriguez writes.
There are plenty of those in the country that Ms. Rodriguez sometimes calls “Manistan.” The eager students who flock to her school, cobbled together with donations from American beauty companies and a German charity, recite a ghastly litany of domestic woes: forced marriages to ugly older men, constant beatings, oppressive confinement, rape.
The highly emotional, impulsive Ms. Rodriguez, known to her American friends as Crazy Deb, spends a lot of her time sympathizing and crying. Beauty salons are good for that. Sometimes her students cry for her. There’s a lot of crying and a lot of laughing, but “Kabul Beauty School” transcends the feel-good genre largely because of the author’s superior storytelling gifts and wicked sense of humor.
Teaching beauty techniques turns out to be tough sledding. For some reason, the students cannot understand the concept of the color wheel, essential for doing a professional dye job and correcting the contributing pigment that underlies a person’s primary hair color. At the end of her tether, Ms. Rodriguez reaches for a religious analogy: Think of contributing pigment as Satan. “It’s this evil thing in the hair that you have to fight,” she says. “You have to use the opposite color to keep it from taking over.” The light goes on.
When a woman from a government ministry comes in for a haircut, Ms. Rodriguez pulls out a hand-held blow-dryer to finish the job. The woman gasps. “She had never seen a blow-dryer before and had no idea why I was pointing it at her head,” Ms. Rodriguez writes. “When I turned it on, and hot air blasted out, she screamed and jumped out of the chair.”
Students and clients alike rejoice at Western lipsticks, facial creams, shampoos and conditioners. Ms. Rodriguez marvels at the Afghan technique of removing hair by rolling a thread across the skin and then looping it around each individual strand. Even so, she returns from one of her trips to the United States bearing a suitcase filled with 45 pounds of wax.
As the Afghans learn about makeup, their teacher learns about them. Naturally pugnacious, she bristles at the high-handed way that men deal with women in Afghanistan, and at the systematic suffocation of female independence, or even female presence, wherever she looks.
Early on, she begins to suspect, shrewdly, that the Taliban closed the country’s beauty salons not because they made women look like prostitutes, or served as fronts for brothels, as they claimed, “but because they gave women their own space where they were free from the control of men.”
Ms. Rodriguez fights back, American-style. In one of the book’s most satisfying moments, she confronts a man who has been groping her in a marketplace and, drawing on her experience as a prison guard, hits him with a haymaker straight in the face. He goes down hard.
. . .
Ms. Rodriguez fights many battles, both bureaucratic and cultural, to get the school up and running. She wins some, she loses others. The Afghans do not really understand American beauty. They like to lay on the color with a free hand and throw in a few sequins and rhinestones while they’re at it. “By Afghan standards, Americans wore so little makeup that we looked pretty much like men — and homely men at that,” Ms. Rodriguez writes, conceding defeat on that front.
On the other hand, once the Satan concept of hair coloring was introduced, students soared, easily fielding questions like “You’ve got a woman who’s a natural level four and she wants to be a warm eight, so what do you do?” It’s like the old war movies in which an ill-assorted platoon is whipped into fighting shape by a tough but soft-hearted sergeant. Osama bin Laden may still be at large, but never let it be said that there have been no triumphs in Afghanistan.
The victories are sweet. Ms. Rodriguez, who lives in Kabul and still runs the school, claims that her graduates go on to increase their family incomes by 400 percent, a statistic hard to evaluate out of context.
The story of Nahida, a prize student, is more specific. Scarred by beatings from her husband, and tormented by his first wife, Nahida opens a salon in her provincial town and begins squirreling away money. Eventually, she persuades her husband to divorce her. The salon expands, taking on several employees. Nahida begins exporting local handicrafts. Chalk up one for the Kabul Beauty School.
