Makeup for the Soul

Offering cosmetics and perms to the hungry and oppressed may seem a bit Marie Antoinette-ish but what value can one place on a smile where, before, there wasn’t any?

Review by DAPHNE LEE

KABUL BEAUTY SCHOOL: THE ART OF FRIENDSHIP AND FREEDOM

By Deborah Rodriguez

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton, 275 pages

(ISBN: 978-0340935248)

MANY of us spend our lives marvelling at the good done by others. We read or hear about those who have given their time, resources and talents to the less fortunate and we feel impressed, wistful and incredulous.

Often, we are encouraged by others’ generosity to ask ourselves how we can contribute to our fellowman.

The truth is that everyone has something to offer others. Unfortunately, most of us just think about it and talk about it. Very rarely do we take time to actually do it.

Deborah Rodriguez just did it. When she decided to open a beauty school in Kabul, Afghanistan, she didn’t worry about practicalities, logistics or what people would say.

A beauty school in Kabul sounds like a frivolous plan for a war-torn country whose people are hungry and homeless, but a project like that is about so much more than highlights and lipstick.

Recalling a visit to an “undercover” beauty salon (run by local women) in Kabul, Rodriguez writes:

“There were women’s voices, women’s laughter – and that feeling of women relaxing with one another, laying hands on one another, telling one another the details of their lives and news of the lives around them.”

The salon, like salons the world over, was a female enclave, a place where women gathered, free from male scrutiny, criticism and control, and Rodriguez wonders if the real reason the Taliban is so against beauty salons is that they give “women their own space”.

A beauty school, thus, makes sense in Afghanistan, and on many levels. It’s a place where women can gather and support each other emotionally. It’s also a place where women can have fun, a pursuit many of us take for granted, but is rare in a place like Afghanistan.

In the short term, it offers a measure of respite from the grey and grim realities of life. And in the long term, the skills learnt at a beauty school arm women with the means of making an independent living, which boosts confidence and self-esteem, and, often, provides an escape route from a life of abuse.

Rodriguez first went to Kabul as part of a Christian aid mission, but found that she couldn’t contribute much as part of the team.

Back in her hometown of Holland, Michigan, Rodriguez was practically raised in her mum’s beauty salon and became a professional stylist herself.

During her first visit to Kabul, while her aid colleagues were out in the field, treating the sick, Rodriguez was given the task of sitting in the hotel and praying for them.

Instead, she ventured out to the town with her new Afghan friends. She trimmed their hair and one of them, Roshanna, became a fast friend and one of the first students at the beauty school that Rodriguez later helped to establish.

Roshanna is also one of the many Afghan women whom Rodriguez bonded with and whose stories help make Kabul Beauty School more than just a tale of shampoo, perms and hair removal .

Reading about what the average Afghan woman has to bear makes me feel very ashamed of the whinging I do every so often about really inconsequential stuff.

What are traffic jams, the lack of parking in KL and apathetic bank clerks compared with constant beatings, forced marriages and rape?

In Afghanistan, the rape victim is also considered to have committed a crime and is imprisoned. In a case described by Rodriguez, the rape victim’s father kills the rapist and is given a much shorter sentence than his daughter!

Rodriguez is appalled by the suffering she encounters and she tries to help by improving lives through employment and training.

The need to love and be loved obviously plays a big part in Rodriguez’s decision to move to Afghanistan. Twice married and divorced, she left two teenage sons in the States to live among strangers in a strange land.

Describing the moment when she left her abusive second husband, she adds, “I flew to Afghanistan, where my heart would soon fill with new people to love.”

Some might call her spontaneous and brave, while others might say she was simply self-indulgent and foolhardy. Rodriguez strikes me as a free-spirited risk taker with her heart in the right place.

I liked Rodriguez’s straightforward and matter-of-fact storytelling style.

She doesn’t dwell on the depressing aspects of her new life, but she does not avoid them either.

Not one to mince her words or gloss over the harrowing details, she spits them out with a fair bit of anger, directed at the guilty, and doesn’t bother to hide her own anguish and despair.

It’s comforting to know that there is someone who is trying to make a difference and it helps to be able to cry along with her. It’s a start anyway. Tomorrow is when you, and I, can do something, too.