Marzia, 35, the mother of eight children, is also a “lead farmer” with the project, in Qala-e- Khona. And like Mah Jan, she too is a widow: “The Taliban killed my first husband. They just killed him without reason. He had a simple life. He was riding a horse. They took him away and they killed him.”

After her husband’s death, she ended up living with relatives in Iran, working for slave wages in a factory for 12 hours a day. Marzia fled home after the fall of the Taliban, but she was then forced to marry a brother in law, according to a primitive custom distilled from sharia law.

In the end, her second husband abandoned Marzia and her children. On her own again, she survived as best she could as a seamstress, until MEDA’s Through The Garden Gate project arrived in the village.

“It is very profitable for us,” Marzia said. “We are doing our housework and at the same time we are out working in the kitchen gardens. Now we have a savings box and we are hopeful.” Marzia has invested her small profits in a shop for her sons, and intends to expand her small farming business. Opportunities like that are opening up for women all across Parwan.

“Now the husbands in the villages are giving us chances to take part in decision making,” she said.

Mahbooba Hashimi is 38. She’s the facilitator of the project in Balaghel. She bore nine children, but her son Abuljamin, a translator, was killed in a suicide bombing in Kabul three years ago. The boy’s death was such a blow that Marzia’s husband became despondent and could not work. So Mahbooba moved back to her home village of Balaghel, and got involved with Through The Garden Gate.

“Now, we have learned this new system of life, so things can be better and better,” she said.

At first, the men of the village were suspicious of the project. But after seeing the results, even the most conservative men have begun to come around, she said.

Sharifa, 33, village facilitator for the project in the village of Dashto Opyan, told a similar story. “I had to tell the men, ‘I am not taking your wives and daughters away. They will be with me,’” she said.

Before she joined Through the Garden Gate, Sharifa’s husband wouldn’t even allow her out of the house, and she didn’t even know where her husband’s farm fields were. Nowadaways, her husband supports her work, and she is included in the formerly men-only community development councils. “I am happy, because the men listen to my suggestions now.

“My dreams are coming true. We are going to friends’ houses and relatives houses for a party, and to tell what we are doing. We are showing that women can be independent and can have things of our own. Now I can see and I can feel that I am alive and that I have a life. We are working, and we supporting our children and also the husbands are now happy with us.”