You see, some things I can teach you. Some you learn from books. But there are things that, well, you have to see and feel.

You have these crops of poppies that supply something like 90% of the heroin sold in Europe and actually represents more than half of the Afghanistan's GDP.

You don't order someone to polish your shoes one day and call them 'sister' the next.

The country [Afghanistan] faces enormous problems. There is a violent insurgency hampering the rule of law and developmental efforts.

And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion. And whenever those twin poisonous flowers began to sprout in the parched land of that field, Mariam uprooted them. She uprooted them and ditched them before they took hold.

In the coming days and weeks, Laila would scramble frantically to commit it all to memory, what happened next. Like an art lover running out of a burning museum, she would grab whatever she could--a look, a whisper, a moan--to salvage from perishing to preserve. But time is the most unforgiving of fires, and she couldn't, in the end, save it all.

Afghan women, as a group, I think their suffering has been equaled by very few other groups in recent world history.