Live Your Life Be Free!

In 2002, I was fortunate enough to attend a public lecture of Dr. Sima Samar, who was the Deputy President of the interim government in Afghanistan. Her words, her bravery and her mission were impossible to forget. She wanted to improve the human rights situation in Afghanistan (for example, making rape illegal) and allow women to go back to school and work (under the Taliban, women were not allowed to work, and buying a girl a pencil and notebook was considered a crime.) Not long after I saw her speak, she was threatened with death and harassed for questioning Islamic laws and subsequently left her post.

I tried to find a transcript of her talk at University of Toronto, but I couldn’t. The closest I could see was her speech at Brown. The following quotes are from that speech. On human rights violations:

As a part of our national consultation process, we released our report, A Call for Justice, that represented the opinions of the Afghan people on transitional justice. We conducted interviews of 4,151 people and more than 200 focus groups involving thousands more people. Of the people surveyed, 69 percent identified themselves or immediate family members as victims of human rights violations in the course of the last two decades of conflict.

On women going back to school:

The media shows thousands of girls going to school, but they do not show what the quality of education is and how many girls do not have access to education facilities. It is the lucky girl that walks for two hours with a piece of bread to get an education, but even these facilities are not available to most girls. The media also does not show the more than 30 girls’ schools that have been set on fire or bombed by fundamentalists in the past three years.

On thesouthasian.com from 2001, speaks about the problems from a medical point of view:

Sima also has a medical clinic in Kabul. "Almost every woman I see has osteomalacia," Samar says. "Their bones are softening due to a lack of Vitamin D. They survive on a diet of tea and naan because they can’t afford eggs and milk and, to complicate matters, their burqas and veils deprive them of sunshine. On top of that, depression is endemic here because the future is so dark."

I find this woman to be one of the most inspirational people I have ever seen speak. Despite her uphill battle, she still keeps fighting for the cause she believes in. She says:

I have three strikes against me,- I’m a woman, I speak out for women and I’m a Hazara, one of the minority tribes.

Even with those strikes, she still continues to be strong and to speak out for and inspire others around the world. In her speech at Brown she finishes with:

Sometimes I think of the world as a bird. If a wing or a country is broken, the bird cannot fly. As a global community, we are all responsible for treating the bird so that it will fly.