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Afghani female hero, Malalai Joya returns for US tour. Starts Oct 4th
http://www.afghanwomensmission.org/2013/09/malalai-joya-national-tour-2013/Acclaimed Afghan human rights activist and author, Malalai Joya, returns to the US this fall for a national tour coinciding with the 12th anniversary of the start of the US war in Afghanistan. Joya’s tour is sponsored by the United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) and Afghan Women’s Mission (AWM).
During her tour Joya will address the following questions:
• Why are Afghan women more vulnerable than ever?
• What is the impact of US drones, bombs, and raids?
• What does the end of the US’s longest war mean?
• Why is violence increasing after 11 years of war?
Below is a list of cities that Malalai Joya will be speaking at during her Fall 2013 tour: (the list is growing)
NEW YORK
Friday October 4, 2013, 7 pm
The Community Church of New York
40 E. 35th Street, New York, NY
Free and open to the public.
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS
Sunday, October 6, 2013, 7 – 9 pm
Malalai Joya and Noam Chomsky
First Parish Unitarian-Universalist, 3 Church St, Harvard Sq T, Cambridge
Requested Donation: $10. $5 students/low income/unemployed – No one turned away
There will be a reception from 5-7 pm with Ms. Joya to raise money for organizations and charities benefiting Afghan women and children before the evening program. There will be music and refreshments will be served. Contribution requested: $20, or $10 for students/low income/unemployed.
Monday, October 7, 2013, 12 noon
Tufts University, Barum 104
Monday, October 7, 2013, 3:30 pm
Univ. of Mass. Boston, Campus Center, Ballroom C, 3rd flr
Monday, October 7, 2013, 7 pm
Wellesley College, Tishman Commons, Lulu Wang Campus Center
Monday, October 8, 2013, 1 pm
Suffolk University
AMHERST, MASSACHUSETTS
TBA
ALBANY, NEW YORK
TBA
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
SAN FRANCISCO ,CALIFORNIA
Thursday October 17, 2013, 7:30 – 10 pm
Berkeley City College – Auditorium 21
2050 Center Street between Milvia and Shattuck,
very near the downtown Berkeley BART station.
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
Saturday October 19th 7 – 9 pm
All Saints Church, the Forum
132 N Euclid Ave Pasadena, CA 91101
Media sponsor is KPFK
Entrance is free – suggested donation of $10 will include copy of Joya’s book A Woman Among Warlords
KPFK host Sonali Kolhatkar will host the event – Book signing to follow talk
ORANGE COUNTY, CALIFORNIA
Monday October 21st, 10 am – 12 noon
Cal State Fullerton,
Langsdorf Hall (LH) Room 318, Cal State Fullerton (LH is along Nutwood Ave)
Campus Map: http://www.fullerton.edu/campusmap/
Media sponsor is KPFK
SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA
Monday, Oct. 21st, 7 pm
Al Awda Center, 2720 Loker Avenue West Suite J, Carlsbad CA 92010
Co-sponsored by Al-Awda, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition
For more information on this event, or to join the Facebook event page, click here
Tuesday, Oct. 22, 11am
San Diego City College, V101 (16th and C Streets)
Tuesday, Oct. 22, 7 pm
San Diego State University, Nassatir Hall 100
A Feminist Reaseach Colloquium, co-sponsored by the Bread and Roses Center of the Department of Women’s Studies, and the Center for Intercultural Relations, SDSU
Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2 pm
UCSD (room tbd)
Wednesday, Oct. 23, 7 pm
Church of the Brethren, 3850 Westgate Pl., San Diego 92105
***********************
Malalai Joya was named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2010. An extraordinary young woman raised in the refugee camps of Iran and Pakistan, Joya became a teacher in secret girls’ schools, hiding her books under her burqa so the Taliban couldn’t find them; she helped establish a free medical clinic and orphanage in her impoverished home province of Farah; and at a constitutional assembly in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2003, she stood up and denounced her country’s powerful NATO-backed warlords. She was twenty-five years old. Two years later, she became the youngest person elected to Afghanistan’s new Parliament. In 2007, she was suspended from Parliament for her persistent criticism of the warlords and drug barons and their cronies. She has survived four assassination attempts to date, is accompanied at all times by armed guards, and sleeps only in safe houses.
Joya takes us inside this massively important and insufficiently understood country, shows us the desperate day-to-day situations its remarkable people face at every turn, and recounts some of the many acts of rebellion that are helping to change it. A controversial political figure in one of the most dangerous places on earth, Malalai Joya is a hero for our times.
http://www.amazon.com/Woman-Among-Warlords-Extraordinary-Afghan/dp/1439109478/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1380427089&sr=8-1&keywords=malalai+joya
3 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
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http://www.rawa.org/s.html
During the Soviet occupation, we were distributing anti-Soviet and anti-puppets leaflets, staging demonstrations and strikes in schools and universities, instigating the women to contribute in resistance war in any possible way despite the opposition from the fundamentalists, running schools, a hospital etc. for refugees, publishing and distributing "Payam-e-Zan" (Women's Message) and so on. It was in the course of such activities that a number of our activists were arrested in Kabul underwent horribly tortures and some of them languished about 8 years in the notorious prisons, and our founding leader Meena and her two aides were murdered at the hands of the KHAD agents and their fundamentalist accomplices in 1987.
After the fall of the puppet government and the invasion of the fundamentalists bands into Kabul, RAWA focused more and more on women's rights, human rights and exposition of the fundamentalists barbaric actions.
Our activities:
1) In Pakistan:
Due to RAWA's principled anti-fundamentalist stand, our social work amongst refugee Afghan women is an uphill struggle. Despite numerous difficulties we have regular contact with women in different camps of Pakistan. We happily note that the fundamentalists' endeavors in this regard have been vastly counter-productive as a great number of women from refugee camps in Quetta and Peshawar approach us for comfort, aid and support. However, the aid and support we can give them are mostly moral, as facing grave financial problems, little material help can be provided to them.
Notwithstanding, we are very much encouraged by the reactions we receive from refugee women. In order to better assist refugee women and children, we try to the best of our ability to attract the support of aid organizations to our health and educational setups. But unfortunately due to the lack of aid most of our projects have not been implemented.
We are also assisting the widows and the families of the prisoners. We contact those who have member of their families imprisoned by the Taliban or Jehadis inside Afghanistan or caught by the Pakistani police and put in the jails of this country. We help them by contacting the police and in some cases providing them judicial and legal help. We are also helping those women who are being tortured or maltreated by their husbands or in-laws. If the tortured/abused women wanted shelter, we try to help them in any possible way.
Financial: Running handicrafts, carpet, tailoring and bead knitting workplaces; running chicken and fish farms; producing jams and pickles and making chalk etc.
2) Inside Afghanistan:
Our work inside Afghanistan consists mainly of support to female victims of war and atrocities committed by belligerent groups. Our workers contact families and particularly women who either themselves or their family members have been victimized by the fundamentalists. Highlighting their misadventures via reports published in Women's Message, alerting international sentinels of human rights such as Amnesty International and similar organizations to human rights violations against women, providing psycho-social support, transferring victims to Pakistan for medical treatment, transferring children of traumatized families to Pakistan for rehabilitation and a better chance of education, tracing missing females and/or their family members, assisting families in evacuating from battlefield and areas affected by any natural calamities and resettling them in safer places, supplying such families with basic living needs and in extreme cases identifying sponsors for 'family adoption' of uprooted families or individuals and facilitating their integration. We also distribute food among needy families in drought/war/earthquake-stricken villages.
.. the list continues
During the Soviet occupation, we were distributing anti-Soviet and anti-puppets leaflets, staging demonstrations and strikes in schools and universities, instigating the women to contribute in resistance war in any possible way despite the opposition from the fundamentalists, running schools, a hospital etc. for refugees, publishing and distributing "Payam-e-Zan" (Women's Message) and so on. It was in the course of such activities that a number of our activists were arrested in Kabul underwent horribly tortures and some of them languished about 8 years in the notorious prisons, and our founding leader Meena and her two aides were murdered at the hands of the KHAD agents and their fundamentalist accomplices in 1987.
After the fall of the puppet government and the invasion of the fundamentalists bands into Kabul, RAWA focused more and more on women's rights, human rights and exposition of the fundamentalists barbaric actions.
Our activities:
1) In Pakistan:
Due to RAWA's principled anti-fundamentalist stand, our social work amongst refugee Afghan women is an uphill struggle. Despite numerous difficulties we have regular contact with women in different camps of Pakistan. We happily note that the fundamentalists' endeavors in this regard have been vastly counter-productive as a great number of women from refugee camps in Quetta and Peshawar approach us for comfort, aid and support. However, the aid and support we can give them are mostly moral, as facing grave financial problems, little material help can be provided to them.
Notwithstanding, we are very much encouraged by the reactions we receive from refugee women. In order to better assist refugee women and children, we try to the best of our ability to attract the support of aid organizations to our health and educational setups. But unfortunately due to the lack of aid most of our projects have not been implemented.
We are also assisting the widows and the families of the prisoners. We contact those who have member of their families imprisoned by the Taliban or Jehadis inside Afghanistan or caught by the Pakistani police and put in the jails of this country. We help them by contacting the police and in some cases providing them judicial and legal help. We are also helping those women who are being tortured or maltreated by their husbands or in-laws. If the tortured/abused women wanted shelter, we try to help them in any possible way.
Financial: Running handicrafts, carpet, tailoring and bead knitting workplaces; running chicken and fish farms; producing jams and pickles and making chalk etc.
2) Inside Afghanistan:
Our work inside Afghanistan consists mainly of support to female victims of war and atrocities committed by belligerent groups. Our workers contact families and particularly women who either themselves or their family members have been victimized by the fundamentalists. Highlighting their misadventures via reports published in Women's Message, alerting international sentinels of human rights such as Amnesty International and similar organizations to human rights violations against women, providing psycho-social support, transferring victims to Pakistan for medical treatment, transferring children of traumatized families to Pakistan for rehabilitation and a better chance of education, tracing missing females and/or their family members, assisting families in evacuating from battlefield and areas affected by any natural calamities and resettling them in safer places, supplying such families with basic living needs and in extreme cases identifying sponsors for 'family adoption' of uprooted families or individuals and facilitating their integration. We also distribute food among needy families in drought/war/earthquake-stricken villages.
.. the list continues