Jamila Afghani, a devout woman who covers her head and wears layers of ankle-length clothing, is leading a movement to enfranchise women at the Noor Education Centre in Kabul.

(Unless otherwise indicated, all photos are by Sally Armstrong.)

Palwasha Hasan, the director of a Canadian-funded women’s rights project in Afghanistan, says the key to reform is that a women’s movement is taking shape. “It’s not strong yet. But we all know each other and we’re starting to come together.”

Dr. Sima Samar, the chair of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, has paid a heavy price for thumbing her nose at the Taliban and criticizing the fundamentalists. She has not been able to leave her home or office without bodyguards for six long years.

Hamida Omid, the most optimistic woman in Afghanistan, is the principal of the women’s high school in Kabul. She vows her students’ lives will improve.

On the road to Rukha, in the rugged but beautiful Panjshir Valley. Rukha is home to a test-case health clinic where the highest infant- and maternal-mortality rates in the world are starting to fall.

A pint-sized patient at the Rukha clinic in Panjshir waits for treatment. His mother, Marzia, says she walks one hour to the clinic because “here our one hundred problems can be solved.”

Children are yoked to the consequences of war. They are too small for their age, too wise for their years, too needy for words. But they are fetching and curious, beguiling and vulnerable, quick to laugh and hungry for love.

Dr. Frogh Malalay, a widow whose husband was killed by the Taliban, brings medical care to the Rukha clinic. “Men used to tell women they couldn’t come here. They said, ‘If she dies, she dies.’ They’re more open-minded now.”

Keeping the home fires burning at minus twenty degrees Celcius in Dr.Malalay’s house beside the clinic where she lives with her eight-year-old son.

Sharifa with two of her six children in January 2008. She managed to keep her family out of harm’s way during the Taliban regime, but still fears for the future.

Tamanna Naveed, seventeen, whose name means “hope,” is the inspiration for tomorrow. She can make mouth-watering kabuli, recite the long history of her country, and stand strong for the rights of women.

Twenty-six little girls live in the orphanage funded by the Afghan Women’s Association in Canada. Soldiers from the Canadian military dropped off teddy bears that became the prize possession of each of the children.

These children of war will smile at a stranger, wink at the pomposity of power-tripping adults, and hang onto a conversation with the curiosity so precious in young people.

Fatima Gailani, president of the Afghanistan Red Crescent Society, treads a fine line between a life of privilege as the daughter of the spiritual leader of the Sunni Muslims and a job that requires her to be 100 percent neutral. She says, “The Taliban is the enemy, but their children aren’t.”

Shegofa Mehri with her father, Engineer Akram Mehri, is the example the girls from Jaghori want to follow. She was the first to graduate from high school and is presently a second-year student at Bolzano University in Italy.

Wearing the required black school frocks and white head scarves, the students come in droves over the hills and down the valleys, along the furrowed paths and dusty byways, to their school in faraway Jaghori.

Wahida says she wants to be an astronaut. The teachers’ salaries at the school she attends in Jaghori are paid by Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan. Wahida missed five years of school when the Taliban denied girls an education, but says nothing can stop her now.

There are only eleven girls in this senior class, as opposed to sixty per class in the junior grades. Most girls leave school when they are fifteen to get married. Four of these girls are already engaged, but claim they will not marry until they have graduated from high school.

Turquoise Mountain Foundation: In the reception room of Peacock House in Murad Khane, Kabul, where the work has been completed (see bottom photo), you could be forgiven for thinking you had stumbled into another century. The delicate woven carpets and magnificent wooden carvings of peacocks and flowers, the intricate jali patterns and brilliant coloured threads in the cushions that surround the room, speak of a finer time, a time of self-admiration and self-confidence. (Courtesy of Turquoise Mountain Foundation)

BBC journalist Lyse Doucet, Dr. Sima Samar, and I stand outside the office of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission in Kabul in 2004. (Photo: Alister Bell)