BLOG: Callison: Watertown Teacher Driven to Empower Afghan Women

These are the faces that Mary Redlin still sees, days after she returned from Afghanistan:

A 35-year-old woman, almost 25 years of her life spent in an arranged marriage, the mother of six, talking about her life with quiet despair.

A woman in the market, skin stretched and puckered, probably by fire or acid.

Women running "bakeries," tandori ovens where they would take dough other women would bring in, bake it in five minutes and return it to feed a family.

A sea of young girls, dressed in black uniforms and wearing white headscarves, excitedly chattering after a day in school.

Redlin, a Watertown native who began teaching this month at Lake Area Technical School, spent three weeks this summer working with a women's empowerment program offered through Concern Worldwide.

Concern Worldwide is a nongovernmental Irish charity that focuses its efforts on developing countries. Redlin was recruited to help with the economics piece of its empowerment program, which also includes health, education and nutrition issues.

"It was a lot tougher than I thought it was going to be," says Redlin, sitting in her loft apartment in Watertown's downtown. "The insecurity is awful in the country. When you go down the street, it is police after police after police, checkpoint after checkpoint after checkpoint."

Redlin, 50, was in remote, rugged Badakhshan province when 10 of a humanitarian team's 12 members were shot dead by gunmen.

"My translator was on the phone and hung up and looked at me and said 10 people were just killed, aid workers in Badakhshan," Redlin recalls.

Six of the 10 were Americans.

While that made Redlin uneasy, she never felt personally threatened. Instead, she spent the three weeks focusing on helping Afghan women establish businesses that could change their lives in a way the people who always have experienced freedom really can't imagine.

Redlin would travel to the homes of Afghan women because few of them are permitted to leave their dwellings. That means the businesses they develop must be something that can be done without traveling elsewhere.

"They can do embroidery, they can do crafts, they can make jewelry. They can do things within their own homes, but then they have to be linked to market," Redlin says. "That's the whole thing. It's how can you link those women to a market so they can do something at home."

Redlin's background has taken her to 35 countries. After more than a decade in the telecommunications industry, she obtained a master's degree and decided to leave the corporate world.

"I decided I'd been so blessed in my life, I will give back, so I became a United Nations volunteer," Redlin says.

She lived in Uganda for two years before returning to South Dakota. After working on U.S. Sen. Tom Daschle's unsuccessful re-election campaign in 2006, Redlin returned to East Africa, spending two more years as a U.N. volunteer, then two years consulting in Sudan and East Timor.

But despite her background in East Africa, Redlin was unprepared for the lives led by Afghan women.

Even though the cultural differences between East Africa and the United States could be glaring - "In Africa, if the husband doesn't beat me, he doesn't love me," Redlin says - African women are treated better than their counterparts in Afghanistan.

"If you sit down with an African woman, she still had a smile, she had a much calmer way about her, and she was happy to see you," Redlin says. "In Afghanistan, it was just like, wow, they're worse than a dog. They're treated so badly. There was no joy anywhere."

Eighty percent of the Afghan women are beaten, Redlin says, and arranged marriages for 11-, 12- and 13-year-olds are common.

There are positive signs, such as the young girls Redlin saw walking home from school.

"That was encouraging to see that," she says. "They were thirsty for school and thirsty for knowledge and thirsty to learn. Even the older women. There were really old women in the (literacy) program, learning how to read and write."

Redlin, who wore a headscarf when she walked on the streets of Kabul and in the villages, says she comes back changed after every such trip.

"Just to sit in a woman's home and talk with the local women and get some insight into their lives," Redlin says. "They were very open about talking to me. Most of the time it was through a translator, but if they knew a little English they would come up and talk to me."