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“We must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope.” Martin Luther King Jr.
There is something about certain days, like MLK, that make us pause to take stock of ourselves. For me, it’s always New Year’s Day (with its perennial list of strikingly similar annual resolutions), anniversaries of births, marriages and deaths, and major world events. September 11th was that kind of a day.
I was a Goldman Sachs partner, at a meeting in New York, when the Twin Towers went down. Now I’m a social entrepreneur, selling fair-trade rugs rather than bonds, focusing on a triple bottom line—people, planet and profit. Today, instead of applying my Wharton MBA to the fundamentals of market change, I apply it to the fundamentals of social change.
Opportunities often present themselves when we’re not expecting them, yet they can change our lives. That’s what happened to me after 9/11, when I left investment banking to found a social business enterprise, ARZU, which means “hope” in Dari. I landed in Kabul, Afghanistan, for the first time in January 2003, ten years ago this month, as the business representative of a bi-partisan State Department effort called the U.S. Afghan Women’s Council to see how we might help Afghan women have a seat in “new Afghanistan.” Though I didn’t realize it at the time, this would be my first step on a personal journey to understand why solutions to extreme global poverty and its twin brother, war, remain so elusive. I have learned that optimism is a prerequisite for change. And, I have come to see the dignity of work a human right.
ARZU employs destitute, but highly skilled rural women in culturally acceptable work. Women have been weaving in the home for generations, even under Taliban rule. From the outset, we set up ARZU to be fair labor and child labor free, in an industry that’s not far behind global trafficking in its exploitation of women and children. Starting with thirty weavers in 2004, ARZU now empowers hundreds through employment and transforms the lives of thousands through the holistic delivery of critical services.
Along the way, we’ve had to figure out how to operate effectively in a gender-segregated, highly tribal, rural society where each village is governed by its own complex mix of religious, legal, and local mores. We’ve learned to work around the aftermath of war—returning refugees, no infrastructure, disrupted supply chains, no commercial shipping, and in the early days, no banks, no internet and limited cell phone telephony. And then there was the security issue—code for ongoing insurgency.
Our instructors and our inspiration are the women themselves, who daily teach us about the resiliency of the human spirit. Through them, I’ve come to understand that people everywhere want the same things for their children—food on the table, good health, a safe environment, an education, good economic prospects, happiness, a better future than that of their parents, and peace.
Today, more than a decade since the Taliban obliterated the irreplaceable giant Buddhas of Bamyan, the women weavers of Bamyan show us the art of the possible through the exquisite rug collection they weave. Touching their rugs touches my heart. I hope they will touch yours as well.
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