Free It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War by Lynsey Addario Page A

the Soviets and widows begging for money on the street. I shot fully clothed women in labor hitched up on rusting old-fashioned gynecological chairs, and Afghans traipsing through the postwar rubble. When I stopped the car where begging widows crouched all day, they got up and swarmed the window, thinking I had money. Dirt and poverty had faded their brilliant blue burqas into a sad powdery gray.

    Afghan women shield their faces at the women’s hospital in Kabul, May 2000.
    On one of my last days there, I visited with a Sudanese woman named Anisa, who ran the main UNHCR office in Kabul and had been living in Afghanistan for several years. I was relieved to see her, sitting behind a grand desk in a bare-bones office. I had been craving the presence of a female with whom I shared at least a few cultural references.
    Anisa took me to a middle-class neighborhood on the outskirts of Kabul. Four women greeted us at the door. The front of their blue burqas had been slung back over their heads, revealing angular features, fair skin, and striking blue eyes. They all wore floral skirts. Their white patent-leather pumps were lined up at the door. It still surprised me to see an actual living being under the tomblike burqa. They smiled warmly and excitedly ushered us inside their modest clay home, wicker baskets and pink-and-green-embroidered sheets hanging on the walls, lacy curtains fluttering by windows covered in wax paper.
    The UN had secretly hired the women to teach vocational skills—knitting, sewing, weaving—to widows and poor mothers in their neighborhood. They sat on the floor and, over the requisite tea and biscuits, began to talk. They were nothing like the women of the countryside; they were educated and had held jobs in government ministries before the Taliban came into power. They were frustrated with the restrictions on their freedoms, which, among other things, prohibited them from working outside the home.
    “Before, our capital was destroyed,” one of the women explained. “The Taliban has rebuilt our capital. In each house in Afghanistan, though, the women are the poorest of the family. The only thing they think of is how to feed their children. Now the men are also facing problems like the women. They are beaten in the streets if their beards are not long enough, thrown in prison for not praying. It is not only the women who suffer,” she said.
    “Wearing a burqa is not a problem,” another said. “It is not being able to work that is the problem.”

    Everything they said surprised me. It had been naïve of me to think that, given all the repression women in Afghanistan were facing—their inability to work or get an education—wearing a burqa would be high on their list of complaints. To them, the burqa was a superficial barrier, a physical means of cloaking the body, not the mind.
    The women also put my life of privilege, opportunity, independence, and freedom into perspective. As an American woman, I was spoiled: to work, to make decisions, to be independent, to have relationships with men, to feel sexy, to fall in love, to fall out of love, to travel. I was only twenty-six, and I had already enjoyed a lifetime of new experiences.
     • • • 
    T HE DAY BEFORE I left Kabul, I returned to the Foreign Ministry to get my exit visa from Mr. Faiz.
    “Welcome,” Mr. Faiz said, gesturing for me to sit. “How was your trip? What are your impressions of our country?”
    I thought of Mohammed from the visa office, the working city women stuck at home, the widows in the countryside, the maternity hospital with its ghastly conditions. Mr. Faiz, in his grand office at the Foreign Ministry in Kabul, represented everything millions of women across the world have fought. In Afghanistan the Taliban granted me license to see and to do things no Afghan woman had permission to do since they took control: partake in meals and in conversations with men outside of their families, go without a burqa, work. But