SHARBAT GULA
(Article taken from http://www.inq7.net/,writting by Ma.Ceres P.Doyo)
THE GREAT news is that they have found Sharbat Gula. The terrible news is that I will not be able to watch National Geographic's documentary series on the search that ended successfully because Skycable dropped the National Geographic Channel. (And for the many years I have been subscribing to Skycable and accumulating reward points, I was told after inquiring that I am entitled to a T-shirt that, again I was told, I have to pick up at the Benpres Building in Ortigas Center. Inyo na lang, please. I'd rather have the NG Channel back. So there.)

Who is Sharbat Gula? If you've been receiving these past several years National Geographic Magazine's persistent invitations to a subscription, you would have noticed that one great face framed by a veil, you would have stopped to behold those stunning sea-green eyes with flecks of brown, pupils constricted, gazing out from the NG brochure. Its caption merely says ''Afghan refugee.''


The picture is one of several that mostly show wildlife in its majestic glory. But this girl, this human being, holds her own. She has been, for a long time, NG's poster girl without a name. She was, in June 1985, NG's cover girl. Who was she? Where was she all these years? Even NG did not know.

Seventeen years later, they searched for her. And they found her. You would want to find her. I had always wondered about her, the way I do about people I photographed in the most remote places a long time ago. Millions of readers had seen her face and she did not even know it.

Now she knows. She has seen her own face at last, the face that went around the world. The face that, Nestor Torre said, symbolized the suffering of an entire generation of Afghan women and their children.

Said NG's Barbara McConnell: "For 17 years we did not know the name of the young girl who stared so hauntingly from the cover of the June 1985 National Geographic. Now we do. It is Sharbat Gula. Her name, in the Pashto language of the Pashtun people, means sweetwater flower girl... Millions around the world have wondered who the mysterious girl was. Now she is a grown woman with girls of her own, and we can give Sharbat Gula the dignity of her name."

I have not gotten hold of the latest National Geographic Magazine where Sharbat (then and now) is again on the cover, and the documentary won't be on Skycable so I had to content myself with the Internet version which is rather abbreviated. But my curiosity has been somewhat satisfied.

Steve McCurry was the photographer who captured that face, those eyes. It's a miracle that Sharbat Gula survived all these years, he said. "When I took her photo in 1984, Afghanistan was at war with the Soviet Union. The country was in a serious state of lawlessness, and the mortality rate among the refugee population was high. As with so many of her fellow Afghans, her survival is a testament to her courage and determination."

So how did they find her and how sure were they that the woman named Sharbat Gula was the Afghan girl? In January, after several months of US bombing of Afghanistan, McCurry joined an NG TV and film crew to methodically search for that face without a name. They showed the 1985 cover photo in refugee camps in Pakistan where McCurry had met the girl. After some false leads, a man who had lived in that camp said he knew who she was. She was alive. She was living in the mountainous Tora Bora region of Afghanistan. The man said he would find her and true enough, after three days, he and a friend brought Sharbat back to the camp.

"When we found her," said producer Lawrence Cumbo, "almost everyone in her family was ill. So the first thing we did was to send them to a doctor for medical care. She never asked for anything for herself. Her first concern was her family's health."

Sharbat must have been about 6 when her parents were killed in the Soviet bombing. To escape to safety the orphaned brood and their grandmother walked through snow-covered mountains for a week until they reached a camp in Pakistan. It was only in the mid-1990s, during a lull in the fighting, that Sharbat returned to her village.

It all unraveled like a poem--the story of her life, her journey, her survival, the love she has found, the new lives she has brought into this world. Oh, but technology had to butt in--just to make sure. Sharbat's eyes had to be scrutinized.

It has been proven that patterns in the iris are even more individual and distinct than fingerprints. So the patterns in the eyes of the 1985 cover girl and those in Sharbat's had to be compared. NG sought the help of John Daugman, inventor of the automatic iris recognition machine and professor at the University of Cambridge. Daugman who uses mathematical calculations was sure the Afghan refugee in the picture and Sharbat were one and the same. Iridian Technologies, a US company that develops iris-recognition security systems, was also tapped.

The FBI's forensic examiner Thomas Musheno did his own scrutiny and said the refugee girl in the photograph and Sharbat were the same person.

Sharbat had not been photographed since McCurry took her photo in 1984. Now she agreed to be photographed again, without a burka covering her, "because her husband told her it would be proper."

If not for the eyes and a tiny scar, the overall look of Sharbat now bears little resemblance to the face on the 1985 NG cover. But 17 years and bloody wars that wiped out 1.5 million people, marriage and motherhood did little change to her eyes. The ocean, the fire--they have remained in Sharbat Gula's eyes.
Names have power, so let us speak of hers. Her name is Sharbat Gula, and she is Pashtun, that most warlike of Afghan tribes. It is said of the Pashtun that they are only at peace when they are at war, and her eyes—then and now—burn with ferocity. She is 28, perhaps 29, or even 30. No one, not even she, knows for sure. Stories shift like sand in a place where no records exist. Time and hardship have erased her youth. Her skin looks like leather. The geometry of her jaw has softened. The eyes still glare; that has not softened.

“She’s had a hard life,” said McCurry. “So many here share her story.” Consider the numbers. Twenty-three years of war, 1.5 million killed, 3.5 million refugees: This is the story of Afghanistan in the past quarter century.

Now, consider this photograph of a young girl with sea green eyes. Her eyes challenge ours. Most of all, they disturb. We cannot turn away.

“There is not one family that has not eaten the bitterness of war,” a young Afghan merchant said in the 1985 National Geographic story that appeared with Sharbat’s photograph on the cover. She was a child when her country was caught in the jaws of the Soviet invasion. A carpet of destruction smothered countless villages like hers. She was perhaps six when Soviet bombing killed her parents. By day the sky bled terror. At night the dead were buried. And always, the sound of planes, stabbing her with dread.

“We left Afghanistan because of the fighting,” said her brother, Kashar Khan, filling in the narrative of her life. He is a straight line of a man with a raptor face and piercing eyes. “The Russians were everywhere. They were killing people. We had no choice.”

Shepherded by their grandmother, he and his four sisters walked to Pakistan. For a week they moved through mountains covered in snow, begging for blankets to keep warm.

“You never knew when the planes would come,” he recalled. “We hid in caves.”

The journey that began with the loss of their parents and a trek across mountains by foot ended in a refugee camp tent living with strangers.

“Rural people like Sharbat find it difficult to live in the cramped surroundings of a refugee camp,” explained Rahimullah Yusufzai, a respected Pakistani journalist who acted as interpreter for McCurry and the television crew. “There is no privacy. You live at the mercy of other people.” More than that, you live at the mercy of the politics of other countries. “The Russian invasion destroyed our lives,” her brother said.

It is the ongoing tragedy of Afghanistan. Invasion. Resistance. Invasion. Will it ever end? “Each change of government brings hope,” said Yusufzai. “Each time, the Afghan people have found themselves betrayed by their leaders and by outsiders professing to be their friends and saviors.”

In the mid-1990s, during a lull in the fighting, Sharbat Gula went home to her village in the foothills of mountains veiled by snow. To live in this earthen-colored village at the end of a thread of path means to scratch out an existence, nothing more. There are terraces planted with corn, wheat, and rice, some walnut trees, a stream that spills down the mountain (except in times of drought), but no school, clinic, roads or running water.

SHARBAT GULA AFTER 17 OF SUFFER AND WAR