ARZU Changes Lives of Afghan Rug Weavers
Written by Carol Carter Wednesday, October 26 2011
Snapshot: Melissa Bertenthal, director international programs, ARZU Studio Hope
In 2007 Melissa Bertenthal joined ARZU, a 501(c) 3 organization that helps Afghan women and their families break the cycle of poverty by providing access to sustainable employment, health care, and education. As director of international programs, Bertenthal oversees the development, implementation, management and monitoring, and evaluation of all Afghan-based programs.
She plays an integral role in funding new program development through grant writing, donor relations, and fundraising campaigns. A whitewater kayaker, she lives in Ashville, N.C.
Womenetics: ARZU helps Afghan women and their families break the cycle of poverty by providing access to sustainable employment, health care, and education. How does ARZU accomplish that?
Melissa Bertenthal: We started as a program that worked with women weavers. We identified weaving as an employment opportunity because it was something that women have always traditionally done in their homes in Afghanistan. And rather than create new employment that might not be culturally or socially acceptable, we decided to identify something that had already been a part of their culture.
The interesting thing about rug weaving is that it’s also one of the most abusive systems against women, second to trafficking, actually. It was the most exploitive of women in the sense that it is all done through a middleman. So while the women spend weeks and months weaving rugs, all the money from the sale goes through the producer and then the women get paid not even a smidgen of what the producer has made.
So what we did was we identified that as being part of the problem, but then decided to use that to our advantage to get Afghan society to change its mind about educating women and providing health care for women. We went to villages and talked to the local government as well as the male head of households and explained to them that if their women participated in our rug weaving program, we would pay the women directly 100 percent of the market value of the rug. Additionally, for any rug that we consider “A” quality, which is a high quality rug, they would receive a 50-percent bonus, so essentially they’re getting 150 percent of the market value of the rug.
In exchange, they have to agree that all women in the household and any child under the age of 15 attend literacy classes or government school when available. And that the women themselves had to be allowed to attend clinics to get maternal antenatal and postnatal checkups as well as either go to a clinic or have one of our midwives come and participate in the birth of her child. And they said yes.
Womenetics: What is your primary responsibility?
Bertenthal: On a daily basis, it’s interfacing with my staff in Afghanistan, talking about existing projects, finding out where we might have a need or ability to create a new project. Finding out how our weavers are doing, how people in our current projects are doing, if there are any problems. Basically it’s conceptualizing, implementing, and then monitoring all of our projects on the ground. Then, on the side, since we’re not 100-percent self-sustaining, although that is our long-term goal, I am the person who writes all of our grants and then interfaces with the donors and keeps up with all the monitoring and reporting of any donor-funded projects.
I speak on the phone three times a week with my colleague, Razia Jan, who is Afghan-American, a vivacious 69-year-old woman who returned to Afghanistan after living in the United States for more than 30 years. She wanted to go back and help her people so she got a job with ARZU
 Weaving a better life |
Bertenthal: I did kind of fall into ARZU by chance. A friend of a friend knew the director at the time. I have always been interested and inspired by women’s empowerment, so it was a natural fit.
Womenetics: Do you spend a great deal of time in Afghanistan?
Bertenthal: I have not been to Afghanistan. I am a single mom, and I have a 2-year-old son. I finally got up the guts to leave him, and I would have needed to go for about a month’s time. I was supposed to go in June, and then a suicide bomb went off next to the place where I was going to stay in Kabul, and I couldn’t do it. But I’m really looking forward to sitting down and sharing a cup of tea with the women I’m working with. Right now I live vicariously. We get pictures every single day. I hear Razia’s stories, and it’s pretty incredible to see the difference we’ve made in these women’s lives.
Womenetics: Who are the women who work on the Afghanistan side of the equation?
Bertenthal: Razia is our only Afghan-American. The rest of our staff – and it is mixed with men and women – are all Afghani, and we select people specifically from the villages where we work, which is a little bit different from a typical nonprofit or nongovernmental organization because you don’t necessarily have someone who has the skill level you would get in, say, Kabul. We work in rural areas, and we feel it is so important to empower an entire society, so we don’t want to bring in people and hire them when we could be giving jobs to people who are already there.
Womenetics: Is there a brief story you can share about someone your organization has helped?
Bertenthal: We wanted to get a little in-depth with how the ARZU program has impacted the life of one weaver, so we went to one of our weavers who has been in our program now for the past five years. She is a very good weaver. When she came into our program, she didn’t have anywhere to live. She couldn’t sign her name.
Recently, she very proudly brought Razia to her home, which is a four-bedroom home with windows she has been able to construct through weaving rugs for ARZU and being part of that program. And she showed Razia how she can sign her name.
Womenetics: How has your work at ARZU changed or influenced you?
Bertenthal: Even though I’ve studied development for a long time and I’ve traveled quite extensively, this has given me a new appreciation for all that I do have, from the theoretical freedom that I have as a woman here in the United States to the more everyday things. In Afghanistan, preschool doesn’t exist, and children as young as 3 are out on the streets playing because, while their mothers might stay home, they’re burdened with all the other things they have to do. My son is in preschool, and that is something I took for granted. It really makes me recognize how many opportunities we have here and how far we still have to go in a lot of countries around the world.
Womenetics: What are two or three immediate goals of ARZU?
Bertenthal: Our top-line goal is to be self-sustaining. We want to be the No. 1 rug supplier for any sort of corporate or commercial design. There’s no reason that you shouldn’t have an ARZU rug on your boardroom floor. We want to continue to expand and open up opportunities to more people in our villages. We have a huge number of people who want to participate, who are desperate to be in our literacy classes, who really want to learn a skill to support their families.
Carol Carter was a founding staff member of Atlanta Business Chronicle in 1978. During her 18-year tenure, she served as editor not only of the Chronicle but also of seven Chronicle special publications including the award-winning Counterpart, a magazine for Atlanta businesswomen; ChopTalk, official magazine of the Atlanta Braves; and Atlanta Now, which serves the Atlanta convention and visitors industry.
Carter is the author of Junior Dragster Dreams: How Sam Found His Own Ride, the first only children’s novel about junior drag racing. She also wrote Hope & Healing, the 125-year history of Saint Joseph’s Hospital of Atlanta. She was an on-air reporter in Atlanta for WXIA-TV’s Noonday show for two years and was writer and editor of the Optical Data School Media team that produced award-winning videos for classroom use. Carter is an alumnus of the University of Missouri School of Journalism.
