International Women’s Day, March 8th

Even though International Women’s Day  has been celebrated for over a hundred years, my first time to celebrate this holiday was four years ago.  We were still in Tajikistan learning language, and my husband gave me the most beautiful bouquet of flowers.  Here’s a fun flashback picture of when I had less gray hair and of course my flowers.

Every year our office staff has luncheon for the ladies on the team and the national ladies that work at the office.  Due to my school schedule, I was not able to attend until this year.   The room was full of 4 workers plus 6 of us wives and a few kids.  The table was overflowing with qabli palau, naan, fruit, firini ( a custard dish) and drinks.  I enjoyed an hour of talking with the other ladies and at the end being treated to speeches from our staff on the importance of women and their work.   The speeches were both in Dari and English with one poem read in Pashto.  My favourite part was when Enayat, one of  national staff who is good friends with our director, spoke about the director’s wife really being the boss.  He was in his element as the MC and gave the longest speech.  Before leaving, the staff gave us each a rose, card and swiss tool business card.  A Swiss tool business card is like a swiss army knife but is the size of a business card.  I am now prepared for almost anything.

Here a few pictures from the event.  Sorry they are not of good quality since they were taken with my phone.

This last picture is of me with my friend Ruth who is supposedly the boss.  Our director and his wife make a great team for leading our team, and we are blessed to have them.

For countries like Afghanistan, it is important to have a day to recognise women and their achievements.  At Pactec, we are excited to have two ladies in our finance office with one of them training to be our finance manager.  The other two ladies work as a cook and cleaner.  It doesn’t seem like much, but for Afghanistan it is a start.  More and more ladies are getting the education they need so hopefully they will also be able to find the work that they need.

So Happy International Women’s Day a few days late.