It’s tricky these days to write about real subject matter. The moment you delve into any substantive topic as an author, you risk offending someone. This book is not a political statement. It’s a story drawn from the real world about one woman’s attempt to ameliorate the suffering of other women half a world away.
I was in the middle of the story when a man with evil in his heart gunned down Muslims at prayer in New Zealand. Like all decent people around the world, I was horrified by this. I attended an interfaith prayer service at our local mosque together with Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and other Christians. The prayer room was packed with people who had come to tell our Muslim neighbors that they are welcome here and that we sympathize with their terrible loss.
It was an amazing experience—more than a thousand people of all faiths praying to God for forgiveness and mercy and vowing to support one another and protect one another from violence and bigotry. Ministers and rabbis shared the microphone with an imam and other Muslim speakers. I was moved to tears as a nephew of one of the men slain in New Zealand spoke of his uncle’s final heroic moments, trying to save others.
One Muslim man spoke eloquently to the tendency of human beings to conflate the actions of extremists with the groups to which they claim to belong.
I have tried not to do that in this story. I’ve made a sincere effort to differentiate between Islam as a world religion and the violent extremism of the Taliban and Daesh/IS. It is not my intention to vilify or misrepresent any group of people or to offend my Muslim readers. I wanted to share just a tiny bit of the tragedy of Afghanistan, a once-thriving nation that has been hurled backward by four decades of brutality and warfare, by focusing on the desperate plight of Afghan women.
Back in 2004 when Jennifer Braun, who inspired this story, began her effort to set up a midwifery school and hospital in Bamyan, Afghanistan had a stillbirth/neonatal mortality rate of roughly one in six. That’s almost unfathomable. Imagine coming from catching babies in the U.S., where stillbirths are rare, to Afghanistan, where they’re a daily occurrence, even at a small rural clinic. I saw a photo of four newly stillborn babies, lying in a row with little handmade string-and-paper tags on their tiny ankles.
It broke my heart.
Though things have improved and Afghanistan is making heroic efforts to improve women’s access to healthcare, most Afghan women still give birth without skilled attendants outside a hospital. Many never receive prenatal care. As a result, Afghan women currently face a one-in-eight lifetime risk of dying from pregnancy- and childbirth-related causes.
One in eight.
That’s the same risk women in the U.S. face when it comes to breast cancer.
But this isn’t a National Geographic article. It’s a love story about a man who has been a part of the war there for most of his adult life and a woman desperate to make change. I hope you enjoy their story.
Peace,
Pamela Clare
April 14, 2019