Excellent story. I ghost wrote a memoire for an Afghan woman, who is turning 85 this weekend, She described the same images when she was young in the renaissance years of the 1940s, when the women for the first time shed the burka and went to the Kabul University with "boys", as she says, to become one of the first OBGYNs in Afghanistan.

I remember the heavenly smell of freshly baked flatbread that was available in small, humble bakeries at every corner of every city and town. In every imaginable size.And those rugged mountains surrounding Kabul that I could see from the rooftop of our house. Covered with dwellings way up the steep slopes and painstakingly put together, brick by brick. Reserved for the less fortunate who could not afford more than the rocky soil with minimal water and electricity supplies.There were those countless bazaars I was never allowed to visit but only marvel at through the windows of an armored car. And it was there that I felt the vibration. The vibration of an entire peace-loving nation on the banks of the Kabul River.