by AMBROSE BRUCE TERRENCE
Raza Gul, center, sits with her son and her sister-in-law in the Kabul bakery where they eke out a living. PHOTO/Lela Ahmadzai/Los Angeles Times
Imagine that the magnificent front-page photo of Raza Gul and her family was actually a painting by a noted 17th century Italian artist and came up for sale at a fine art auction. How the art aficionados would gush about the texture, the color, the detail of the faces of the subjects and their artifacts. The attendees might then bid millions of dollars for this powerful artistic statement. The rich have certainly paid more for less profound works to hang in their homes and galleries.
Then, imagine that Raza Gul, her husband and her children showed up at the front door.
Assuming they were even admitted, I wonder what would happen were she to request money to help pay for education for her children, addiction treatment for her husband and a new ventilation system for the bakery where she works. I wonder what the response would be.
Thank you for a very important, thought-provoking and worthwhile story.
Ambrose Bruce Terrence of Marina del Rey’s letter appeared in Los Angeles Times of November 17, 2012.
(The above letter was in response to the following article.)
Bleakness only a child’s smile can lift
by NED PARKER
Raza Gul works backbreaking hours in a tiny Afghan bakery to provide for her children, her one source of joy. Without them, there’s only her husband’s opium addiction and worries about the Taliban.
Afghanistan — Raza Gul trudges the half-mile to work through a maze of brick and mud homes, sewage streams and toddlers running naked. She’s two months pregnant, and her lower back aches as she steps over ditches and eyes speeding cars. Her sister-in-law, a frail woman, shadows her. They say little.
The slight wind chills Gul and she thinks about the cost of wood to heat her home and keep her four children warm. She is certain that her husband is already prowling their neighborhood hillside, hunting his first hit of opium for the day.
She knows he’ll walk to one of the local dealers, then sit alone in their crumbling house, roll his stash in foil and smoke. He will tell her it brings him peace, and then beg her to forgive him.
The women reach the bakery where they work in the Russian Blocks neighborhood, a district of gray walk-up tenements shaded with long lines of trees where the educated and well-off live. People here say it’s one of the few good things the Soviets left from their decade of war.
The bakery, little more than a stone hut, is freezing, and piled with pots, sacks of flour and jerrycans of water. Milky sunlight pours through a window. A scuffed rusty pickax lies in the corner to split wood for the oven. The two women sit down on thin mats, one made from cardboard, to cushion them from the cold, hard floor. They prepare to greet their wealthy customers.
The blessings and curses of recent Afghan history are etched in the face of Gul, who is 35 but looks much older. Although her work at the bakery brings her pain, both real and emotional, she is her family’s sole means of support, something unthinkable during the years of civil war and Taliban rule.
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(Thanks to reader)