Read: Kabul Beauty School by Deborah Rodriguez
Kabul Beauty School: An American Woman Goes Behind the Veil by Deborah Rodriguez
Source: Library
At first, I wasn’t entirely sure if this would fit the definitions of the Women Unbound Challenge. But it definitely does. It opened my eyes to what it means to be a woman in this other part of the world, where a woman can be imprisoned for being raped or for getting pregnant with a boyfriend before her parents can marry her off. It is a place where one is fully aware that she is a woman: “When I wasn’t inside the beauty school, all I saw were men… If i left when it was starting to get dark, I’d soon realize that I was the only woman on the streets. The men noticed pretty quickly, too, and they’d stare at me as I passed.”
Deborah Rodriguez is a hairdresser who manages to find her way onto the first team that Care For All Foundation sent to Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban. At first, she feels quite useless and doesn’t know what to do (her teammates are all medical professionals), but eventually hits upon the idea of starting a beauty school for the Afghan women: “I figured that the salon business would be even better for women in Afghanistan, where the men aren’t allowed to step inside the salon. They’d never see the cash changing hands or be able to tell the women how to run things.”
The compelling stories of these Afghan women are full of courage and sadness. Baseera is the breadwinner of her family who provided then-forbidden wedding hair and makeup for wives of the Taliban. Another woman had not been allowed out of her house for eight years.
This book aggravated me and also touched my heart. It was such an unbalanced book, with too much details about Rodriguez’s life in the US that I more or less skimmed over. I couldn’t quite believe Rodriguez’s impulsiveness (in the US, she marries a preacher with whom she has a personality clash, explaining that “I wanted to be married again. I liked being married.” Then in Afghanistan, she marries an Afghan man whom she hardly knows and can barely speak to, after her friends convince her to do so!), and yet, I couldn’t help but admire her dering-do and her passion for these women of Afghanistan.
“I just do, occasionally with disastrous results,” she explains. Thankfully, the Kabul Beauty School wasn’t one of them.
This is my second read for the Women Unbound Challenge.
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That’s too bad there’s not more focus on the Afghani women. And she sounds like a crazy wedding person! lol But I’m glad you still enjoyed the book.