Dear Group:  Yesterday I posted my Letter to President Obama: Plea for the Human Rights of Women, Tribute to a Matriarch at http://feministadvisoryboard.blogspot.com.

I’m asking that people sign the letter using the comments box.  Today I received this update (below) on life in Afghanistan, and thought I would include part of it with my request for signatures for the Letter to President Obama.

Please feel free to repost my letter anywhere you think appropriate.  You may use it to drive traffic to your own site as long as you make your comment section easy to use and accessible.  For this letter, I have removed moderation, allowed anyone to comment, yet require the signer to fill in the "captcha" letters/numbers.

thank you very much

Madama

Sunita Viswanath posted an announcement to the cause Women for Afghan Women.

I am sitting in WAW Executive Director Manizha Naderi’s office in our wonderful Family Guidance Center. The room has windows on three sides, and a view of mountains. This is a very busy and organized office, with a staff of maybe 25 people made up of counselors, lawyers, case workers, and a genius "logistics" guy who basically is the organization’s "fixer." Also guards, cooks, cleaners and drivers. We’ve seen over 650 clients here in Kabul since 2006. 19% of our cases have been men. All clients of the Family Guidance Centers have experienced human rights violations.

Currently there are 47 women in our Kabul women’s shelter. I visited the shelter yesterday and will be back there tomorrow. Each shelter resident’s story is more horrific than the next. Forced marriages, "baad" cases, where a girl is given over to another family in order as compensation for a crime, rapes, battered wives, women forced into prostitution by their husbands, a little girl who was sold and then and chained and treated like a dog, on and on, a little girl who was raped at 5, another who was raped at 7… They all stay at our shelter, one of only three in Kabul. The shelter is beautiful, clean, bright. There is a garden, and we are going to give every child here a patch of garden to grow flowers, herbs and vegetables. As you enter the shelter you smell roses growing in the front garden patch. There are 13 children living in the shelter, five of them are clients themselves, and are attending a private school thanks to a private donation to fund this. Eight children in the shelter are there with their mothers who are clients.
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(You can read more here: View Announcement)

PLEASE SIGN the Letter to President Obama: Plea for the Human Rights of Women, Tribute to a Matriarch by leaving your name (and a comment, if you choose) in the comments box for the post.