Christmas means jobs for Muslims

KABUL, Afghanistan — Most of these women do not like burqas, which conceal everything and make women look like giant blue shuttlecocks. One complained that when the Taliban forced her to wear one, she could not fit her glasses under the tight headband, so she could not see. Another remembered how her daughter, unused to the long garment, tripped and scraped her knees.

So it is with some measure of irony that these Afghan women now sew mini-burqas for foreigners to put on wine bottles. They know the math: They can make as many as 35 wine-bottle burqas from a real burqa, and they can earn a significant amount of money — for an Afghan woman, at least.

"I don't know why the foreigners like them," said Marzia, 30, who, like many Afghans, has one name. "Maybe they like them for their children, maybe for themselves. Maybe they like them because it's interesting to have a burqa."

The women learned about the odd tastes of foreigners through the Women of Hope Project, started by Betsy Beamon, an American who left her customer-service job with US Airways after the Sept. 11 attacks and moved to Afghanistan to help women.

In a country now considered the major focus of the U.S.-led war on terror, where the Taliban are regaining strength, where corruption is endemic, and foreigners and Afghan officials are accused of gobbling up most aid money, this project is a rarity. It shows how one person can help, on a small scale at least, and how far women have come since the rule of the Taliban, who whipped women if they did not wear burqas or if they tried to work.

"I had become obsessed with what had happened to them," said Beamon, a mother of two who favors jeans and long embroidered shirts. "I wondered, what happens to a woman's spirit when she's been made invisible for six years?"

Beamon, from Virginia Beach, Va., has had five foreign volunteers in seven years. Her Web site, www.womenofhopeproject.org, is not quite finished; she cannot take credit cards in Kabul; and her e-mail inbox has 1,052 unanswered queries. But somehow her project has helped employ about 1,000 women — 100 main seamstresses who employ other women.

The women here, each a kind of entrepreneur, have experimented with what foreigners like. One woman sews Taliban dolls. Another sews doll families, a cross between voodoo dolls and Bollywood movie stars. Another invented the wine-bottle apron, with the word "Afghanistan" crudely stitched near a camel. Another woman is such an artist that she can take a picture of a pet or scene and embroider it perfectly on a pillow. Next she wants to make a Michael Jackson pillow.

Now that it's almost Christmas, the women have shifted gears. The artist has sewn a flawless Santa Claus on a pillow — even though she did not know who he was — and cardinals in pine trees. The women sew mini-burqas in red and green, and tiny pillows to be hung as Christmas ornaments. There are table runners in red and green, and bookmarks with crosses.

In a country where spreading Christianity is against the law and where the Taliban recently gunned down a foreign woman accused of trying to convert Muslims, such crafts could create a major controversy. But these Muslim women shrug when asked about what they are sewing. "It's for Christmas," said Marjan, about 45, whose husband is sick and does not work.

The main customers are foreigners visiting Kabul and buyers in the U.S. On Fridays at the main U.S. military base in Kabul, Beamon sets up a booth. One recent Friday, some customers flipped past Santa Claus pillowcases in favor of Afghans playing buzkashi, the national sport in which Afghans on horseback fight over a headless calf carcass. Others bought red and green table covers, and most told Beamon or the two Afghans with her to keep the change.