The Widow's Courage

The Widow's Courage

Mazar-i-Sharif, 2019

Bibi Fatima ran a small, immaculately clean chaykhana, a traditional tea house near our forward operating base, serving sweet, milky shir chai with cardamom and her specialty naan-e-roghani, the beautiful oil-brushed bread that glistened golden in the morning light. She was seventy years old if she was a day, her face deeply lined by decades of war and loss, widowed three times by conflict, yet her spirit remained somehow, impossibly unbroken. Her eyes still sparkled with life and determination.

Local Taliban sympathizers, emboldened by our impending withdrawal, demanded she immediately close her business. Women shouldn't work publicly or serve men; they informed her threateningly. It was against their interpretation of propriety. She quietly, firmly refused. They escalated to direct threats against her life. She served tea to our soldiers the very next morning anyway, her gnarled hands steady as stone as she poured the steaming, fragrant brew from her battered copper kettle.

"Bibi, aren't you afraid of what they might do?" I asked her one morning, genuinely concerned for her safety. "They're serious. They've hurt other women for less."

"I have buried three husbands to war and four sons to violence," she replied, her deeply lined face radiating an almost supernatural serenity. "What can these angry men possibly take from me that God has not already received and held safely for me in heaven? My fear died long, long ago, buried with my last child. Now I have only purpose, to live as God calls me, to serve His children, to refuse to let evil men dictate how I honor my Creator."

One night, they threw heavy rocks through her shop window, shattering the glass everywhere. She methodically swept every shard before dawn and opened at her usual early hour. When they slashed all her cart's tires, she walked the three miles to her shop, arriving before sunrise. When they painted vile threats on her door in red paint, she calmly painted over them with bright flowers-yellow sunflowers and red tulips, making beauty from ugliness.

Her courage proved contagious, spreading like ripples in still water. Other women-shopkeepers, teachers, midwives, seamstresses began cautiously reopening their businesses again, emboldened by her example. One elderly widow, faithful to her divine calling despite overwhelming pressure, sparked a quiet but powerful revolution simply by refusing to surrender to fear.

Before my final deployment to Afghanistan ended, I visited her beloved chaikhana one last time, drinking in the familiar sights and smells. She pressed a delicate cup of saffron-scented kahwah into my hands, fragrant with almonds and cinnamon. "Tell your people back home," she said firmly, gripping my hand with surprising strength, "that God gives His greatest strength not to the mighty and powerful, but to those who refuse to abandon His purpose, no matter the cost." I never forgot her words or her face.

As my soldier friend Gerg or whose actual name was Gregory Shelton, a second lieutenant in the allied forces tells me that her words reconnected him the scripture verse he had read the night previous at bedtime and it went like this, “The Lord is my strength and my shield; my heart trusts in him, and he helps me."[Psalm 28:7]

Freshly baked Nan Rugani