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THE PERFECT ACTIVIST in what she calls “THE PERFECT PLACE”

American activist Sarah Chayes finds her calling in Afghan hot spot.
Click on this to see ^ her amazing history as “The Perfect Activist”
i.e. someone who is really a JOURNACTIVIST. This type invariably
falls in love with the distressed country that she has covered in the course of her
work as a war-reporter, and puts her feet where her mouth is,
moves there, and then, creates a TRADE COMMUNE to get the war-torn
country put right. Mother Teresa almost made it. SARAH CHAYES DID!

By Declan Walsh, Boson Globe Correspondent | May 9, 2006

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — In a city where women are rarely seen, never
mind heard, Sarah Chayes talks tough politics with rough men, drives her
own car, and keeps a gun under her bed.

‘’It’s a Kalashnikov. I’ve never had to use it except for a little
target practice,” she says.

The macho image has helped the impassioned campaigner — a
self-described idealist from an accomplished Cambridge family steeped in
academia and government service — to carve out a role for herself in
the troubled landscape of southern Afghanistan.

Her latest
venture involves encouraging farmers to grow roses instead of opium
poppy.

Yet lately her enthusiasm has dissolved into disillusionment with the
US-supported new order, which she describes as discredited, corrupt, and
infected with drug money.

Last June, he and 19 others were killed when a bomb ripped through a
Kandahar mosque during a prayer service. Although government officials
blamed the explosion on a suicide bomber, Chayes conducted her own
investigation and concluded her friend was assassinated by a device
planted at the behest of agents working for neighboring Pakistan, which
many Afghans believe is continuing a decades-old policy of meddling in
their affairs — an allegation Pakistani officials strenuously deny.

The killing is the opening scene of her book ‘’Punishment of Virtue,” to
be published in August 2006 by Penguin Press. She describes the book as a mix
of history and contemporary reporting and as ‘’an ant’s view of how
things developed after the fall of the Taliban in 2001.”

Activism runs in Chayes’s blood. Her father, Abram Chayes, was a legal
adviser in the Kennedy administration and a distinguished law professor
at Harvard. He died in 2000. Her mother, Antonia, served as
undersecretary of the Air Force during the Carter administration and
currently teaches at Tufts University.

After graduating from Harvard and spending two years in the Peace Corps
in Morocco, she returned to Harvard to study for a graduate degree in
Islamic history, but she struggled in academia, and became a researcher
for Christian Science Monitor Broadcasting in Boston.

She reported for National Public Radio from 1997 until June 2001 from
her base in Paris, and then agreed after the Sept. 11 terror attacks to
take on a three-month assignment for NPR covering the war in
Afghanistan.

http://www.masterjules.net/perfectactivist.htm