Kabul Beauty School (5 page)

When someone else on the team came to tell me she had a job for me to do, I was momentarily excited. But it turned out she just wanted me to make welcome posters for the new team members who would be arriving soon. I started to feel frustrated and restless, wondering if I’d ever have much of an opportunity to do something meaningful. My consolation in those first few days was that, while everyone else was figuring out how to save lives, I had started to make friends with the Afghans who worked around the compound. The lovely girl who was always so kind about helping me figure out how to get hot water and phone cards to call home was Roshanna. The shy, handsome man who drove the van was Daud.

After a few days, our little group of volunteers went to a meeting of other foreigners who had been living in Kabul for a while—including some who had been there for years. We rode to the meeting site in the van, and when we arrived, our group leaders urged us to get out quickly and duck into the building. No one wanted to attract attention to the fact that a big bunch of foreigners was getting together; it might make us an irresistible target to any Taliban sympathizers who were still in town. Inside, there were about 150 people milling around, eating cookies and introducing themselves, passing out business cards and telling one another about the projects they were involved in. I overheard their conversations and had the sinking feeling that everyone else had been trained in something that met a specific and pressing need here. Since the fall of the Taliban, hundreds of foreigners and dozens of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)—big ones like the Red Cross as well as smaller ones like CFAF—had been pouring into the country. All around me, I heard people introducing themselves as teachers, engineers, nutritionists, agricultural specialists, and experts of all sorts. Not once did anyone introduce herself as a hairdresser.

Toward the end of the meeting, Allen—our group leader—was asked to introduce the team. He stood in front of the room and explained CFAF’s plans to open a health care clinic. That got a round of applause. He also got quite a few cheers when he offered the team’s services to the other Westerners in the room as well. Some of these people had been working here for months with cavities that needed filling, mysterious rashes that wouldn’t go away, and other ailments that they hadn’t been able to do anything about. Then he introduced our team members one by one: doctor, nurse, dentist, doctor, and midwife. Everyone in the room clapped as each team member was introduced. When Allen finally got around to introducing me, he gave me a bright smile, as if to assure me that he wasn’t going to leave me out. “Finally, we have Debbie Rodriguez,” he said. “She’s a hairdresser from Holland, Michigan, who did some training—”

He didn’t even get to finish his introduction, because the room broke into the wildest applause of the night. A few of the women were actually jumping up and down. It seemed like half the people in the room were pulling at their hair with relief. Allen hesitated, then finished talking about the clinic. The meeting soon broke up. And suddenly I was mobbed.

“We’re so glad you’re here!” said the woman who got to my side before any of the others. “There isn’t a decent haircut within a day’s drive of Kabul.”

“We have literally risked our lives for highlights,” another said. “Once I drove ten hours over the Khyber Pass to get my hair done in Pakistan. I had some other errands to run there, too, but that was the one thing I really couldn’t do here.”

“Aren’t there any beauty salons in Kabul?” I asked.

“I think there used to be a lot of them, before the Taliban took over,” the first woman said. “They pretty much squashed them out of existence. I hear some are resurfacing now, but they’re in pretty rough shape.”

“My kids and I got some kind of bionic lice at an Afghan salon,” her friend added. “When we got back to the States, we had to use an industrial-strength pesticide to get rid of them. It took months!”

People were swarming around me, eager to set up appointments. They wanted to know what I was doing the next day and the day after that. They wanted to know how long I was staying in Kabul. They wanted directions to my guesthouse. I couldn’t give directions, since I hadn’t a clue which streets we had taken to get to the meeting, but I tried to point them toward the people who could tell them. They didn’t even ask me whether I had brought any of the tools of my trade with me, but if they had I could have quickly assured them. I always travel with my scissors, my combs, a salon cape, and some product. It’s just part of who I am.

And the next day, people started showing up at the guesthouse. I don’t know how they found their way there, but they did. Word seemed to spread throughout Kabul that there was a Western-style hairdresser in town. Soon, all sorts of people—journalists, diplomats, missionaries, aid workers, you name it—were trying to contact me. They couldn’t call for appointments because there wasn’t any phone service, but they managed to send word that they were coming. Every time I’d go out with the team to do some work, I’d return to find the door to my room covered with sticky notes from people wanting their hair done.

My team had finally figured out some useful tasks for me, including trauma counseling with Afghan children using puppets. But by the end of that first week, there was almost always a little group of Westerners waiting in the yard of our guesthouse for me. I’d take them up to my room between team assignments and cut their hair. Some people came with their kids, and I’d do the whole family. One German woman who had been living in Afghanistan for seven years even showed up with perm solution stored in a brown bottle so ancient that it looked as if it had been dug out of an archaeological site. She told me the Taliban had raided her house a bunch of times, but they’d never taken that bottle. I apologized and told her that I didn’t have perm rods, but then she held up a bag—she had the rods, too. So I set her up out in the garden and gave her a perm. Roshanna and I served her tea and cookies while it set, and then I washed the solution off with a bucket of water.

All this time, I’d been making fast friends with the Afghans. While the other team members were busy doing the medical things that only they could do, I’d be hanging out with Roshanna, Daud the driver, Muqim the cook, and several others. There was a swing set in the garden, and Daud, Muqim, and I would sit there and talk and swing, talk and swing, until soon we’d be pumping ourselves up so high that we could see over the wall. Daud and Muqim would let themselves fly off the swings at the high point, tumble on the grass, and joke about who had gone the farthest. I’d have to laugh, remembering that
these
were those scary Afghan men half the world was afraid of.

One day, after I came back from doing trauma counseling at a school, Daud picked up one of my puppets that had a beard and head scarf and examined it. “Is this Osama bin Laden?” he asked. The puppet did look a little like Osama, but it had been Joseph of Nazareth in a former life. A church group had donated the puppets to our team. Now I was turning Joseph, Mary, and Jesus into ordinary Afghans who were trying to become happy families again in the aftermath of the wars. But Daud and Roshanna preferred the idea that the patriarch puppet was Osama. Roshanna picked up the Mary puppet and announced, “I am Osama’s wife. I will help the Americans kill him!” And for the next half hour or so, we played “Search for bin Laden” throughout the downstairs of the house. We did some really bad things to the Osama puppet, but he recovered well enough to be an Afghan dad the next day.

I cut their hair, too. The men had been watching as I cut some of the Westerners’ hair—on nice days, I did it out in the garden—and they were intrigued with the kiwi-scented gel that I used to finish up some of the cuts. So I squirted a little on their hands, and they spread it on their hair. They liked it so much that they didn’t want to wash it off. For days they walked around with stiff hair coated with dust. Then I offered to trim Roshanna’s hair out in the garden. I took a few inches off the bottom and cut a few short angles around her face so that she could have little tendrils poking out of her head scarf. When I finished, I asked Muqim if he wanted a haircut. After a few minutes of deliberation, he said yes. I knew that Afghan men don’t get their hair cut by women—they go to barbers, not beauticians—because there is no touching allowed between unmarried men and women, either professionally or casually. So I was careful to snip his hair gingerly, without a lot of physical contact, because I didn’t want him to go home at the end of the day thinking he had sinned. But when I finished, he stared up at me with bleary, besotted eyes.

“I love you,” he croaked. “I love you, I love you!”

Then I pointed my scissors at Daud. He had a haircut that was pretty typical of the Afghan men I had seen so far—a sort of pompadour trimmed short in the back with a big wad of hair puffed up on the top. It was like the hairdo Elvis had sported in his most hideous days, when he was wearing those tight leather pants and awful capes made by the Ice Capades people. I hated it. Daud backed away, but Muqim, Roshanna, and some of the other Afghans hanging around decided to nab him for me. I put my scissors down and joined the chase. All of us raced around the yard trying to grab him, slipping in puddles, tripping over the hedges, laughing, hooting. We were so full of our own high spirits that you’d have thought we were roaring drunk. They finally captured him and dragged him back over to my chair, then tied his feet down and put a gag in his mouth. After all that, I only trimmed his hair a little. But when I was in the middle of doing it, Roshanna came running outside with a video camera and taped me standing over Daud, menacing him with my scissors while he rolled his eyes and tossed his head from side to side.

I still wonder if that videotape will show up on Aljazeera television someday, as evidence that American hairdressers are torturing Afghan men.

AS I LEFT MY ROOM
and clomped downstairs, I nearly mowed down Allen, the head of our group. He regained his footing pretty quickly but stared at me for a few seconds too long. “Is something wrong?” I asked.

He reddened a little and cleared his throat. “Is it really necessary to wear such bright lipstick? And all that eye makeup?”

I planted my feet and stared back. “Have you taken a good look at the Afghan women? They wear a lot more makeup than I do.”

“I suppose they do,” he conceded, then continued on his way.

It was clear that my behavior was starting to make some of the CFAF people nervous. I adored Allen and I still do, but he had started to think of me as a loose cannon. He’s a really brainy guy who spends his time doing good deeds all over the world, and I don’t think he had ever spent much time around someone like me. Even my appearance made him nervous. Whereas all the other women in the group had neat, conservative hairstyles, mine was short, unnaturally red, and spiked. While this was the first time he had spoken to me about my makeup, sometimes I could feel him wince at the sight of me. I felt vindicated on the makeup issue when four of CFAF’s major funders came to visit us at the guesthouse. These were four Texas ladies—we called them the Texas Dolls—who breezed through the gate with the biggest bouffant hairdos, the most extravagantly applied perfume, and the glossiest nails, as well as faces made up as if they were stars in a daytime soap opera. While they were there, there was some discussion about the emergency kits we were all supposed to carry, with things like maps showing where safe places were, a compass, a whistle, a five-hundred-dollar piece of gold, and such. One of the ladies drawled, “I just have plenty of lipstick in mine,” and turned on her battery-operated fan to keep the sweat from ruining her makeup. I told Allen that if our funders could wear lots of makeup, so could I.

Still, our head worried and tried to rein me in periodically. My luck turned when a second group of CFAF volunteers arrived and our team swelled from seven to fifteen people. The guesthouse was now so crowded that everyone was getting uncomfortable, so Allen asked if a few of us would move over to the Mustafa Hotel for the rest of the month. I don’t think he had me in mind, because he thought he needed to keep an eye on me for my own safety. He had already asked one of the other girls if she’d move. She was a sober, responsible midwife, and he trusted her to be safe away from the main group. You’d never imagine that this girl and I would be partners in crime, but we had already gotten to be friends, and I asked her to request me as her roommate. She did, promising Allen that she’d watch out for me. We moved into a room at the hotel, and that was the point at which I was turned loose on Kabul.

That wasn’t Allen’s plan, of course. There still wasn’t a lot for me to do with the team because I just didn’t have skills that were very helpful to them. So he and some of the others came up with a new job for me for the rest of the month. Good Christians that they were, they figured that, since I had all this time on my hands, I should sit in my hotel room and pray for the team while they were out in the field. I’m a good Christian, too, but there are some things I’m not so good at. Intercessory prayer is one of them. I tried, though. I’d sit in my hotel room and start to pray for the team, and then I’d hear one of the Afghan vendors going by singing about his turnips or whatever, and I’d just have to go outside to investigate. Then I thought I’d try listening to spiritual music to drown out any alluring street noise. I put on a CD and my headset and tried to sit still but quickly got bored. I just decided that I was a naturally fast prayer. Instead of taking three hours, I’d whip those out prayers in about three minutes. Then, arm in arm with Roshanna, I was out the door.