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| After facing suspicion from local men, Azra Jafari is now referred to as 'Mr Mayor' – a title that conveys respect in Afghanistan. |
When Azra Jafari became mayor of Nili, she knew that the impoverished
and remote Afghan town desperately needed roads and investment. She was
aware she would be living in very basic conditions, on a meagre salary
of $76 (£50) a month, and that taking care of a four-year-old daughter
at the same time would be challenging.
What she was less prepared
for was the appearance of a powerful mullah in her unheated, makeshift
office, wagging his finger at her, warning that Nili was not about to
accept a female mayor who thought she could "exploit her femininity in
order to complete a few projects and influence our women".
"After
three months, the same man came up to me and thanked me," Jafari
recalled, four years later. "He said, 'If a man could do just half of
what you've done here, our province will surely flourish.' He now
supports me and we work very well together – I have a great deal of
respect for him."
She is now referred to as "Mr Mayor" by her community, a title that conveys respect in a country not known for women's rights.
Until
2009, Nili – a small town of about 40,000 people at the centre of
Daykundi province – had never seen a female official, said Jafari. She
had to prove to the community that she was serious about improving their
lives.
Jafari was shocked by the complete lack of infrastructure
in the town. "Anything that needed to be built in Nili, had to be built
from scratch," she said. "And I had no budget" – something she had to
address by making regular trips to Kabul to implore ministry officials
to release funds. "When I arrived, my office had been damaged by
snowfall. It was a small room, with a few pillows. There was no table,
no chairs. Just a couple of people there to help me," Jafari said.
"Wherever
it was necessary I picked up a shovel, kicked dirt, and gathered coal
with my hands. Nili is not the sort of town where you can easily drive a
car. I often had to walk from place to place through deep snow, getting
my feet soaking wet."
Location of Nili in Afghanistan.
The 34-year-old cannot be further from the image of the downtrodden
victim that has become a misleading shorthand for Afghan womanhood. Nor
is she connected to a powerful or wealthy family, and she fiercely
rejects the suggestion that her promotion was an exercise in tokenism by
a government under pressure from its western financiers to show it is
bettering women's rights.
"If our friends in the international
community really made me mayor because I am a woman then they would have
paid for the roads I built. Unfortunately they have contributed very
little to the changes in Daykundi," she said.
Jafari also does not hold back on the subject of how severely women in office in Afghanistan are judged, likening it to having one's decisions and behaviour placed under a magnifying glass.
"There
are plenty of men here with no ambition to work, who are bad at their
jobs and over whom a lot of money has been wasted. Because they are men,
no one really questions them and asks 'as a man, how successful have
you managed to be?' But as the only female mayor among 180 others, the
first question I'm always asked, wherever I am, is 'show us what you've
done for your people.'"
Jafari, who is married to an Afghan
film-maker, is currently the subject of a documentary series called
Afghanistan at Work, a sequel to Kabul: A City at Work, which seeks to
show ordinary working Afghans doing extraordinary things at a time of
war.
"Mr Mayor" grew up in Ghor province, which borders Daykundi
to the west. Like Daykundi, Ghor's population is poor and mainly Shia
Hazara. Jafari says that her familiarity with the people and their needs
is what partly drew her to the job in Nili.
Daykundi has
virtually no western troops. It was carved out of inhospitable
mountainous terrain in the centre of Afghanistan in 2004, hugged by the
much more restive provinces of Ghazni, Uruzgan and Helmand.
It
takes Jafari and her daughter, Indira, two days to drive to Nili from
Kabul. It is a perilous journey on poorly paved roads. It becomes a
death trap during winter's heavy snowfall.
Two days after this
interview, Jafari telephoned from Nili to explain that the small coach
in which she had been travelling along with her daughter and 13 other
passengers, had overturned and almost careered 1,600ft towards a
riverbed below.
"The windows were shattered. Thank God we were
OK," she said, adding that she had suffered a sprained neck and her
daughter had cut her finger on some glass. "But she couldn't stop
shaking for half an hour afterwards."
Bad weather and
heart-stopping bus journeys are one risk. The other is the war being
waged between Afghan and foreign forces and insurgents.
Jafari's
commute often takes her through the insurgent-filled province of Maidan
Wardak. "Last year we were caught in a gunfight between Afghan forces
and insurgents for three hours. We couldn't move."
And violence is
slowly encroaching on Nili itself. Daykundi has long been known as one
of the least dangerous and most isolated provinces in Afghanistan. But
the Taliban are making increasingly bold moves on Nili, advancing from a
district called Gizab, on the border with Uruzgan and technically under
that province's jurisdiction.
For many years, it was the very
lack of an insurgency that starved Daykundi of adequate attention from
foreign donors. Now, Jafari says, that argument is running on borrowed
time.
Between 2001 and 2011 the US government's development
agency, USAid, spent $37m (£24.4m) on projects in Daykundi province,
which has a population of just over 400,000 but no Nato-backed
provincial reconstruction team (PRT). By contrast, the more dangerous
Uruzgan province, which borders Daykundi to its south and is home to
100,000 fewer civilians, received almost twice as much aid over the same
period and hosts a PRT.
Like thousands of Afghans, Jafari fled
the civil war in the early 1990s, taking refuge in Iran, where she ran a
school for Afghan refugee children. She moved back to Afghanistan in
September 2001 to take part in a peace jirga (a tribal assembly
of elders) as the fall of the Taliban became imminent. She has also
published two books, one entitled I am a Working Woman, which she wrote
for women with low levels of literacy.
When we met, Jafari was
dressed in a fitted beige knee-length tunic, buttoned down the front and
worn over trousers. Her hair was neatly covered with a black shawl
splashed with bright colours and loosely wrapped around her neck. It is a
typical Kabul look, but perhaps seen as less acceptable in a much more
conservative and rural place such as Nili.
"I like to dress
formally," she explained. "This means clothes tend to be more fitted and
a bit tighter, but this is the way formal, professional people dress.
Not traditional loose, wide clothing, and people need to accept this."
She
has never changed what she wears, even in the face of criticism and
gossip, as she sees it as part of her job to encourage people to
understand that the way someone dresses has no bearing on who they are
or their ability to get a job done properly.
"What I've really
learned is that it makes no difference whether you are a man or a woman,
what matters is that you do your work properly and you work hard and
how seriously you take your responsibilities," she said.
As
Afghanistan's first and only female mayor, Jafari is determined to make
her mark not just on infrastructure but on attitudes towards women. She
feels strongly that since being in Nili, she has influenced the way
younger women think, and for the better. She says one day she may angle
for the top job in government, but she would like to become a member of
parliament before aiming for the presidential palace. "I'm like a
template for women," she said.
The morning after the interview, Jafari set off, with Indira in tow, on their long and dangerous journey to Nili. (Guardian)
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