Mah Jan is a widow from the Parwani village of Qala-e-Kona. The hardships of her life are written in the lines on her face. She is 37, but she looks about 70. She is beautiful, nonetheless.

Forced to marry a deaf mute who died and left her alone with four children, Mah Jan has spent most of her adult life working as a washerwoman and a farm labourer, weeding fields for 400 grams of beans per jerbil of land, about two hectares to a jerbil. She raised her children in a tent.

But all that is behind her now. Over cups of strong tea at the Kabul offices of Through the Garden Gate, a project conceived and funded by Canadian Mennonites, Mah Jan explained how it came to pass that the hard life is behind her and she now makes frequent business trips to Kabul to sell vegetables. She has just bought a sheep and a goat, and is saving money to buy a cow.

The story of Mah Jan’s success begins with the Mennonite Economic Development Associates, a simple idea, and a careful program of strategic investments involving only small amounts of money – a few dollars in grant money here, a few more in “microfinance” loans there. The effort is transforming the lives of hundreds of Parwani women, like Mah Jan.

While the rest of the Third World was engaged in the “Green Revolution,” much of Afghanistan remained stunted by ancient farming methods. Even so, as recently as the 1970s, Afghanistan was more or less self-sufficient in food production. But three decades of war reduced Afgans to paupers.

In Parwan, farming practices remained an almost wholly subistence undertaking, nearly unchanged from the early days of the neolithic revolution. The farmers cast seed upon untilled ground. The men farmed the main fields, and the women were confined to household kitchen gardens.

By investing in basic literacy classes and some training in modern horticulture, the Mennonites have helped hundreds of Parwani women increase the yields of their household crops to allow for marketable surpluses. Through composting, irrigation, and other basic but “modern” methods, the effort has extended the growing season for potatoes, beans, carrots, cucumbers, onions, and tomatoes.

With training in efficient storage and marketing, the women reinvested their tiny profits to package and sell their produce in Kabul at times when vegetables are otherwise scarce and expensive. These further earnings have paid the costs of teachers, and now the women of Parwan are slowly emerging into the light of literature and commerce and the life of the world.

Nine Parwani villages have reaped the benefits so far, and in Qala-e-Kona, everyone thanks Mah Jan. It was she who stepped forward to serve as the village leader in what was, at the time, uncertain, contentious and experimental enterprise. These days, Mah Jan, formerly a widowed washerwoman and field labourer, can boast that she is routinely invited to weddings and parties.

While Parwani villages remain profoundly conservative places, there is simply no comparison with “the Taliban time.” In those days, the women of Parwan were hiding in the cellars.

The Taliban, covetous of Parwan’s rich farmlands and orchards, set about to carve up the land and dole it out among their own crowd. They roared across Parwan in heavily-armed armadas of Toyota SUVs, and they drove off the men, butchering the brave ones who stood and fought. The Parwani women would come out at night to kill the Taliban.

“The Taliban burned our lands and tried to force people to move to Jalalabad,” Mah Jan recalled. “The men escaped. When the Taliban came with guns, the women would come out to beat them to death with their bare hands.”