Mother-of-two's transformation in Afghanistan from burka to bikini

12 April 2012

There is a quiet buzz of happy conversation as the students at the world's most unlikely hairdressing academy practise the arcane arts of perms, tints and extensions on a row of life-size plastic heads.

All are wearing high heels and make-up, but their heads are covered with long scarves. There are no men around, save the Kalashnikov-toting guards in a leopardskin-print sentry box outside the walled compound.

This is the Kabul Beauty School, a Western-style coffee bar and hairdressing salon in the Afghan capital that has so far offered the promise of a new life to nearly 200 women who have been left destitute by decades of warfare and rule by Islamic fundamentalists.

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Debbie and her Afghan warlord husband Sam

The school is run by Debbie Rodriguez, an eccentric American mother of two from Michigan. Debbie, 46, was on the run from a disastrous marriage when she arrived in Afghanistan five years ago with a Christian humanitarian group.

She had come to work as a nursing assistant, but she found her skills as a hairdresser - she had worked in salons since the age of 15 - were far more in demand.

Beauty salons had been banned in 1996 by the Taliban, which imposed a draconian regime on Afghan women: they were forced to wear the burka, forbidden to work, barred from education past the age of eight and faced public flogging and execution for violating religious laws.

But in a country waking up to a new liberalism after the American-sponsored toppling of the Taliban in 2001, it soon became clear to Western aid workers and local women that there were no hairdressers - and when word got around that Debbie was a wizard with scissors, there was a stampede for her services.

"When I got back to my hotel room at night, my door would be plastered with 20 or 30 Post-It notes from people asking me to cut their hair," she recalled.

Now her account of her five-year odyssey that has seen Debbie help set up a salon and beauty academy, divorce her American husband and marry the assistant to a local warlord who sleeps with a Kalashnikov by their bed, has become an American publishing sensation. Her book, The Kabul Beauty School, will be published in Britain later this month.

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Bridal makeup is a speciality of The Kabul Beauty School

Today the school she co-founded is a registered charity that trains Afghan women who have few opportunities for work.

Yet Debbie's personal journey has been every bit as fascinating as that of the students she has trained to give Brazilian bikini waxes and bobs.

Her visit with a Christian charity, Care For All Foundation (CFAF), in May 2002 was part of her search for fulfilment that began a year earlier, when she felt stifled in her marriage to an American Bible-basher.

She began training as a volunteer disaster worker with CFAF - and in September 2001 found herself in New York, offering assistance to firefighters and rescue workers amid the rubble of the World Trade Centre.

"It was a hard experience, but so fabulous,' she recalled. "When I went home, it was "Taliban, Taliban, Taliban" on the TV, radio and in the papers. I saw these women in Afghanistan and, at the same time, I felt so trapped in my marriage.

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Afghan women were forced to wear the burka under Taliban rule

"I told my ex-husband there was nothing he could do to stop me from going to Afghanistan. I did not know what I was supposed to be doing, but I knew I was supposed to be there."

She begged a medical team from the charity to let her travel with them to Kabul and raised money for her tickets by selling cookies.

"I had no intention of staying any longer than a month," she said. "But in Afghanistan all my misery disappeared. There were so many people who had real problems, mine were nothing.

"It was embarrassing to say I had a troubled marriage, because my husband didn't try to set me on fire, which is not uncommon here."

She was then asked to help train women to meet the burgeoning post-Taliban demand for beauty treatments, often for Afghan brides on their wedding day.

However, women working is still taboo for many fundamentalists, so being a hairdresser can be a dangerous occupation - hence the armed guards.

Afghanistan is still a fiercely traditional society and most women are married at 12. Even sex within marriage is considered so shameful that women hide their pregnancies.

Before the Taliban came to power in 1996, there was a flourishing world of women-only beauty parlours - some of which were fronts for brothels.

So Debbie is keenly aware that the salon must not only be beyond reproach, but must be seen to be so. The only men allowed as far as the gate of the school, which also includes a coffee shop and charity gift shop, are fathers, brothers or husbands.

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Debbie on her wedding day

Some of the students' stories are heartbreaking. Mina (all the women's names have been changed in the book to protect them) is a beautiful, elegantly dressed woman - no mean feat in a country where the average family income is £400 a year.

She lives in two small rooms in a dangerous area of Kabul, where she could be raped or murdered just walking home.

Her family sold her to pay a debt to a much older man when she was ten. Mina fled to Kabul and worked as a cleaner for Debbie. After two years she asked if she could join the school and is now the salon's manager.

Hama's life has been equally grim. Her father sold his entire family - wife and children - to a much older man who, the father claimed, was an uncle who would marry her.

"Girls are not respected as humans. Fathers don't look at them as people to cherish, but as a way to feed their family," said Debbie.

Six women work at the school, which has trained 170 women, most of whom have gone on to work at other salons that have opened since the fall of the Taliban.

The staff are like family, all swapping stories, including Debbie, of the trouble with their Afghan husbands. One of the ways women avoid having sex with their husbands is not to bring water to their homes, most of which don't have running water.

"The big thing after sex is showering, it's an Islamic custom. It's no sex tonight because there is no water," Debbie laughed.

She also told the story of how she was groped in a market and was then advised that this was the right of all Afghan males. She laid the molester flat with a knock-out punch.

Debbie knows that, for an Afghan woman, striking a man remains a penal offence. But for her, as an angry Westerner, it was a moment of liberating satisfaction.

Since writing her book, Debbie has become a celebrity in Kabul and in America, where she has made the Top 10 of The New York Times' bestseller list. But, not everyone is convinced of her saintly image.

Six American women involved in the founding of the school say Debbie's book exaggerates her role. They have also alleged that, in their absence, she moved the school from its original home in Kabul's Women's Ministry, where she was not allowed to make a profit, to a house she shares with her new Afghan/Uzbek husband, where she could make money.

One of the co-founders, Sheila McGurk, told The New York Times: '[The book] makes Debbie out to be Mother Teresa. And it's wrong."

Certainly prices are high at the salon, which caters mainly for Western women. It costs £48 for a cut and blow-dry and £16 for a manicure.

But Debbie lives in a modest three-room apartment above the salon and said she puts any money she makes back into the school.

She also argued that she has never claimed to be the founder of the school. "Others have claimed that, not me," she said.

"I have always said I helped found the school. The book is not a detailed description of every event. It is and always has been about the women and their stories."

Debbie's image is not helped by the fact that her new husband, Sam, who is 12 years her junior, is the assistant to the notorious Afghan warlord General Abdul Rashid Dostum, who is suspected of killing as many as 50,000 people and is now part of President Karzai's government.

Debbie married Sam four years ago, just 20 days after their first meeting, despite the fact that he hardly spoke any English and was married to a woman with whom he had had seven daughters.

Debbie admitted she wouldn't have married so quickly, but knew she could not continue to see him unless they got married. The only low point, she said, came when his first wife, who lives with her children in Saudi Arabia, gave birth to a son.

"It felt as if he had cheated on me," she said. "My American brain can't process the fact that I am a second wife. So I've made up the story that he's divorced and he has to go to Saudi Arabia to visit his children, which he does one month every year."

And despite the fact that neither she nor Sam speaks each other's language particularly well, she insists their marriage has grown stronger.

"The great bonus is that you don't have to apologise about all the terrible things you've said in an argument, because neither of us has the faintest clue what the other has said," she laughs.

While we talked, Sam came into the cafe to ask Debbie a question. He's a burly man with a moustache, a scar across his cheek and a gun in his pocket.

He played with her hair extensions in a loving manner - an unusual sight in a country where men and women rarely even speak - and told me Debbie is old.

"But in Afghanistan we like antiques," he said, with a wicked laugh.

Debbie refers to him as Fred Flintstone with a rocket launcher.

Whatever the truth about its origins, The Kabul Beauty School remains an oasis of hope and cheer. Despite the turmoil outside, the students and customers chat as they would in a salon anywhere else in the world.

And every generation of graduates spreads the gospel that women can earn their own living in Afghanistan and free themselves from the Taliban's crippling straitjacket of tradition and puritanism.

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