Beyond FEARLESS: Malalai Joya

I first read about suspended Afghan parliamentarian and women’s rights activist Malalai Joya in Tara Bradford’s Paris Parfait blog in the spring. Tara first discussed Joya’s suspension and followed with a reference to a PBS broadcast of the documentary Enemies of Happiness that covered Joya’s efforts to rout warlords and druglords from the Afghan parliament. I planned to write a post on the documentary and try to help raise awareness of it, but when it turned out Denver-area PBS stations weren’t going to broadcast Enemies of Happiness, I put off writing about Joya. She deserves to be widely known, however, not only for her political efforts but for her clinics designed to provide free medical care to Afghan women and children, and I hope to follow up in a future post with more details on her efforts. She wages a constant, treacherous, heroic battle as is evidenced by her tremendous story. It breaks my heart to read that she’s now forced to live in seclusion and is unable to see her husband, but I have high hopes that she and others working on her behalf in Afghanistan will some day prevail.

Photo © 2006 Marie Dorigny