Posted in Recent Reads

Kabul Beauty School: An American Woman Goes Behind the Veil by Deborah Rodriguez.  This is another book that first caught my eye quite awhile ago, but I didn't start reading till last week.  Once I got started, I was really pulled into the story, although I have to say that the timeline of events was a bit confusing to me at times.  Deborah Rodriguez is a hairdresser from Michigan that volunteered to go to Afghanistan with a humantarian aid group shortly after the fall of the Taliban in 2001.  She relates how she felt rather useless during the first part of her stay because she had such limited skills in things that seemed practical - nursing, therapy, etc.  But she discovered that she made friends with the Afghani people easily, and found that her hairdressing skills were indeed very useful!  She wound up teaching a beauty school for Afghani women, training them so that they could open up their own salons and help support their families.   This book is a journal and memoir of her experiences and friendships.

When I started reading, I (in my relative ignorance) wondered how much demand there might be for hairdressing and cosmetology in a culture where - I thought - the women were almost always under a veil.  Boy, was I wrong about that!  Apparently, beauty salons are in great demand and are very successful businesses for these women.  I learned a lot about daily life in this war-torn nation and its people just by reading this simple memoir.