64 Review

The Mail on Sunday May 13, 2007

Mother of two Debbie Rodriguez went to Kabul to
bandage wounds ... five years on shes doing perms for
Afghan women, teaching them the art of bikini
waxing and married to a Mujahideen warrior who she
describes as Fred Flintstone with a rocket launcher
T
here is a quiet buzz of
happy conversation as the
students at the worlds
most unlikely hairdressing
academy practice the
arcane arts of perms, tints
and extensions on a row of life-size
plastic heads.
All are wearing high heels and make-
up, but their heads are covered with
long scarves. There are no men
around, save the Kalashnikov-toting
guards in a leopardskin-print sentry
box outside the walled compound.
This is the Kabul Beauty School, a
Western-style coffee bar and hair-
dressing salon in the Afghan capital
that has so far offered the promise
of a new life to nearly 200 women who
have been left destitute by decades
of warfare and rule by Islamic
fundamentalists.
The school is run by Debbie
Rodriguez, an eccentric American
mother of two from Michigan. Debbie,
46, was on the run from a disastrous
marri age when she arri ved i n
Afghanistan five years ago with a
Christian humanitarian group.She had
come to work as a nursing assistant,
but she found her skills as a hairdresser
she had worked in salons since the
age of 15 were far more in demand.
Beauty salons had been banned in
1996 by the Taliban, which imposed
a draconian regime on Afghan
women: they were forced to wear the
burka, forbidden to work, barred from
education past the age of eight and
faced public flogging and execution for
violating religious laws.
But in a country waking up to a
new liberalism after the American-
sponsored toppling of the Taliban in
2001, it soon became clear to Western
aid workers and local women that
there were no hairdressers and
when word got around that Debbie
was a wizard with scissors, there was
a stampede for her services.
When I got back to my hotel room
at night, my door would be plas-
tered with 20 or 30 Post-It notes from
people asking me to cut their hair,
she recalled.
Now her account of her five-year
odyssey that has seen Debbie help set
up a salon and beauty academy,
divorce her American husband and
marry the assistant to a local warlord
who sleeps with a Kalashnikov by
their bed, has become an American
publishing sensation. Her book,
The Kabul Beauty School, will be
published in Britain later this month.
Today the school she co-founded is a
registered charity that trains Afghan
women who have few opportunities
for work. Yet Debbies personal
journey has been every bit as fas-
cinating as that of the students she has
trained to give Brazilian bikini waxes
and bobs.
Her visit with a Christian charity,
Care For All Foundation (CFAF), in
May 2002 was part of her search for
fulfilment that began a year earlier,
when she felt stifled in her marriage to
an American Bible-basher. She began
training as a volunteer disaster worker
with CFAF and in September 2001
found herself in New York, offering
assistance to firefighters and rescue
workers amid the rubble of the World
Trade Centre.
It was a hard experience, but so
fabulous, she recalled. When I went
home,it was Taliban,Taliban,Taliban
on the TV, radio and in the papers.
I saw these women in Afghanistan
and, at the same time, I felt so
trapped in my marriage.
I told my ex-husband there was
nothing he could do to stop me
from going to Afghanistan. I did
not know what I was supposed
to be doing, but I knew I was
supposed to be there.
S
he begged a med-
ical team from
the charity to
let her travel with
them to Kabul and
raised money for
her tickets by selling cookies.
I had no intention of staying
any longer than a month,
she said. But in Afghanistan
all my misery disappeared.
There were so many people
who had real problems, mine
were nothing. It was embarrass-
ing to say I had a troubled mar-
riage, because my husband didnt
try to set me on fire, which is not
uncommon here.
She was then asked to help train
women to meet the burgeoning
post-Taliban demand for beauty
treatments, often for Afghan brides
on their wedding day. However,
women working is still taboo for
many fundamentalists, so being a
hairdresser can be dangerous work
hence the armed guards.
Afghanistan is still a fiercely tradi-
tional society and most women are
married at 12. Even sex within mar-
riage is considered so shameful that
women hide their pregnancies.
Before the Taliban came to power in
1996, there was a flourishing world of
women-only beauty parlours some
From Heidi Kingstone
IN KABUL
From
bur
Bra
Review 65
Brides and
prejudices ...
Afghan women
were forced to
wear the burka
under Taliban rule,
top left. Bridal
make-up is a
speciality of The
Kabul Beauty
School, above.
Left: Debbie and
her Afghan
husband, Sam
When an Afghan man groped her
she flattened him with one punch
m
rka
azilian
to
of which were fronts for brothels. So Debbie
is keenly aware that the salon must not
only be beyond reproach, but must be
seen to be so. The only men allowed as
far as the gate of the school, which
also includes a coffee shop and charity
gift shop, are fathers, brothers or
husbands.
Some of the students stories are
heartbreaking. Mina (all the
womens names have been
changed in the book to protect
them) is a beautiful, elegantly
dressed woman no mean feat
in a country where the average
family income is 400 a year.
She lives in two small rooms
in a dangerous area of Kabul,
where she could be raped or
murdered j ust wal ki ng
home. Her family sold her to
pay a debt to a much older man
when she was ten. Mina fled to
Kabul and worked as a cleaner
for Debbie. After two years she
asked if she could join the school
and is now the salons manager.
Hamas life has been equally grim. Her
father sold his entire family wife and
children to a much older man who, the
father claimed, was an uncle who would
marry her.
Girls are not respected as humans.
Fathers dont look at them as people to
cherish, but as a way to feed their family,
said Debbie.
Six women work at the school, which has
trained 170 women, most of whom have
gone on to work at other salons that have
opened since the fall of the Taliban. The
staff are like family, all swapping stories,
including Debbie, of the trouble with their
Afghan husbands. One of the ways women
avoid having sex with their husbands is not
to bring water to their homes, most of
which dont have running water.
The big thing after sex is showering, its
an Islamic custom. Its no sex tonight
because there is no water, Debbie laughed.
She also told the story of how she was
groped in a market and was then advised
that this was the right of all Afghan males.
She laid the molester flat with a knock-
out punch.
Debbie knows that, for an Afghan woman,
striking a man remains a penal offence. But
for her, as an angry Westerner, it was a
moment of liberating satisfaction.
Since writing her book, Debbie has become
a celebrity in Kabul and in America, where
she has made the Top 10 of The New York
Times bestseller list. But, not everyone is
convinced of her saintly image.
Six American women involved in the
founding of the school say Debbies book
exaggerates her role. They have also alleged
that, in their absence, she moved the school
from its original home in Kabuls Womens
Ministry, where she was not allowed to
make a profit,to a house she shares with her
new Afghan/Uzbek husband, where she
could make money.
One of the co-founders, Sheila McGurk,
told The New York Times: [The book]
makes Debbie out to be Mother Teresa.
And its wrong.
C
ertainly prices are high at the
salon, which caters mainly for
Western women. It costs 48
for a cut and blow-dry and 16
for a manicure. But Debbie lives
in a modest three-room apart-
ment above the salon and saidshe puts any
money she makes back into the school.
She also argued that she has never
claimed to be the founder of the school.
Others have claimed that, not me, she said.
I have always said I helped found the
school. The book is not a detailed descrip-
tion of every event. It is and always has
been about the women and their stories.
Debbies image is not helped by the fact
that her new husband, Sam, who is 12 years
her junior, is the assistant to the notorious
Afghan warlord General Abdul Rashid
Dostum, who is suspected of killing as
many as 50,000 people and is now part of
President Karzais government.
Debbie married Sam four years ago, just 20
days after their first meeting, despite the
fact that he hardly spoke any English and
was married to a woman with whom he
had had seven daughters.
Debbie admitted she wouldnt have mar-
ried so quickly, but knew she could not con-
tinue to see him unless they got married.
The only low point, she said, came when
his first wife, who lives with her children in
Saudi Arabia, gave birth to a son. It felt as
if he had cheated on me, she said. My
American brain cant process the fact that I
am a second wife. So Ive made up the story
that hes divorced and he has to go to Saudi
Arabia to visit his children, which he does
one month every year.
And despite the fact that neither she nor
Sam speaks each others language particu-
larly well, she insists their marriage has
grown stronger.
The great bonus is that you dont have to
apologise about all the terrible things
youve said in an argument, because neither
of us has the faintest clue what the other
has said, she laughs.
While we talked, Sam came into the cafe
to ask Debbie a question. Hes a burly man
with a moustache, a scar across his cheek
and a gun in his pocket. He played with her
hair extensions in a loving manner an
unusual sight in a country where men and
women rarely even speak and told me
Debbie is old.
But in Afghanistan we like antiques, he
said, with a wicked laugh.
Debbie refers to him as Fred Flintstone
with a rocket launcher.
Whatever the truth about its origins, The
Kabul Beauty School remains an oasis
of hope and cheer. Despite the turmoil out-
side, the students and customers chat
as they would in a salon anywhere else in
the world.
And every generation of graduates spreads
the gospel that women can earn their own
living in Afghanistan and free themselves
from the Talibans crippling straitjacket of
tradition and puritanism.