Profiles

Jacki Lyden's Afghan Diary

NPR host Jacki Lyden, right, with her radio student Fatima, in the Bamiyan mountains. Lyden led a workshop in Afghanistan focused on producing "audio diaries."Photo: Internews Afghanistan

Jacki Lyden is a National Public Radio senior correspondent and alternate host for All Things Considered. After working for Internews training Afghans in radio production, she shared her impressions.

Last summer, a young colleague and I created a national radio diary project for the NGO Internews, which promotes independent media in developing countries.

Our project is called “My Life is Afghanistan,” a sort of spin-off of the audio diary concept heard on “This American Life,” distributed by Public Radio International. This has never been done in Afghanistan before.

Our student Fatima, a Hazara Afghan who lives near the destroyed Buddhas of Bamiyan, was among the first to finish her tale. To record her story, Fatima and I climbed to the top of the small Buddha’s head, 9,000 feet up in the Bamiyan valley of the Hindu Kush, both of us wearing hijab and sandals.

Fatima clutched her brand-new microphone and talked about what it had been like to flee this gentle valley when the Russians came. She’d been tied to a horse, which slipped, and left dangling in ropes all night until her feet touched the water of a river below and she fainted.

Watching our students, who range in age from 16 to over 50, and who come from all parts of Afghanistan, I have been amazed at the forthright honesty with which they narrate their accounts.

They’ve produced stories about a woman who survived a stoning under the Taliban, and followed a heroin addict—and his suffering mother—in Kandahar.

Younger students have done stories about their love of body-building, or what it’s like to be a 16-year-old devout Muslim female and still love Bollywood movies and text-messaging.

By putting microphones in their hands, by teaching them how to create radio, I feel I am empowering them to tell their own stories again and again, long after I am gone.

I am convinced that the fundamentals of journalism, taught to a formerly repressed society, are key to promoting democracy. “You can’t lie and misrepresent yourself,” we said to a stunned student from Herat, who’d done an interview posing as an aid worker.

We made lists of questions to get them to challenge their own preconceptions, and to challenge the thinking of others. The very idea of personal responsibility and space for thinking—the atmosphere of civil society—was something we had to teach.

It was arduous and frustrating, but in the end the students created eleven life stories, some of them breathtaking.

Fatima wants to work at Radio Bamiyan, a two-room station in a low mud-brick building with chickens roosting outside.

After her family fled to Iran, she was forced into marriage and motherhood at 13, but she was lucky—her husband allowed her to finish her high school education.

Last year the family returned to Afghanistan, so poor that Fatima lives in a sort of mud stable, behind an animal pen. She is mortified by her poverty but is now a university student in Bamiyan.

Watching Fatima master a MiniDisc recorder and microphone has been like watching myself, when the wide world opened to me, a small-town girl from rural Wisconsin, who knew the world was limitless with such tools.

This is why I have loved radio so much all these years: its simplicity, immediacy and power, its dependence on the human voice, its lack of regard for appearances.

Each student chose a title for their piece in “My Life is Afghanistan,” which was broadcast around the country in Dari and Pashto. Fatima’s is called “Hope.” That’s what these students have given me.

Internews’ radio diaries project was funded by a grant from the US Agency for International Development.