July 1, 2003 When I visited a suburb of Kabul in March 2002, I came across a woman washing clothes. She was rubbing them hard as if summoning all the strength in her body. The water in the big basin was black and dirty and there was little detergent in it. Sherife, the 40-year-old housewife, was doing laundry for money. The well-worn clothes she was washing had been collected from kind neighbors. Two years earlier, when the Taliban was still in power, her house was destroyed by a fire set by Taliban soldiers. "I have to sustain my family because my husband, at 60 years old, is too old to work," she said. Jiajan was a 32-year-old mother of six children. She lost her husband three years before when he was killed by Taliban soldiers for associating with an anti-Taliban political party. "There is no adult man to rely on in my family." Her elementary-age son supported the family, earning what is barely enough for the family to survive each day by washing cars, selling fancy goods and carrying water. "I want him to go to school. I want to acquire skills and work myself." As she said this, tears were welling up in her eyes. She was learning dressmaking with the assistance of a support group. I saw many women in Afghanistan who had lost their husbands or whose husbands were too old to work. These women took whatever they could and turned it into work to sustain their families. Some weaved carpets. Others made cushions or sold artificial flowers. The emerging breed of professional women are attracting attention in Afghanistan at the moment, but ordinary housewives with no particular careers are making an equally important, if less visible, contribution to the country's reconstruction. (Published in EMERGENCY NURSING, July 2003 issue)