'I had no idea women were treated like this'
December 22, 2008
VANCOUVER -- Lauryn Oates was 14 when she first heard the word "Taliban." A bewildering photo in a local newspaper - of an Afghan woman covered from head to toe - caught her attention. The Grade 9 student was stunned to read that women under the Taliban had lost nearly all their freedom, including the right to show their faces in public.
That was 12 years ago, long before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington and before Osama bin Laden became a household name.
Ms. Oates has been an activist for Afghan women ever since.
Now 26, she remembers how the newspaper story, which outlined a series of Taliban edicts against women, shattered her sheltered world.
Ms. Oates moped around the house for weeks, unable to shake the image of the covered woman. "My whole world blew apart," she recalled. "I had no idea that women were treated like this."
Eventually, her mother encouraged her to act. Ms. Oates started a petition at her high school, urging the Canadian government to denounce the Taliban. She gathered about 400 signatures and sent the petition to Ottawa, Washington and Amnesty International. She even found a fax number on the Internet for the Taliban and sent them a copy of the petition, too.
Since then, Ms. Oates has become one of Canada's leading advocates and fundraisers for educational reform in Afghanistan. She's been to the war-torn country about a dozen times in the past decade and has helped build schools and libraries and develop literacy programs.
Her no-nonsense dedication has impressed seasoned aid workers and journalists twice her age.
"There is something about her that commands your loyalty," said Victoria writer and educator Terry Glavin, who has written about and travelled to Afghanistan.
"She is the real thing. Here's this person who got this idea when she was 14. She said: 'This sucks. I'm going to do something about it.' It's been all Afghanistan, all the time, ever since. She's smart as a whip and has a clear agenda."
In an interview at a Vancouver White Spot restaurant, Ms. Oates was friendly and down-to-earth, but when talk turned to educational opportunities for girls and women in Afghanistan, her manner grew urgent.
Education, she said, is the key to getting the country on its feet after decades of war. "Through education, you can address human rights," she said, recalling a conversation she once had with an illiterate Afghan man who believed women's brains were much smaller than men's, hence his certainty that they were inferior creatures.
Ms. Oates is also the project director for a Canadian International Development Agency-funded teacher-training program.
What distinguishes her from a raft of other aid workers is her nimble ability to multitask.
When she's not at home fundraising, she's in Afghanistan overseeing the projects herself. She also does aid work in Uganda and is at work on a PhD in education at the University of British Columbia.
Her work has garnered a number of honours, including her being named Chatelaine Woman of the Year in 2000.
Most of Ms. Oates' work in Afghanistan is aligned with volunteer organization Canadian Women for Women, which started in 1997 and raises money for educational projects in Afghanistan.
In 1999, she volunteered to set up a Vancouver chapter. She was given the green light and raised $5,000 at a North Vancouver restaurant, owned by a high-school friend's father.
Later, when she flew to Calgary to meet with staff, they were shocked that she was a 16-year-old high-school student. "My age hadn't come up before," she said sheepishly.
Today, seven years after the NATO-led invasion that ousted the Taliban, she is aware that Afghanistan fatigue has set in among the Canadian people.
More than 100 Canadian soldiers have been killed since the mission began and security in the country is spiralling as Taliban insurgents wage a deadly campaign. Canadian aid workers and journalists have been the targets of kidnapping and ambushes and in August, Ms. Oates's close friend and mentor, Jacqueline Kirk, a Montreal-based aid worker with the International Rescue Committee, was killed in a road ambush near Kabul. Two colleagues and a driver also died when gunmen opened fire on the car.
Ms. Kirk's death shook Ms. Oates. On her last trip to Afghanistan in October, she was nervous - for the first time. She drastically reduced the time she spend travelling in cars and wore a burka when she did venture into the countryside.
"It's not an option for me to give up this work," she said. "But I've learned that I'm not invincible."
Still, each time she returns to Afghanistan, she is buoyed by the progress she sees.
"Canadians seem so focused on the bad, and certainly that is compelling. But for some reason it doesn't seem to sell to point out all the good things. Just in our small project, we've seen incredible changes."
She said the Afghans she encounters, all ordinary, mostly rural people, are terrified at the prospect of a return to Taliban control.
In the past year, Ms. Oates said, Canadian Women for Women has helped build a new school for girls near Jalalabad from $75,000 raised entirely by Canadian donations.
Contrary to naysayers, Ms. Oates said, ordinary Afghans want international aid and intervention.
"People have this incredible resilience," she said. "If they're willing to go on, we have to be behind them. The least we can do is stand by them. This is not about charity or pity. I would never tolerate this in my country.
"I've learned how to be a human being there. There is such unbelievable hospitality and kindness, contrasted against such cruelty."
*****
ONE TO WATCH
Who
Lauryn Oates, activist for Afghan women
Why to watch her
She'll be fighting the Afghanistan-fatigue mindset in Canada.
