Kabul Beauty School part 2

I am continuing reading Kabul Beauty School by Deborah Rodriguez, I am currently on page 196. Debbie was able to make her idea about opening a school for hairdressers in Afghanistan a reality. She got several hair product donations from such companies as Paul Mitchell. Debbie than got help from the organization PARSA to help fund and run her beauty school. So with all the hair product donations and the help from PARSA the school Beauty Without Borders Kabul Beauty School got started. Debbie was a teacher there and she taught the women attending the school about various hairdresser things. Original she had trouble with that because she needed to use a translator because she wasn't fluent in Dari, however after a while she found out that if she had a student who understood the concept well teach the class instead, it was much easier. The school did have several problems including getting their land confiscated and having to move the school's location, and then having to move again because they were stuck in a place were empty rooms got rented out to men who liked to party a lot. There was also the problem of the lack of funding the school got. This prompted Debbie to make a salon to help fund the school. She had graduates from the school help run the salon which catered to western clients. I have also learned more about Deborah Rodriguez. She seems to always be sort of depressed. She always seemed to need some person to be with which causes her to quickly marry people who she doesn't really know much about. After her first divorce she married a preacher who became an abusive husband. She managed to divorce him and after that she went to Afghanistan to start her beauty school. In Afghanistan her Afghan friends believe that she needs an Afghan husband and so they find one for her. After only a few dates she and the Afghan guy, who was already married and had kids in Saudi Arabia, got married.

I think it is really sad some of the stories about women being abused in Afghanistan. There was this one girl named Hama who was molested by an older man who was a friend of her family. When Debbie found out about this she was very angry and tried to help Hama by keeping her away from the old guy. Eventually someone from the US told Debbie that she would take Hama in. So, Hama was sent to live in America. There was also a woman whose husband was very abusive and Debbie tried to help her. Debbie managed to get the women into the beauty school and after beauty school the woman managed to get her husband to divorce her. After that she started her own salon and is doing so well that she doesn't ever have to get married again.

I am really happy that Debbie has helped so many people and is trying to help even more. However, I think that Debbie is sort of a weird person and has some issues. I think it was really stupid of her to marry an Afghan man, even though he had some progressive thinking, he was still raised in a culture where women were considered inferior and were bossed around by their husbands. I also think that when Debbie went to Afghanistan she was abandoning her kids in America, when she first went to Afghanistan I think her kids were only in their teens and I think that by going to Afghanistan she abandoned them.