She has just returned from Pakistan and Afghanistan where she was doing her practice of deep inquiry and research and bearing witness to the condition of women in that part of the world and so I look forward to hearing what you have to say. Thank you, Alan. It's a wonderful honor to be asked to speak here this morning in my own home temple. And to be home, I went all the way around under the other side of the earth, leaving on March 1st and returning on March 20th. It's just about 12 hours difference and I know I really didn't feel like I was back at home until I walked in here to Berkley Zen Center a few days after I got back. I think this journey I went on really began in March 2001 when the Taliban blew up the two great Buddhas at Bamiyan.

[01:22]

They were the tallest standing Buddhas in the whole world and had been built in the 3rd century. The oldest one, it's believed, was carved in the 3rd century AD. And the Taliban, who went to a lot of trouble to destroy them, said that they were offensive to Islam. And then in September, of course, the World Trade Center towers fell also. And I was really struck by the pairing of these images, the two towers with the peoples from every nation inside of them, and the two ancient Buddhas who had looked out under the world for all of the centuries. And as they fell, I, like so many Americans, experienced their coming down as a kind of unveiling of so many things I had been blind to, hadn't been paying any attention to before.

[02:33]

And one of them, one among many, of course, is the connection between our own safety and the safety of Afghan people, Afghan villagers and Afghan refugees. As the war started, I started to look for ways for me to understand what was happening, studying and reading like so many other people. And I discovered a 25-year-old Afghan women's organization, RAWWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. I never heard of them before September 11th. And I didn't know much. Well, I had heard about the oppression of Afghan women under the Taliban. And again and again, I would get this email a lot of people got coming. I must have gotten it 35 times. And it was a petition. It described their oppression. And you were supposed to sign this petition. And then I heard that it really didn't go anywhere and there was no point.

[03:35]

And how could you petition the Taliban to change their treatment of women. And so I just kept deleting it and always feeling kind of guilty and wondering what I could do. But I never heard of Rawa until after the attacks. And here was a group, Rawa, I found out, they have a website and one of their representatives came to the United States in late October and early November. And I was able to go to, Annette and I went to some of their events, some of her events, and we heard about their work throughout the Taliban era. They were the only group secretly going into Afghanistan, documenting the human rights abuses there. They made the famous film of the women being executed in the stadium in Kabul. that was shown here quite a lot and they brought medicines urgently needed and supported women in their secret groups inside of Afghanistan and then in Pakistan most of the Rawa members are in exile in Pakistan in the huge vast refugee camps there up to two million people are living there in terrible conditions and there Rawa

[04:57]

runs orphanages, schools, and some clinics. I found that I could really support the principles of Rawa. They have asked for 25 years for a secular democracy, not a religious state in Afghanistan, for human rights, for women's rights. And they also do, I felt a lot of affinity for them, because they do social action work, the clinics and orphanages and so forth, but they're also a political organization and ask for these political changes. And so they remind me of Buddhist Peace Fellowship, with which I've been active all these years and years. Buddhist Peace Fellowship is about the same age as Rawa because BPF doesn't just teach meditation in jails and prisons, but it also has demonstrations and asks for, for example, abolition of the death penalty. And I really think both are necessary.

[06:00]

On the Rawa website, I saw a photo of Mina, who is the young woman who founded the organization in 1977. at the age of 20 years old. She was a university student at the University of Kabul, formed the organization prior to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. It was an ordinary feminist organization then when Afghanistan was a growing and modernizing a monarchy that was moving toward more freedoms. But in 1979, the Soviet Union invaded and the organization went underground and continued to be a feminist group but opposed the Soviet occupation. Mina was forced into exile and continued her work in Pakistan, returning many times to Afghanistan She reminds me sometimes of Harriet Tubman, going back all the time, trying to free other people.

[07:06]

And she kind of reminds me of Rosa Parks, because she started a movement that long outlived her. In 1987, in Pakistan, Mina was assassinated. They are pretty sure by agents of the Afghan Soviet-backed KGB, by Secret Service. men. As I learned about her I was so inspired by her life and her eloquence. She also was a poet and wrote lots of essays and articles. She was a charismatic speaker and there is a one piece of five minutes long videotape of her talking in Europe on a trip she took in 1981 there. She really was extraordinary and I wondered if there was a book of her life and found out there was, there is no biography of her. Books in Pakistan are few and far between and there is of course no Afghan publishing industry at all.

[08:14]

No presses really, no electricity, no nothing. And so I realized that writing her biography was a task I might be able to take up and I asked Rawa if they would like that, and in a really still an act of faith that still amazes me, they accepted my proposal to be her biographer. The publisher was found very quickly and this is in New York City. St. Martin's Press is in a building that looks right out onto the World Trade Center site. And so the editor of Mina's biography is also just as committed as I am to doing something for Rawah. The proceeds of the book, the author's royalties, will be for Rawah's projects. So as I realized, after a while, I realized I had to go there to do the interviews of the people who knew Mina.

[09:17]

And, you know, facing the prospect of this dangerous journey, while as we planned and packed and got ready to go, Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and assassinated in Pakistan. And the only way to get to Afghanistan is through Pakistan. I thought a lot about my former teacher, May Lee Scott. You know, we used to sit here and talk so often. And her determination to just go ahead and do what she was sure was the right thing to do and the path that she thought was right for her to take. And I kept thinking that she would tell me, yeah, go ahead and go there, Melody. And I always bear in mind, you know, thinking about what she taught me, too, to watch out for that it's so much easier for me to do something than to just sit with my anxiety and fear.

[10:23]

Say, during this war, I've been very aware of how lucky I am to have a project to do, to have something that I can just create this book and feel that I am doing something in the midst of all very, very bad news, very bad news this week. And so it relieves me of quite a lot of my own pain about things. It's sort of like when really bad news comes on the radio and then I kind of vacuum the house. And I want to tell of one of the Dokusan meetings I had with Mel when he said to me once, well, your practice for social action is your practice. And then we both sat there for a minute and then he said, well, no, really, that's not the right thing to say to you. You really should sit more. Very true. Still, I know why I was drawn to Mei Li as my teacher, that her sort of slogan of devotedly do, devotedly do, really appeals to me.

[11:36]

All of this time, I can hardly believe, you know, Mei Li died still less than a year ago, and I cannot believe she didn't live to see what happened in September. And I always think about what she would have thought of it and said about it. So I traveled with Latifa Popal, a wonderful 34-year-old Afghan-American woman who left Afghanistan at the age of 17. Her refugee story is so amazing, like so many. She and her whole family walked out in December over Tora Bora, which now we all know what that is, with donkeys in the winter. That would be like walking over the Sierras in the winter. And eventually they were in these refugee camps and then came ultimately to America. And she acted as my translator.

[12:37]

She's also a Rawa supporter. And our trip had two purposes. To find Mina, to find out all the witnesses we could get in touch with who knew her during her lifetime and get their real vivid memories of her for the book. And then to take Latifa home to Kabul, where she's from. To find her relatives there. whom they couldn't call. There's no mail system. They hadn't known what happened to them. And we basically accomplished both missions with a lot of difficulty, but supporting each other, we made our way all the way to Kabul. where we saw her relatives, her cousin, her very dear man-cousin, who's a very tolerant Muslim, really a Sufi, and his wife, he is Ashgar, and his wife is Naida, and their four children, living in very reduced circumstances, but they're okay, they're really just have been very poor and malnourished to the point where their children are not grown enough, and

[13:45]

Their 13-year-old daughter, who looks like a 9-year-old, is severely depressed from traumas from the American bombing, which happened. Their home, their sort of project they live in, is very near the airport, which was bombed for two weeks. And so they were just in the basement, very, very scared. But they had a wonderful reunion together, Latifa with the family, and I just was so lucky to be there with them and witness all the love between them. We found, well as we were there in Kabul, Latifa just went into a state of shock over the difference between when she had left and there were paved streets and schools which had been there since the 1920s, her own school. All of these things are destroyed, there is just mud and the minute we emerged from the car from the airport

[14:49]

We were surrounded by begging children, lots of them landmine victims, missing limbs. And everything you've seen on television just is true, except it's so much harder to really be there with it. Latifa couldn't stand to stop the car at her school. It just looked so destroyed. She was too upset to do it. And we could not go to her home. We could have just driven to her home, but we were told it was in an unsafe part of Kabul. So only small parts of Afghanistan are safe at all. And that's only because the international peacekeepers are there. We did meet with the Rawa people in Kabuldo, who are still mostly kind of underground, and we found everyone so hopeful, just happy and joyful in the middle of all this destruction, because they can walk out, they can do things.

[15:50]

The Taliban ran away, and this has been a great liberation for them. The best example, I guess, or one thing to tell you is that we went to Mina's old school, which had been the famous girls' school, the best girls' school in Kabul. It's called the Malalai School, named for an Afghan heroine of the wars against the British. Malalai raised the Afghan flag in the 1830s when it fell to the ground, and a lot of things are named for her. We went to the school which the Taliban had... They closed to girls right away, sent all the girls home, and none of the girls had been to school for six years, in the whole country, of course, as you know. We found 200 people rebuilding the school. The Taliban had used it as a madrasa to indoctrinate young boys and they had put these fundamentalist slogans all over it and painted inside the classrooms.

[16:56]

But though they used it, they still wrecked it. They broke the windows and they smashed the walls and it's such a good example of the mindless kind of destruction they did. And on the day we came there, 200 men were, Afghan men were just rapidly rebuilding it, fixing and fixing everything. And we made our way through all this mud and into the building and into the office. We were escorted in. And here was a young woman, an Afghan civil engineer, a young woman who hadn't worked during the whole Taliban. And she was in charge of the project, which is being funded by a French nonprofit organization. They hired her, and she had a walkie-talkie and was bossing all these 200 men. She was really, really busy, and she didn't know anything about Meena or Rawa, really. But she was very excited to hear about, meet us and hear about our project and learn about one of the famous alumnas of the school. And they were trying to finish by May 23rd, and though we haven't heard, I'm sure they made it.

[18:02]

May 23rd was back-to-school day. All the children were going to be tested twice to see what their grade level will be so they can go back to school. Latifa's cousin's wife is a teacher confined to her home for six years, and she was going to be back to work. She said she'd been severely depressed, but that her mental health has improved so much. Here's the irony of, the ironies that can happen in this world, that all of this destruction happened, the World Trade Center fell, all of those people were killed, and then on the other side of the world, some things are being built up that couldn't have been built until that happened. So there's a, again, kind of a strange pairing of things. Rawad's vision for Afghanistan is that it be a peaceful and secure and democratic nation.

[19:08]

And that vision is just, it seems impossible. But as Meili would say, the impossible tasks are the ones to take up. And so they have upheld their vision and they continue just to work for it. I came back with a lot of thoughts about trauma and healing. I already had a lot of thoughts about that from working on death row for 22 years of my life. That's my job. And I thought I knew a lot about people who are traumatized and post-traumatic stress disorder and so forth. Every person we met there is traumatized. We didn't meet anyone who didn't tell us about the many, many members of their family who've been killed, either executed under the Soviets. Latifa herself, my traveling companion, lost 13 members of her family because the Soviet Union killed

[20:14]

thousands, tens and tens of thousands of intellectuals, the doctors, the lawyers, the professors, and ultimately Meena, among them, and Meena's husband, who was a doctor. And then came the, you know, successive waves of fundamentalists and warlords, and then finally, ultimately, the Taliban. So being with them there, and with the Rawah, these women who are working so diligently, trying to make things better, Well, it just reminded me of Buddhist Peace Fellowships calls for peace today, you know, or this week, or any time. It's kind of... asking for the impossible, yet we do it and don't give up. You know, sort of steadfastly keep on saying these things and keep on warning of the dangers. And we saw Rawah doing that. It was very, very inspiring. But then we would talk with them about their own lives and they would always tell

[21:18]

just kind of matter-of-factly say to you, well, my husband and my sons were murdered and then I came here to this place and so forth. And when I would say something sympathetic, you know, try to express sorrow or sympathy, they always immediately just would say something like, well, others have suffered so much more or I'm only one among many. And they really have their own way of dealing with their trauma, which is to take action and take very... It seemed to me they had taken very good care of each other over the years in basic ways and important ways. And I learned something new, I think, about being with traumatized people. You know, here I think my idea of it is kind of psychologically to draw people out and allow them to cry and sit with their weeping and so forth.

[22:25]

But there, in the face of so much, and I saw how important it was for people to hold on to, that they are with so much tragedy that they simply have to keep on going. found that empathy and compassion was more in just sitting with people and listening and trying to bring myself to understand, to open up my own self to realizing that I could be her, or she could be me, or that this child could be my grandchild, or my grandchild could be this child. And so it was different, and I haven't sorted it out entirely. Well, having gotten ourselves so far away from home, it was very, very difficult for us to get ourselves back.

[23:27]

We actually flew to Pakistan without confirmed tickets back from Pakistan. After September 11th, all airlines left there. And there's only the Pakistan National Airline left, which has only a few sort of aging 747s. Nobody had confirmed tickets. It was really, really hard. We must have gone half a dozen times to the office trying to get tickets or seats back. We had tickets, but they didn't really mean anything. And then when we flew to Kabul on the United Nations flight, really, again, really, really hard to get onto that flight and very expensive. And we really didn't have a seat back on the flight. So we wound up driving all the way back over the Khyber Pass and all the way through Afghanistan and back to Pakistan with men with us, guarding us. And there's so much to say about being women there. One thing to say is that we were continuously guarded and cherished and looked after by men.

[24:33]

who took really good care of us, especially Latifa's cousins who accompanied us all the way to the border where they had to go back so that they can cross into Pakistan. The border is closed to Afghans, though thousands are walking over the mountains still escaping into Pakistan. As we went on the road we passed more thousands and thousands of Afghan refugees returning in these huge Pakistani trucks. They are given $100 per family if it's over 5 people. $20 per person and then the maximum is $100. and a bucket, plastic bucket, and a bag of rice. And with that, they're taking a chance on going back to their land, to their nation. And standing up in these enormous trucks, packed in for the 7 to 12 hour ride over this unbelievably rocky, muddy, single track road over precipices.

[25:36]

Rocks about to fall on us and land mines everywhere on both sides. So we did all that, which was a great adventure. And very beautiful. The main impression I have from it, besides being terrified, was the beauty of that land. If you've been to the east side of the Sierras, sort of like that. Also very much like the Rocky Mountains. and the deserts, the beautiful deserts of California, and vast parts of Japan, I think, with terraced bright green fields. The whole trip was down, down, down, through, until we wound up near date palms and camels and looking at the nomads. Many, many nomad people camped along the roads. This land is so beautiful. It should be the most peaceful jewel of the world. And I don't know why, it is just a place of war, has been and is now.

[26:42]

Then at the border we got, we walked over the border and got another car, just had to negotiate for a car and the Pakistan army put a man with a big gun in our car and then drove us that way back to Islamabad. We spent another week in Pakistan doing more interviews and we returned to the Peshawar refugee camps. I just want to talk a little bit about being an American and a Buddhist and a woman in Pakistan. It's an Islamic republic. which is also a shaky military dictatorship, and very few Westerners are there at all now. And I tried very, very hard not to be, as the Taliban talked about the Bamiyan Buddhas, not to be offensive to Islam. I wore the chador, which is like just a big piece of cloth over my head, and so did Latifa, and we were very quiet, and we didn't tell anyone where we were living.

[27:53]

When we were asked, we sort of lied and said we were in a different place. We were very, very careful, always with men guarding us or driving us. You don't see women driving cars. You don't see women working. No woman, we didn't see anyone in the government offices. People wanted to know constantly where our husbands were. For example, if we went to email at the little internet stores, women don't normally go into them. So we would just say, we need to email our husbands. They would kind of reluctantly let us use the computers and so on. And there was just, we just felt a great deal of tension toward us, especially me. When asked what nation, where I was from, I often just didn't answer. I just would turn away because it really wasn't safe to be an American there. And yet, you know, I felt, I really loved the general feeling of worship all day long.

[28:57]

I really liked the call to prayer, for example, which was like a mindfulness bell, kind of a reminder to remember my own practice. On the last day, our flight was delayed 28 hours. So we had a whole extra day and we went to two places. We went to the only tourism sort of that we did. We went to the Faisal Mosque, which is the largest mosque in the world in Islamabad. It was built in 1985 by King Faisal of Saudi Arabia. 100,000 people can worship there at once. And the minarets, as you approach it, they look just like missiles. It's very 1985 kind of architecture, concrete and just vast. We were covered and very quiet and we took off our shoes and washed and so forth. We went to the women's entrance, and it was not prayer time or anything, but the man opened the door, a man, and he pointed at me and he said, foreigner.

[30:04]

And I said, yes. And he said, you cannot come in. We saw a Japanese tourist going, so I think that I just was denied entrance and Latifa didn't want to go in without me, so we just peered in the windows and it was a very good symbol, I think, architecturally of what has happened to parts of Islam now, that it was sterile and unornamented, and had one of those digital readouts in red, printing along on the side with the time and things like that, and these kind of big, ugly chandeliers. Not to be disrespectful, but I think that architecture sometimes really does show the essence of things.

[31:08]

And then we went to, you know, and I just want to say it hurt a lot to be excluded and, you know, to be on the receiving end of hostility. People would not shake my hand or wouldn't, if I held out a piece of paper, they wouldn't take it from my hand. I would put it down in offices and things. You know, the idea is not to touch women and not to touch non-Muslims and on and on, you know. I think Rawa's teaching and our teaching of tolerance is so important and rare in the world and something to continue to talk about. On the other hand, we met so many Pakistani people who did nothing but help us and love us and take care of us and support us every minute and so that was the other side and I feel badly for them that they live so intimidated by the situation there now. The other place we went to was to a Buddhist site outside of Islamabad called Tak Sila.

[32:16]

And Tak just means knock on stone, and Sila, Sila means stone. And it's a place where people have been working the stone for, it seems, I think, 5,000 years. The earliest ruins there are from 3000 BC. And this area was once ruled by Ashoka, the famous Buddhist ruler. who converted to Buddhism in 262 BC, and he died in 232 BC. So in those 30 years, Ashoka built hundreds of stupas and monasteries. So there are only five enormous archaeological sites there. It's about an hour's drive outside of Islamabad on a little pass area, and there are only five huge sites that have been excavated at all. The archaeology has all been stopped since the 1960s, so nothing more. is going on there. It's very, very quiet. And we were the very first Western tourists to arrive since September 11th.

[33:19]

So when they realized I spoke English, they had to get the one guy who speaks English and he kind of came running along across the field putting his turban on to greet us. And he was so happy to see us and kind of went into his memorized spiel on it all. And we were walking rapidly by all these The former standing Buddhas, the feet of them are huge, as big as this whole seat. They were 50 feet high and so on. They all were knocked down later. We went to a monastery where you could see all the cells, 48 cells of the monks, each with a ventilation window and a little altar in the wall. The most beautiful stonework. We saw their dining hall and the place where the big soup bowl had been. their ceremonial hall. It's not protected. People are just kind of climbing and walking all over everything. And then we went to the biggest stupa. It's probably as big as our building here, as our temple, all told.

[34:25]

The guide was rattling on and on and kind of dragging us from place to place and telling us just tiny bits about everything. And then our driver was a really sweet young Pakistani man. We had come to really like him. was with us and then Latifa and I, we were the party, four of us. And when we came to the big stupa, it was possible to go up some stairs and circumambulate around the whole edge of it. And I decided I wanted to do that. So I sort of stopped the guy talking for a bit and I said, well, I would like to walk around and I'd like to walk around in silence. And he said, oh, well, okay. So I walked up by myself and bowed and I had my little mala Susan Moon scent with me. So I just began to ken him quietly around and sang my little Tara chant. It was wonderful to have respect.

[36:17]

Buddhists had worshipped men. At one point, the... and other people came and come and... Thank you, Claire.

[37:36]

Well, there's always a tension between accepting what is and trying to change it, and... walking there around the stupa made me think about how people do build up things, and other people sometimes come along and just knock them back down again. Evidently, the White Huns came in 500 AD and destroyed Takshila, but we weren't able to find out who the White Huns were. The guide didn't know the answer to that question. But we keep on building, and I thought about what the Dalai Lama says about rebuilding the temples in Tibet, destroyed by the Chinese, and then they just put one brick on top of another and rebuild. So I think I saw, I found the spirit of Meena in that, watching the women in Rawa, the people we met, rebuilding after, in the middle of so much destruction.

[38:47]

Thank you. And I think there's a few minutes for questions or comments. Yes. Thank you very much. That's good. Well, being there, I did get a very different perspective because almost everyone we talked to said that they considered the fight between the United States government and the Taliban and Al-Qaeda to be a family fight. That was their phrase, a family fight. They consider Al-Qaeda and the Taliban to be completely the creation of the U.S. And that the fact that they came to Afghanistan and took over Afghanistan

[39:50]

was so terrible for them. that the United States' war with them has little to do with Afghanistan itself. And they are hoping the world, the whole world, will help them to create a peaceful country and build their country back up. But they are only cautiously hopeful. They felt like, again and again, people told us, well, everyone is here, people are here now, but we're so afraid they're just going to leave us, go away again and forget about us. In some areas, they almost have too much help, you know, where the Turks, the Germans, and the Russians right now are all three training a police force in Kabul and in different ways. And then Latifa's cousin said pretty soon, there are too many of them now, and then pretty soon they'll all just leave. He was worried about that. So they don't dislike Americans. They were very, very grateful to any Americans there helping them.

[40:55]

We were nothing but welcomed in Afghanistan as opposed to in Pakistan. But they are just very skeptical about what America's intentions are or George Bush's intentions are. Yes. How did you eat? Well, very little. We ate We tried to eat boiled food. We were afraid of being sick and actually we were sick and are sick. I just hope every single person here is grateful for turning a tap and seeing clean water come out of our faucets. There wasn't good water and there wasn't clean food, we lost our appetites and every meal we would just ask for a plastic bag and put the leftovers in and a few minutes later in a car, roll down the window and hand it to beggars.

[41:58]

You know, the couple is full of little children, come up and tap when the car stops, they tap gently, smile, and they have these bright blue or hazel Afghan eyes. Afghan people are the original Aryan people. Their airline is called Ariana, their former airline they used to have. And they are very, very pretty, beautiful people. And so, you know, it was so metaphoric of the literal scraps from our table that we could give. Persian woman. I put in the parenthesis. It's Afghan, Gorgistan, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Persian, Iranian. They're all MENA, like yourself, have traveled. The story of MENA is story of my childhood and all my countrymen.

[43:03]

It's a time, I guess, this is a century of healing. And that's why the attention is going to Afghanistan. But this is the time for women in, I would say, Middle East. It's a time to get, to be heard. What they have practiced was tolerance and love. And that's not going to last. It's right now we are seeing the whole world, even President Bush is taking that credit is because this woman has helped to keep the families together. And as myself left Iran because of the same situation. I was in university and I had to leave because of the political reason. And I have been here attacked by terror, with this hostage crisis here at UC Berkeley in 1982.

[44:12]

And then going back to Iran in the Iraq wars, and then I got, I had to, I got abandoned by the government, but hopefully I got out. not to go too much into politics, because we know what the politics is. We are not going to be too helpful, unfortunately. That's the image we learned that we are not going to be helpful. What CIA is going to decide, what KFG is going to decide, that's going to be our destiny. And right now, my friend this morning said, did you know the war started? They started, because we are waiting for the big war right now. And this is the next step, this is going to start with September 11th. But we are having a lot of hope. The whole attention of the world, energy, is going to that part of the world.

[45:16]

And we see a lot of hope is coming, light is coming. I'm so sorry what happened with September 11th. But the cause is what's going to happen late for us. It's going to be in big pictures. I immediately traveled to LA and I started a self-healing project doing the Qigong and food and healing at parks in LA. Right now I'm doing every Sunday and Thursday in Los Angeles parks. Which we also, the police stopped us many times, but again, we are getting help to put back these classes. And that was just purposely to bring people's attention for self-healing. As a Buddhist peace fellowship is doing that, helping

[46:17]

just bring people's attention. We have to heal ourselves to heal the world. So I really appreciate to bring the Meena's story and your story and then I see big big connection and then we are getting together and I thank you everybody. Thank you so much. I need the support of women like you to accomplish this. I have all these notes now and I have to write a book and I hope, I only am hoping and trying my best to represent women like yourself through her life. I know that's what she means to people. When I was talking earlier about how people didn't cry about their own pain and their own experience, they do cry about her. Everybody easily weeps and cries about her death, and I saw how she also provides that healing kind of catalyst that is an emblem of all those who have been killed and driven away or arrived here, taken away from everything, as you did.

[47:30]

and what that experience is like, and also how hard it is to go back home again for the refugees. So, thank you for talking about your life. Thank you. I think it's time to stop. One more question. One more question. Time for one more. Dolly. Dolly, thank you so much for bringing your impressions and your thoughts on this very urgent and sensitive topic for all of us. The question I have is, what can we do? What can we do? What can I do? Is there a way to contribute to time and volunteer work of some kind right off the bat? We can do it starting Monday morning. Well, I guess I would say that Donations to Rawalpindi are really helpful. I saw that with my own eyes. I went to their newly opened hospital which is in Rawalpindi, this big slummy city half an hour from Islamabad.

[48:40]

hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees are living. And they opened it since September 11th. They tried to get money for that hospital for seven years. It closed for lack of funds in 93. And all these years, they never could raise any money. They would get a few hits to their website occasionally. Now, enough money has been raised to reopen it. And these young girls who are also going to school, bought all the things, x-ray machine, operating table, laboratory equipment, and they rented a small, a little building, and I saw it filled with women and kids, babies crying, everybody's sick, and it has 24 beds. Where can we send the money? Well, on the website of Rawa, rawa.org, it shows the bank account is Afghan Women's Mission, which is done by some people in Santa Barbara. And they send the money over there. And I saw how dedicated all of these women are.

[49:45]

I really think it's a a good thing, you know, that nobody's profiting or misusing funds or anything like that. And I'm hoping the proceeds from the book I'm writing will go to the same place. How do you spell Rahwa again? Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan, R-A-W-A. Dot org. Yeah. So that's one thing. Thank you. Right. So that's just one suggestion. But keeping up our own practice and sitting in the middle of all this terrible news today even is, I think, so important for us all to keep doing. Thank you. Maybe just one quick thing. Pardon me? That's a shill, my shill question.

[50:50]

There's a leaflet on the community building board of some other talks I'm giving to report that with my translator, Latifa, but right behind. There's an Afghan widows project that three women in Fremont, three Afghans in Fremont, have started. And I've been trying all week to get a number, an address where we can send donations. I'll still try. But they want to start a women's shelter in Afghanistan for refugee women, for women who are widows, mainly for widows and their families. So if anybody's interested, I'm still trying to get an address that we can send donations to. Great. Thank you. Thank you.

[51:48]

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