I am eager to share with you amusing missives, both frustrating and exciting personal and professional anecdotes, and updates on the Afghan Women’s Network’s activities. You will be able to follow my experiences in Kabul as I regularly will be posting this blog.

Four days and more than 7000 miles to go. Managing ones assumptions and expectations seems futile, especially when I have been working to with AP and AWN to develop a tentative work plan. They have inevitably been incorporated into this plan. In addition to feeling very flexible, I’m preparing to have my assumptions shattered and for the priorities that structure my work plan to shift very quickly. I’m both excited and apprehensive.

I am trying to be conscious that I will be working in a country, a city, an NGO where rights, political power, security, might all be understood in different terms than I will be able to immediately understand. Based on my previous professional experiences, I understand that all of these are contested and abstract concepts that are frequently articulated in local forms. That being said … women in societies everywhere suffer from internalized forms of oppression and both explicit and implicit forms of violence. I will work side by side with Afghan women in support of their fight, while bearing in mind that on many levels it is our fight.