By ELENA BECATOROS, Related Press
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — They wandered via the museum, listening attentively as their information defined the antiquities in show cupboards. It might have been any tour group, anyplace on this planet. However there was one thing uncommon about this one.
The group of foreigners visiting the Nationwide Museum of Afghanistan was made up solely of girls. Its information was a lady, too — one of many first Afghan feminine tour guides in a rustic whose Taliban rulers impose the severest restrictions on women and girls anyplace on this planet.
Somaya Moniry, 24, hadn’t recognized that tour guides existed, as a career and even as an idea. However whereas searching the web for assistance on bettering her English language abilities, she stumbled upon Couchsurfing, an app the place vacationers join with locals and keep of their properties.
After internet hosting a traveler, “I grew to become very captivated with it and it was very attention-grabbing for me,” Moniry stated. “It was very distinctive. I’ve by no means heard about it earlier than, so I stated: ‘Why not (do) this?’”
On the lookout for the optimistic
As she confirmed that first customer round her hometown in western Afghanistan, she noticed a brand new facet to her nation.
“Many of the issues that now we have heard (about Afghanistan) was simply … negativity. The main target of the folks, focus of the media, focus of headlines, all of them had been simply the negativity. And positively we get influenced by that,” Moniry stated.
However for her, Afghanistan is way extra nuanced. Whereas there are undoubtedly issues in a spot recovering from a long time of battle and chaos, there may be additionally one other facet to the complicated, gorgeous nation. Her love for her homeland runs deep, and he or she is raring to share it. She hopes to steadily change folks’s perceptions.
“At any time when … I noticed all of that natures, all these magnificence, all these positivity, it modified my view completely,” Moniry stated in her enthusiastic English. “And positively this may be additionally for different folks.”
A type of guests is Australian Suzanne Sandral. She initially needed to see Afghanistan within the Nineteen Sixties however the pressures of getting a household stored her away. Now at 82, she was a part of Moniry’s women-only tour group in Kabul.
Afghanistan shocked her.
“It’s not what I anticipated in any respect. I anticipated to really feel reasonably fearful. I anticipated to be given plenty of … accusatory appears. By no means,” she stated throughout a pause in sightseeing. “Wherever you go within the streets, when you smile at somebody and provides them slightly nod or say howdy, you get a terrific response. So it’s very completely different.”
Jackie Birov, a 35-year-old impartial traveler from Chicago who was not a part of the tour group, known as the Afghan folks “unbelievably hospitable.”
Nonetheless, “I’m very conscious that I’ve much more freedom than native girls,” she stated.
A fledgling business
4 a long time of battle have stored vacationers away from Afghanistan. However whereas the Taliban’s takeover of energy in August 2021 despatched hundreds of Afghans fleeing and shocked the world, the tip of its insurgency in opposition to the earlier U.S.-backed authorities additionally marked a pointy drop in violence.
Assaults nonetheless often happen, primarily by an Islamic State affiliate, and Western nations advise in opposition to all journey to Afghanistan. Nonetheless, the improved safety is more and more attracting international guests drawn by the dramatic surroundings, millennia of historical past and a deeply ingrained tradition of hospitality.
Tourism is a fledgling business, with annual guests within the low hundreds. Most are impartial journey vacationers. However guided package deal excursions are rising from nations as numerous as China, Greece, the Netherlands and the UK.
Afghanistan’s Taliban authorities is eager to welcome them. Remoted on the worldwide stage — formally acknowledged solely by Russia, which did so in July — the federal government sees how doubtlessly profitable tourism may very well be.
Vacationer visas, sometimes single-entry ones legitimate for stays of as much as 30 days, have turn out to be comparatively easy to acquire from the few embassies that problem them. Common flights join Kabul with main transit hubs corresponding to Dubai and Istanbul.
A query of ethics
For some, the concept of visiting Afghanistan as a vacationer is morally abhorrent, notably given the federal government’s therapy of girls.
Women are banned from training above major faculty degree, and ladies stay below myriad restrictions. The federal government dictates what they will put on in public, the place they will go and who they will go together with. They can’t stroll in parks or eat in eating places. Magnificence salons are banned. A really restricted variety of professions, corresponding to educating and carpet weaving, are open to them.
And the principles can change shortly.
However these concerned in tourism level to the optimistic results that visiting Afghanistan can have.
“I actually imagine in moral tourism,” stated Zoe Stephens, 31, a British tour chief at Koryo Excursions, an organization specializing in uncommon locations. “I imagine you could divide politics and folks, and that’s the important factor for me. … A rustic will not be a sum of its politics. It’s a sum of a lot extra, it’s a sum of its tradition, its historical past, its meals, and particularly in Afghanistan, its folks.”
Glimpses into the ladies’s world
Of the three current excursions Stephens led in Afghanistan, two had been women-only. Working with native feminine guides, together with Moniry, they mix key points of interest with visits to girls’s facilities and cooking and embroidery courses from native girls — worlds which might be closed to male vacationers.
“We all the time try to do one thing slightly bit completely different that basically makes our excursions distinctive, in addition to one thing that form of provides again to the group,” Stephens stated. “So I felt that working with the feminine tour guides does each of these issues rather well.”
The teams are small — one had eight girls, the opposite three — however the firm is trying to construct a community of feminine guides throughout Afghanistan.
“What we try to do with this tour, particularly the ladies’s tour, is conquer these moral issues,” Stephens stated. “The thought is to study concerning the lives of Afghan girls in context.”