Afghanistan country/city shots 00:00
COLGAN: They glide through the streets like blue ghosts Afghan women still too afraid to throw off their burkhas. Yet there are thousands of others looking the world in the eye once more and they're hungry to recapture what was stolen from them during years of repression. 00:21
This is Kabul, Afghanistan a city robbed of beauty during the harsh years of the Taliban regime. Now from the high fashion world of New York comes a bid to help Afghan women reclaim their culture of beauty and to give them a livelihood that will mean survival. 00:53
COLGAN: It's an industry renowned more for cattiness than charity for vanity rather than philanthropy. Yet some of the most powerful fashion companies and their executives have got behind a support scheme that started in one woman's salon chair. 01:28
GRAUEL: So you wanted to go for a change today. I love the idea of doing like a longish bang I think that it will look really great. And I'll just make it a little chunky. 01:51
COLGAN: New York hair stylist, Terri Grauel knew she'd made it in the industry on the way to her first Vogue shoot in December 2000. What she hadn't counted on was being so moved by the woman she was meeting Mary McMakin, founder of PARSA, a group supporting Afghan women. 72-year-old McMakin had lived and worked in Afghanistan for 35 years when she was denounced as a spy by the Taliban, arrested and thrown out of the country. 01:59
TERRI GRAUEL: After I had met Mary, I was much more inspired by her to look at women's issues, because I was horrified with her stories. 02:35
COLGAN: Within a year the chance meeting would set the New York hair stylist on a path to Kabul.
TERRI GRAUEL: Five weeks in Kabul, six weeks total. After 02:50 Terri the Taliban left, Mary saw that so many women were opening up storefront salons and they were doing it with very limited resources. So she was very proud of them and asked me if I would go and teach classes, and so I thought, well I couldnt try to do better than that. 03:00
COLGAN: A fundraising crusade saw cosmetics companies, fashion magazines and industry players put up half a million U.S. dollars in cash and products to start a beauty school. 03:23
TERRI GRAUEL: I think generosity of spirit that's what I felt and they're people too, just like us, and this is their way of giving back to women and it's a great thing. 03:37
Hairdresser at basin
HAIRDRESSER: Shes quite compliant with whatever product we want to put on her. I like the quiet, shy types. 04:03
Hairdressing class
COLGAN: A small team of helpers went looking for hair and make-up professionals willing to go to Afghanistan as volunteer teachers. In an inspired move, they sought out Afghan-American women already working at hairdressers to form a bridge between cultures and language. For each, it would mean going home for the first time. Sima Calkin jumped at the chance. She last saw home 23 years ago.
SIMA CALKIN: I didnt have the hope that I'm going to be going back but now it's like yesterday wasn't soon enough that I should be there. 04:48
COLGAN: Barely speaking English, Sima fled her war stricken country with her 5-year-old daughter for a new start in America. 04:56
SIMA CALKIN: At the beginning it was really hard. I missed home every day, I used to cry, I used to dream. After a while, life kind of pushed you to adjust to where you are and what you do. 05:04
COLGAN: Even after the Taliban fled, it didnt occur to her she could be of use back home. 05:21
SIMA CALKIN: I wasn't a doctor, there wasn't a need for me, I wasn't a nurse what could I do? What could I teach them? Then this came along. 05:27
Sima pulls up at home
COLGAN: Two decades in America she says have not made her forget those she left behind. 05:39
SIMA CALKIN: I was one of the lucky ones to leave. 05:47
Sima. Super: Sima CalkinHairdresser I survived, I learned, I saw a different world, I'm a different person, but deep down in my heart I'm still an Afghan. 05:53
COLGAN: The Afghanistan Sima remembers bears no resemblance to the country so wracked by war for the past twenty years. 06:06
SIMA CALKIN: It was green, grass, flowers. Afghanistan was another heaven on earth. 06:15
COLGAN: She recalls a privileged childhood, shared with her three sisters and two brothers. At university, she enjoyed a freedom that soon became lost to Afghan women. 06:27
SIMA CALKIN: Their scarfs are much bigger than what we wore. We wore much smaller like this. 06:39
COLGAN: Now remarried, Sima, her husband Hugh and daughter Soraia share a comfortable American existence in Falls Church, Virginia. But days from now, she'll revisit her past. 06:50
SIMA CALKIN: It's not still real. I have to be on the plane, I have to get there to believe I'm there. It's like a dream it's a dream. I have been away for 23 years. 07:06
Beauty without Borders members having photo taken
COLGAN: And they now have a name Beauty without Borders. The first to go, Sima and Terri. 07:20
COLGAN: For Sima, her first glimpses of Kabul have left her too numb to even cry. 08:15
SIMA CALKIN: I am in shock, I am in shock. I keep telling myself it's a dream, I'm not here, it's not the way it should be. And I thought what we saw on the news and the everything, it was, oh it's not going to be like this but it's worse that it was, worse than what I saw. It's just mind boggling to see what happened to it. They have gone through so much that you can't describe it. I feel guilty coming here and saying I'm doing something. I havent done anything, I haven't. I feel like they were the ones who saved the place, the home for us to come back to, we didnt do anything. One of the best parts on the flight, when they said we are going to cross the border and we are going to be going to Afghanistan, that was the part that I thought I'm home now. 08:26
COLGAN: In the two years since the fall of the Taliban, money has flowed into Kabul but to very few hands. There are more goods to buy, businesses have opened, but the rewards have not even begun to trickle down to the poorest. Poverty is everywhere. 09:35
SIMA CALKIN: God, I can see that Afghanistan or Kabul, so far as I've seen it, have gone back about 100 years, not even 20 or 50. I left here 23 years ago but what I see right now, I dont see anybody the way we dressed before. 10:00
I will never leave like the way I left before, when I thought I'm gone. I dont think I can live there again the way I did before. 10:22
COLGAN: At the beauty school there are just two days to the inaugural class and a mountain of work to finish. Patricia O'Connor, a marketing consultant to the beauty industry in New York has been pivotal in bringing it all together. 10:45
PATRICIA: We dont have the instructions for anything. We have to like guess as we go. Everything here is like figure it out. We need like a Martha Stewart type to come in and take a look at it.
COLGAN: Confronted by a band of energetic driven foreign women, local tradesmen try to build a slice of New York in the middle of Kabul.
TERRI GRAUEL: When I walked in and all of a sudden 11:20
everything that needed to get done came to me at once almost. It was a lot to do, a lot to do, so it was a little overwhelming. 11:37
COLGAN: It's been a logistical nightmare, still missing 90 manikin heads from China.
PATRICIA: So they are somewhere. There is some man with 90 heads. 11:50
PATRICIA O'CONNOR: How would I describe it? Nothing short of a miracle. 12:26
COLGAN: And miraculously it does come together. 12:38
SIMA: Hello my sister, I'm Sima. I'm happy to meet you.
COLGAN: Too many women have turned up for the first three-month course and some are sent away until next time. 12:49
SIMA: Here is your notebook, heres your pen. Welcome again.
COLGAN: Each of the women works as a beautician of sorts some with many years experience, some novices. But for most it will be their first formal training in a business that's booming. 13:08
Beauty salons have cropped up all over the city finally women can openly work at what they'd been doing in secret under the Taliban and make lots of money. Cosmetics, hairstyling, what they lack in subtlety they make up for with enthusiasm and every colour of the palette. But there are serious issues of hygiene, the use of chemicals, the lack of training the beauty business badly needs a facelift. 13:32
SIMA: Always try to have the hair wet for the comb, when cutting. And always try to have the scissors and comb in your hand. 14:20
COLGAN: The Shanghaied manikins have arrived in time for class and the women are ploughing through the curriculum. 14:28
TERRI GRAUEL: It's not easy hairdressing is very difficult to learn and it's a condensed curriculum.
COLGAN: It's a country where 60 percent of the women are widows and most of those in this class are the breadwinners of the family. Beauty is still a luxury for the Afghan woman, one wedding makeover can earn them the equivalent of a tradesman's monthly wage. 14:49
SIMA CALKIN: Part of our classes are teaching them a small course of business, how to build a clientele, how to save money. They can start from one chair and they can go bigger and bigger to become a hairdresser with a big salon. 15:11
Hairdressing class
COLGAN: Two members of the one family 18 year old Wajma and her aunt Jamila hope it will turn around the family fortunes. If they pass the course, they want to open a salon together. 15:26
SIMA: Whats the mistake here? Has she made a mistake or not? You saw how she stood the way she stood up. She was bending over. 15:39
COLGAN: Wajma harbours dreams of one day going to medical college, but for now her plans are grounded in practicalities. 15:50
WAJMA: Nowadays a beautician earns a lot more than a doctor. The doctor charges 30 afghanis for a visit a beautician charges 300 afghanis for hairstyling. Being a beautician means a much better income than being a doctor. If we continue like this for the three months, I will learn a lot. All our mistakes are being corrected and later it will mean I'll be able to help my family. 16:05
COLGAN: In the poor neighbourhood where they live, Wajma shares housing with 25 members of her extended family, 14 of them children. 16:46
Though her father and 2 brothers are working, they urgently need more money they borrowed heavily to send one of her brothers to Australia. 17:00
REYHANA SHIRZAI [wife of brother]: My husband left because of the Taliban. I didnt hold out much hope for it, but I agreed it was much better for him to go and be far from the beatings and floggings from the Taliban. 17:10
WAJMA: Yes, he borrowed money -- everything we had in the house -- and my father borrowed for him. Now these people have been asking for their money back. He spent $10,000. 17:26
COLGAN: Her brother Jamshaid, she explains, risked the refugee path, a boat from Indonesia to Australia only to be caught and interned in the Broome detention centre. 17:40
WajimaPhoto of Jamshaid The family says he spent two years behind the prison wire before giving up his bid for asylum and returning home last year.
ROBIA PASHTUNYAR: My son was so very keen to go and stay there and for some of us to join him. 17:56
But because he couldnt, we're all heartbroken. We're frightened now and think if we go again, we will have to borrow money and may still be rejected -- so no one has hopes of going anywhere else. 18:12
COLGAN: Wajma's aunt Jamila is a teacher but she worked secretly at home doing makeovers during the Taliban years, to supplement her income. 18:29
JAMILA PASHTUNYAR: When the women came, they wore their burkhas. When they finished, we checked for Taliban outside, then put on their burkhas and thered be a car waiting right outside for them. 18:46
COLGAN: They were threatened once by the Taliban and Jamila's brother was taken to gaol for three days. But it wasn't as bad as the treatment she saw meted out to one woman. 18:55
JAMILA PASHTUNYAR: During the Taliban time, she bared her face while she was crossing the road. Two people following from behind threw acid on her face. Her face was burned and her scarf destroyed because she took off her burkha. 19:07
COLGAN: Yet Afghan women, they say, risked everything for the sake of looking beautiful. It was an act of defiance that allowed them a modicum of control in a life controlled by others. 19:25
JAMILA PASHTUNYAR: They're very happy now -- and glad to be liberated like before because in the past we had this custom - whenever we went to a wedding party or engagement party -- whenever we were invited -- it was our custom to make ourselves up to look beautiful. Now everyone has that happy feeling. 19:41
SIMA CALKIN: This is the school that my brother and sister went to and my cousin. 20:06
COLGAN: For Sima, it's time to confront the past she's returning to the home she left behind.
SIMA CALKIN: This was my bedroom. 20:18
COLGAN: This was your bedroom?
SIMA CALKIN: That was my bedroom with my sister, yes. Oh I hope to God somebody's here. I hope somebody's here. [Knocking on gate] Hello how are you?
CARETAKER: Hello, how are you?SIMA: Hello, how are you? 20:40
SIMA CALKIN: Is anyone at home?
CARETAKER: No, no one's in the house.
SIMA CALKIN: Is the door open?
CARETAKER: It's an office here now.
SIMA CALKIN: It's my house, can I come in and see? 20:52
CARETAKER: Please, please.
Sima walks around garden and then house crying
SIMA CALKIN: Oh God it looks so small. 21:22
COLGAN: The house is just the way she left it more than 20 years ago. 21:39
SIMA CALKIN: Even the light fixtures are the same. This was my room with my sister. We were together, we didnt need friends outside, there was six of us, just coming home from school and sitting in that little room and whispering with my sister and talking about what we went through. 21:54
COLGAN: Her family, she says, has no intention of abandoning their home again. 22:22
SIMA CALKIN: It's still our house, my mum has the papers, my brother asked me to check everything out he wants to move back. 22:30
COLGAN: Do you feel you're paving the way for them to come back? 22:34
SIMA CALKIN: I hope so.
Opening of beauty academy Music
COLGAN: At school, it's the big day Opening Day for the Kabul Beauty Academy. There are two guests of honour Mary McMakin, the woman who inspired the scheme and Afghanistans Minister for Women's Affairs.
PATRICIA O'CONNOR: We've been working for over a year on this project 22:48 and we've been very lucky. We've had great support from the Minister and Deputy Minister who both are here tonight, and they've been really supportive in helping us bring this to light for the Afghan women. Here in Afghanistan they need a lot of things. Obviously this country is being rebuilt from the ground up. 23:09
They need so much, they need medicines, they need better hospitals, they need housing but they also need an ability to earn a living. 23:30
MINISTER: I hope the women will make good use of this beauty centre -- this learning centre. God willing, we can say it will be a positive step for women and their education. 23:41
COLGAN: For Sima, this has been more a personal journey to make two halves of her life whole. 24:21
SIMA CALKIN: When I first saw the women and I listened to them, I couldn't look at them. I was so ashamed and embarrassed. I ran away from here I left them alone. I wanted to hug and kiss them all I wanted to kiss their hands and feet because they were the ones who saved the country for us. It's my promise to myself and the women in this country I can't help them all but if I can help two at a time, I'll be back again. 24:32
COLGAN: They glide through the streets like blue ghosts Afghan women still too afraid to throw off their burkhas. Yet there are thousands of others looking the world in the eye once more and they're hungry to recapture what was stolen from them during years of repression. 00:21
This is Kabul, Afghanistan a city robbed of beauty during the harsh years of the Taliban regime. Now from the high fashion world of New York comes a bid to help Afghan women reclaim their culture of beauty and to give them a livelihood that will mean survival. 00:53
COLGAN: It's an industry renowned more for cattiness than charity for vanity rather than philanthropy. Yet some of the most powerful fashion companies and their executives have got behind a support scheme that started in one woman's salon chair. 01:28
GRAUEL: So you wanted to go for a change today. I love the idea of doing like a longish bang I think that it will look really great. And I'll just make it a little chunky. 01:51
COLGAN: New York hair stylist, Terri Grauel knew she'd made it in the industry on the way to her first Vogue shoot in December 2000. What she hadn't counted on was being so moved by the woman she was meeting Mary McMakin, founder of PARSA, a group supporting Afghan women. 72-year-old McMakin had lived and worked in Afghanistan for 35 years when she was denounced as a spy by the Taliban, arrested and thrown out of the country. 01:59
TERRI GRAUEL: After I had met Mary, I was much more inspired by her to look at women's issues, because I was horrified with her stories. 02:35
COLGAN: Within a year the chance meeting would set the New York hair stylist on a path to Kabul.
TERRI GRAUEL: Five weeks in Kabul, six weeks total. After 02:50 Terri the Taliban left, Mary saw that so many women were opening up storefront salons and they were doing it with very limited resources. So she was very proud of them and asked me if I would go and teach classes, and so I thought, well I couldnt try to do better than that. 03:00
COLGAN: A fundraising crusade saw cosmetics companies, fashion magazines and industry players put up half a million U.S. dollars in cash and products to start a beauty school. 03:23
TERRI GRAUEL: I think generosity of spirit that's what I felt and they're people too, just like us, and this is their way of giving back to women and it's a great thing. 03:37
Hairdresser at basin
HAIRDRESSER: Shes quite compliant with whatever product we want to put on her. I like the quiet, shy types. 04:03
Hairdressing class
COLGAN: A small team of helpers went looking for hair and make-up professionals willing to go to Afghanistan as volunteer teachers. In an inspired move, they sought out Afghan-American women already working at hairdressers to form a bridge between cultures and language. For each, it would mean going home for the first time. Sima Calkin jumped at the chance. She last saw home 23 years ago.
SIMA CALKIN: I didnt have the hope that I'm going to be going back but now it's like yesterday wasn't soon enough that I should be there. 04:48
COLGAN: Barely speaking English, Sima fled her war stricken country with her 5-year-old daughter for a new start in America. 04:56
SIMA CALKIN: At the beginning it was really hard. I missed home every day, I used to cry, I used to dream. After a while, life kind of pushed you to adjust to where you are and what you do. 05:04
COLGAN: Even after the Taliban fled, it didnt occur to her she could be of use back home. 05:21
SIMA CALKIN: I wasn't a doctor, there wasn't a need for me, I wasn't a nurse what could I do? What could I teach them? Then this came along. 05:27
Sima pulls up at home
COLGAN: Two decades in America she says have not made her forget those she left behind. 05:39
SIMA CALKIN: I was one of the lucky ones to leave. 05:47
Sima. Super: Sima CalkinHairdresser I survived, I learned, I saw a different world, I'm a different person, but deep down in my heart I'm still an Afghan. 05:53
COLGAN: The Afghanistan Sima remembers bears no resemblance to the country so wracked by war for the past twenty years. 06:06
SIMA CALKIN: It was green, grass, flowers. Afghanistan was another heaven on earth. 06:15
COLGAN: She recalls a privileged childhood, shared with her three sisters and two brothers. At university, she enjoyed a freedom that soon became lost to Afghan women. 06:27
SIMA CALKIN: Their scarfs are much bigger than what we wore. We wore much smaller like this. 06:39
COLGAN: Now remarried, Sima, her husband Hugh and daughter Soraia share a comfortable American existence in Falls Church, Virginia. But days from now, she'll revisit her past. 06:50
SIMA CALKIN: It's not still real. I have to be on the plane, I have to get there to believe I'm there. It's like a dream it's a dream. I have been away for 23 years. 07:06
Beauty without Borders members having photo taken
COLGAN: And they now have a name Beauty without Borders. The first to go, Sima and Terri. 07:20
COLGAN: For Sima, her first glimpses of Kabul have left her too numb to even cry. 08:15
SIMA CALKIN: I am in shock, I am in shock. I keep telling myself it's a dream, I'm not here, it's not the way it should be. And I thought what we saw on the news and the everything, it was, oh it's not going to be like this but it's worse that it was, worse than what I saw. It's just mind boggling to see what happened to it. They have gone through so much that you can't describe it. I feel guilty coming here and saying I'm doing something. I havent done anything, I haven't. I feel like they were the ones who saved the place, the home for us to come back to, we didnt do anything. One of the best parts on the flight, when they said we are going to cross the border and we are going to be going to Afghanistan, that was the part that I thought I'm home now. 08:26
COLGAN: In the two years since the fall of the Taliban, money has flowed into Kabul but to very few hands. There are more goods to buy, businesses have opened, but the rewards have not even begun to trickle down to the poorest. Poverty is everywhere. 09:35
SIMA CALKIN: God, I can see that Afghanistan or Kabul, so far as I've seen it, have gone back about 100 years, not even 20 or 50. I left here 23 years ago but what I see right now, I dont see anybody the way we dressed before. 10:00
I will never leave like the way I left before, when I thought I'm gone. I dont think I can live there again the way I did before. 10:22
COLGAN: At the beauty school there are just two days to the inaugural class and a mountain of work to finish. Patricia O'Connor, a marketing consultant to the beauty industry in New York has been pivotal in bringing it all together. 10:45
PATRICIA: We dont have the instructions for anything. We have to like guess as we go. Everything here is like figure it out. We need like a Martha Stewart type to come in and take a look at it.
COLGAN: Confronted by a band of energetic driven foreign women, local tradesmen try to build a slice of New York in the middle of Kabul.
TERRI GRAUEL: When I walked in and all of a sudden 11:20
everything that needed to get done came to me at once almost. It was a lot to do, a lot to do, so it was a little overwhelming. 11:37
COLGAN: It's been a logistical nightmare, still missing 90 manikin heads from China.
PATRICIA: So they are somewhere. There is some man with 90 heads. 11:50
PATRICIA O'CONNOR: How would I describe it? Nothing short of a miracle. 12:26
COLGAN: And miraculously it does come together. 12:38
SIMA: Hello my sister, I'm Sima. I'm happy to meet you.
COLGAN: Too many women have turned up for the first three-month course and some are sent away until next time. 12:49
SIMA: Here is your notebook, heres your pen. Welcome again.
COLGAN: Each of the women works as a beautician of sorts some with many years experience, some novices. But for most it will be their first formal training in a business that's booming. 13:08
Beauty salons have cropped up all over the city finally women can openly work at what they'd been doing in secret under the Taliban and make lots of money. Cosmetics, hairstyling, what they lack in subtlety they make up for with enthusiasm and every colour of the palette. But there are serious issues of hygiene, the use of chemicals, the lack of training the beauty business badly needs a facelift. 13:32
SIMA: Always try to have the hair wet for the comb, when cutting. And always try to have the scissors and comb in your hand. 14:20
COLGAN: The Shanghaied manikins have arrived in time for class and the women are ploughing through the curriculum. 14:28
TERRI GRAUEL: It's not easy hairdressing is very difficult to learn and it's a condensed curriculum.
COLGAN: It's a country where 60 percent of the women are widows and most of those in this class are the breadwinners of the family. Beauty is still a luxury for the Afghan woman, one wedding makeover can earn them the equivalent of a tradesman's monthly wage. 14:49
SIMA CALKIN: Part of our classes are teaching them a small course of business, how to build a clientele, how to save money. They can start from one chair and they can go bigger and bigger to become a hairdresser with a big salon. 15:11
Hairdressing class
COLGAN: Two members of the one family 18 year old Wajma and her aunt Jamila hope it will turn around the family fortunes. If they pass the course, they want to open a salon together. 15:26
SIMA: Whats the mistake here? Has she made a mistake or not? You saw how she stood the way she stood up. She was bending over. 15:39
COLGAN: Wajma harbours dreams of one day going to medical college, but for now her plans are grounded in practicalities. 15:50
WAJMA: Nowadays a beautician earns a lot more than a doctor. The doctor charges 30 afghanis for a visit a beautician charges 300 afghanis for hairstyling. Being a beautician means a much better income than being a doctor. If we continue like this for the three months, I will learn a lot. All our mistakes are being corrected and later it will mean I'll be able to help my family. 16:05
COLGAN: In the poor neighbourhood where they live, Wajma shares housing with 25 members of her extended family, 14 of them children. 16:46
Though her father and 2 brothers are working, they urgently need more money they borrowed heavily to send one of her brothers to Australia. 17:00
REYHANA SHIRZAI [wife of brother]: My husband left because of the Taliban. I didnt hold out much hope for it, but I agreed it was much better for him to go and be far from the beatings and floggings from the Taliban. 17:10
WAJMA: Yes, he borrowed money -- everything we had in the house -- and my father borrowed for him. Now these people have been asking for their money back. He spent $10,000. 17:26
COLGAN: Her brother Jamshaid, she explains, risked the refugee path, a boat from Indonesia to Australia only to be caught and interned in the Broome detention centre. 17:40
WajimaPhoto of Jamshaid The family says he spent two years behind the prison wire before giving up his bid for asylum and returning home last year.
ROBIA PASHTUNYAR: My son was so very keen to go and stay there and for some of us to join him. 17:56
But because he couldnt, we're all heartbroken. We're frightened now and think if we go again, we will have to borrow money and may still be rejected -- so no one has hopes of going anywhere else. 18:12
COLGAN: Wajma's aunt Jamila is a teacher but she worked secretly at home doing makeovers during the Taliban years, to supplement her income. 18:29
JAMILA PASHTUNYAR: When the women came, they wore their burkhas. When they finished, we checked for Taliban outside, then put on their burkhas and thered be a car waiting right outside for them. 18:46
COLGAN: They were threatened once by the Taliban and Jamila's brother was taken to gaol for three days. But it wasn't as bad as the treatment she saw meted out to one woman. 18:55
JAMILA PASHTUNYAR: During the Taliban time, she bared her face while she was crossing the road. Two people following from behind threw acid on her face. Her face was burned and her scarf destroyed because she took off her burkha. 19:07
COLGAN: Yet Afghan women, they say, risked everything for the sake of looking beautiful. It was an act of defiance that allowed them a modicum of control in a life controlled by others. 19:25
JAMILA PASHTUNYAR: They're very happy now -- and glad to be liberated like before because in the past we had this custom - whenever we went to a wedding party or engagement party -- whenever we were invited -- it was our custom to make ourselves up to look beautiful. Now everyone has that happy feeling. 19:41
SIMA CALKIN: This is the school that my brother and sister went to and my cousin. 20:06
COLGAN: For Sima, it's time to confront the past she's returning to the home she left behind.
SIMA CALKIN: This was my bedroom. 20:18
COLGAN: This was your bedroom?
SIMA CALKIN: That was my bedroom with my sister, yes. Oh I hope to God somebody's here. I hope somebody's here. [Knocking on gate] Hello how are you?
CARETAKER: Hello, how are you?SIMA: Hello, how are you? 20:40
SIMA CALKIN: Is anyone at home?
CARETAKER: No, no one's in the house.
SIMA CALKIN: Is the door open?
CARETAKER: It's an office here now.
SIMA CALKIN: It's my house, can I come in and see? 20:52
CARETAKER: Please, please.
Sima walks around garden and then house crying
SIMA CALKIN: Oh God it looks so small. 21:22
COLGAN: The house is just the way she left it more than 20 years ago. 21:39
SIMA CALKIN: Even the light fixtures are the same. This was my room with my sister. We were together, we didnt need friends outside, there was six of us, just coming home from school and sitting in that little room and whispering with my sister and talking about what we went through. 21:54
COLGAN: Her family, she says, has no intention of abandoning their home again. 22:22
SIMA CALKIN: It's still our house, my mum has the papers, my brother asked me to check everything out he wants to move back. 22:30
COLGAN: Do you feel you're paving the way for them to come back? 22:34
SIMA CALKIN: I hope so.
Opening of beauty academy Music
COLGAN: At school, it's the big day Opening Day for the Kabul Beauty Academy. There are two guests of honour Mary McMakin, the woman who inspired the scheme and Afghanistans Minister for Women's Affairs.
PATRICIA O'CONNOR: We've been working for over a year on this project 22:48 and we've been very lucky. We've had great support from the Minister and Deputy Minister who both are here tonight, and they've been really supportive in helping us bring this to light for the Afghan women. Here in Afghanistan they need a lot of things. Obviously this country is being rebuilt from the ground up. 23:09
They need so much, they need medicines, they need better hospitals, they need housing but they also need an ability to earn a living. 23:30
MINISTER: I hope the women will make good use of this beauty centre -- this learning centre. God willing, we can say it will be a positive step for women and their education. 23:41
COLGAN: For Sima, this has been more a personal journey to make two halves of her life whole. 24:21
SIMA CALKIN: When I first saw the women and I listened to them, I couldn't look at them. I was so ashamed and embarrassed. I ran away from here I left them alone. I wanted to hug and kiss them all I wanted to kiss their hands and feet because they were the ones who saved the country for us. It's my promise to myself and the women in this country I can't help them all but if I can help two at a time, I'll be back again. 24:32