Beverli J. DeWalt is the daughter of Kent residents Arnold and Sue DeWalt, and is an alumnus of Thomas Jefferson High School in Auburn. But right now, she’s about as far away from western Washington as she can be.
DeWalt, 32, is currently in Afghanistan, serving as a U.S. State Department foreign service officer helping to get the war-torn country back on its feet. She’s one of 10 American civilians stationed in Afghanistan as part of the Civilian Response Corps.
Since June, she’s been embedded with a military unit to assist the Kapisa and Parwan Provincial Reconstruction Team. Kapisa and Parwan are provinces (roughly equivalent to U.S. states) just north of Kabul, the nation’s capitol. She’s scheduled to remain in the country till December.
“My job is to help advise the commander and the rest of the unit on political issues,” she said, in a phone interview from Afghanistan. She also meets with local political leaders to help them create a better and more stable government.
In her three months in Afghanistan, DeWalt said she’s had to face a number of challenges — politically and culturally.
“One of the things I wasn’t really expecting was how much there still is to do,” she said.
She compared the reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan to the work done in post-WWII Germany: “After World War II they had something to start with. Europe was already – before the war – one of the more advanced societies in the world. Afghanistan, on the other hand, has always been a very decentralized government … very reliant on the clan and the family.”
Without a base of local understanding of good government to draw upon, DeWalt said, reconstruction efforts are moving slowly.
“People have been through so much war they haven’t really had a normalized society,” she said. “You go into a meeting at the provincial level, and they don’t have an agenda, and they don’t even know how to make an agenda.”
Another difficulty has been the difference between Western and Middle-Eastern communication styles.
“Culturally here, if you want to talk about a computer, that’s the last thing you talk about,” DeWalt said, adding that “you can expect to sit in any meeting at least an hour and a half (to get around to discussing a single point).”
Helping women
Along with her work as a diplomat and liaison between U.S. military and local Afghan leaders, DeWalt said she’s also focusing on women’s issues in Afghanistan.
“I’ve been working with line leaders (appointed Afghan government officials) … to identify needs of local women, and address them through programs of the Provincial Reconstruction Team,” she said, adding that one of the major goals is to find ways to help Afghan women support themselves financially.
“One of the things we’re just getting started here is a saffron project,” DeWalt said.
Saffron, one of the costliest spices on the market, is a crop international groups have been pushing as a viable alternative for farmers involved in Afghanistan’s huge – and illegal – opium industry. (Afghanistan’s poppy fields generate an estimated $4 billion in illicit revenue annually, according to the CIA’s online World Factbook.)
Part of the saffron harvesting process includes hand-picking the thin red filaments out of the saffron crocus blooms, a job often done by women. So if the saffron industry grows, so too will the job market for Afghan women.
“Women don’t have a lot of economic opportunity here, but agriculture is an acceptable (trade for women),” DeWalt said.
Life in Afghanistan
When she arrived in Afghanistan, DeWalt said one of the first things she noticed was the walls — foot-thick adobe brick walls around nearly every building.
“It’s the grand country of walls,” she said with a chuckle.
DeWalt said that a lot of women like having a wall around their houses “so they can be outside without men seeing them.” The walls also offer a way to safeguard a family’s animals — an important consideration in a largely agrarian society.
“It almost feels like you’ve walked back in time a thousand years … except occasionally you’ll see a car or a bicycle,” DeWalt said of the scene in a typical Afghan neighborhood.
With the danger level still so high in her area, DeWalt said that she doesn’t get to go out and mingle with the locals much. When she does get the chance, though, she said what she finds is a people who have lived with war so long, they simply shrug and accept it. With a life expectancy rate of 44 years, few people alive can remember a time without war.
“There’s a phrase, ‘In sha’a Allah.’ It’s an Arabic phrase that means ‘God willing.’ You hear that a lot,” DeWalt said. “Most of your average people are poor, very poor. They don’t really know or care too much (about the political situation) as long as they’re left in peace.”
War and poverty have done nothing to dampen the famous Middle-Eastern hospitality, though.
“They’re very, very hospitable…. If they have nothing, it doesn’t matter; they’ll make sure they have something for you as a guest,” she said. “That’s very humbling.”
And even when she’s not stopping for long, the people will always offer her a cup of tea. “I’ve had a lot of tea offered to me,” she said. (DeWalt said she doesn’t drink tea, so she also has to do a lot of polite declining.)
The work of rebuilding Afghan society will not happen overnight, but DeWalt said she’s optimistic about the progress her team and other international groups are making.
“In the short-term, we’re making lots of strides,” she said adding that the long-term goal of “having (Afghanistan) be a modern society” will take a long time.
Contact staff writer Christine Shultz at 253-872-6600, ext. 5056, or cshultz@reporternewspapers.com.
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