Stories of Ordinary Women Doing Extraordinary Things

by Lana Šlezić

In March 2004, when award-winning photographer Lana Šlezić began an assignment in Afghanistan, she never dreamed she would stay for two years. At the time she believed that since the ousting of the suffocating Taliban in 2001, Afghan women and girls were living under considerably less oppressive conditions. She soon discovered that life for Afghan women was not as she expected and felt compelled to stay and document their story. [Read more →]

In “First Victims of Freedom”, Amy DePaul interviews Iraq’s most tenacious feminist , Yanar Mohammed, founder of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq, about why she says the U.S. war and its aftermath have completely disenfranchised women in the country. [Read more →]

On December 17, 2003, a 26-year-old woman named Malalai Joya joined hundreds of others in a large tent in Kabul, Afghanistan, to adopt a new constitution for their war-torn nation. The gathering, called a Loya Jirga (traditional grand assembly), was dominated by U.S.-backed warlords who were responsible for mass slaughter and violence in the 1980s and early 1990s. Malalai Joya was present as an elected delegate from the remote Farah province in western Afghanistan. [Read more →]

Lakota Harden (Minnecoujou/Yankton Lakota & HoChunk,) is an orator, activist, community organizer, workshop facilitator, radio host and poet. She has dedicated her life, as a daughter of seven generations of Lakota leaders, to liberation and justice. Harden first became an accomplished speaker as a youth and representative of the early American Indian Movement’s “We Will Remember” Survival School on the Pine Ridge reservation, established out of the 1973 Wounded Knee occupation. She has continued her activism over the years, working with the International Indian Treaty Council (IITC), Women of All Red Nations (WARN) and the Black Hills Alliance. [Read more →]

At the height of the Cold War, the Osman family frantically escapes from Afghanistan while leaving almost everything behind. In the ensuing chaos, their only suitcase filled with family photos is stolen. [Read more →]