BIBI AISHA’S PAIN ISN’T OVER 

Nearly a year after we first reported the story of Bibi Aisha, a young Afghan teenager brutally maimed by her Taliban husband and his family, she’s been relocated to the U.S. and became a media phenomenon. 

Bibi Aisha, a young woman whose image ignited a heated political debate when her maimed face graced the cover of Time magazine under the headline “What Happens if We Leave Afghanistan”; shocked readers globally.

Bibi Aisha’s story

ABC World News, Diane Sawyer portrayed Bibi Aisha’s story as a tragic story with a made-for-TV ending about a young woman’s journey to the United States for a second chance at a new face and a fresh start. The reality is that rebuilding a life, particularly one marked by harsh years of abuse, was far more difficult and complicated than headlines permit. So far doctors evaluated Bibi and initially said that she was not yet emotionally ready for the endurance test of reconstructive surgery, as she suffered from seizure-like incidents. The Grossman Burn Foundation, sponsored her trip to the U.S., fighting to figure out the best way forward for the young woman. who still suffered from the traumatic attack.

Landing in Los Angeles, with its shimmering kaleidoscope of sun, glitz, and gridlocked traffic, is often a shock even for Americans from other parts of the country. For a girl from a rural and remote part of southern Afghanistan who had never been to school, or even lived with running indoor water and constant power until a year ago, the transition was more than daunting.

In a culture that revels in happy endings, Bibi Aisha’s story is a lesson in the understanding, patience, and determination real life often requires.

Yet while Aisha has struggled emotionally, she has shown remarkable agility in adapting to the country now hosting her. The young woman who never set foot in a formal classroom has quickly taken to the Internet taught herself English using an online program designed for American schoolchildren. She is a deft text-messenger and an avid cellphone user. And she blossomed as a jewelry designer, a skill she says she first learned in prison in Kandahar, following her escape from her husband, and later honed in more formal training at the Kabul Women for Afghan Women shelter. Grossman staff and volunteers have provided Aisha with beads from the local Michael’s craft store, and she has created a collection of elegant, beaded necklaces and bracelets, some translucent, some pearl, and some in vibrant hues. A number of women who have met Bibi Aisha and wanted to help have found customers for her creations.

Until she was ready for surgery, she had a remarkably real-looking and painstakingly crafted prosthetic nose created by Dr. Stefan Knauss, which she wore at an event for the Grossman Burn Foundation, where she stood on a red carpet before a throng of flashing cameras and met such notables as former first lady Laura Bush and California first lady Maria Shriver. Aisha applied the prosthetic herself with a glue-dipped Q-tip, though she often found it uncomfortable to wear for long periods of time.

Grossman Burn Foundation staff and volunteers sought to provide emotional care and a sense of close-knit community for Aisha amid all the unpredictability, even hosting her very first birthday party, cake and Afghan music included.
“A couple of times she has made me cry,” says Pari Moayer, an ambassador for the Grossman Burn Foundation and a school nurse with bright eyes and a kind and soothing demeanor. Moayer, who once treated injured soldiers on the front lines of the Iran-Iraq War, formed a close bond with the young woman, visiting Aisha nearly every day and later making room for her at her own house for several weeks. She remembers in particular one night around 10 p.m., when Aisha told her she was hungry. Bringing in a plate of freshly cooked, soft scrambled eggs, Moayer said she nearly choked up when the young woman spent several minutes thanking her profusely for the meal, a maternal gesture about which Moayer had thought little. “She told me no one had ever cooked for her like that since her mother died,” she says. “You can make someone’s life change and make them so happy with the little, little things that you can offer them.”
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It is the young woman’s resilience that has left the most lasting impression.
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“Aisha has just had, from what I have learned, a life of extreme abuse since her mother died,” says Rebecca Grossman of the Grossman Burn Foundation, who worked to arrange Aisha’s arrival in the Unites States. “She has been treated so badly and been so abused, and that is why it is amazing that she is as playful and joyful as she is.”
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Grossman, whose husband, Dr. Peter Grossman, plans to perform the donated surgery, says she has learned a great deal from her experience helping Bibi Aisha and Zubaida, another young woman from Afghanistan whose burn injuries required years of operations in the United States. The reality is, intervening is often far more complicated than it sounds.
“It is so difficult and so challenging to bring people from other parts of the world to America,” says Grossman. Many times, the patients the Grossman Burn Foundation brought to Los Angeles for treatment found it difficult to function in their native villages and cities after the disjointed experience of life amid the attention, amenities, and modern life in Los Angeles. The story of one young boy whose case came to Grossman from a U.S. serviceman serving in Afghanistan’s Farah province, haunts her in particular. After months of living with a host family in the U.S. while undergoing surgery to recover from a harrowing injury that left his ears and neck connected, the young boy returned to his family, where he struggled to learn to live once more in hardship and poverty. Today, having managed a number of cases in which the Grossman Burn Foundation has hosted men and women from economically devastated Asian and African countries, she thinks the resources dedicated to individual cases might be better devoted to supporting doctors in their native countries so that the arduous cultural transitions might be avoided.
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Regardless of the challenges, Aisha, for her part, remained determined to get the surgery and to create a new life for herself, one in which she makes her own decisions.

Zubaida and Bibi (both patients) crossed paths in Kabul prior to Bibi’s departure to the United States.

Grossman and Moayer, have learned a great deal in the time that they have known this exceptional young woman whose case sparked so much emotion in so many people.

​Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

​Gayle Tzemach Lemmon is deputy director of the Women and Foreign Policy Program at the Council on Foreign Relations. She has spent the last five years reporting on women entrepreneurs in conflict and post-conflict regions, including Afghanistan, Rwanda and Bosnia. Her upcoming book, The Dressmaker of Khair Khana, will be published by HarperCollins in March 2011.