A 9/11 widow reaches out to Afghan widows

Susan Retik, a woman who knows about loss and renewal, was trying to help a group of war widows in Afghanistan when she had an idea:

Maybe she could get the women to ride bicycles.

It would open so many avenues. The women wouldn't have to walk everywhere, so they'd have more time. Most important, it would increase their access to jobs, and through that, their ability to support themselves and their children.

But none of the women was willing to ride a bike. They felt that people would laugh. In Kabul, bicycles are reserved for men and boys.

Retik realized that the Afghan women, largely illiterate and unskilled, connected by the deaths of their husbands and their dire poverty, would no more ride a bicycle through the streets of Kabul than Retik would ride naked through her own New England neighborhood.

It showed her that changing lives requires more than money.

Tomorrow, Retik will speak at the Ambler Theater, continuing a journey that has taken her from her childhood home in Cheltenham, to an affluent suburb of Boston, to the ruins of ground zero in New York, where her husband died on Sept. 11.

She's holding a fund-raiser for her organization, Beyond the 11th, which provides life-sustaining assistance to Afghan women widowed by war or terrorism. A cocktail reception will be followed by a screening of

Beyond Belief

, a film that documents the post-9/11 passages of Retik and group co-founder Patti Quigley, who also lost her husband that day.

Beyond the 11th takes its name from its founders desire to move forward, for people not to become trapped in the images and emotions of that day. Yet, ironically, the group's ability to raise money - and through that to help women in Afghanistan - is directly tied to Retik's willingness to climb onto the platform afforded her as a widow of Sept. 11. To tell her story to strangers, to newspaper reporters and on television, to Oprah Winfrey and Paula Zahn and all the rest.

Three years was enough for her co-founder, Quigley. She left the group in 2006, needing to end her public role as a "9/11 widow."

Sometimes Retik wonders: How many times can she tell her tale? How many more times can she let herself be dragged back to that day? To that horror, that hollowing grief?

For five years now, the answer has been: once more.

For today, once more. And tomorrow, again.

She was on her way to the grocery store that morning. That's when she heard. Her husband, David, a general partner at Boston-based Alta Communications, was a passenger on American Airlines Flight 11, the first plane to hit the World Trade Center. Susan was pregnant with their third child.

She remembers her house filling with people. And, in the odd way that great tragedy focuses the mind on small detail, noticing that the place was a mess. Later on, she saw that someone, without being asked, had cleaned up. As the days wound forward, and it became plain the U.S. intended to attack Afghanistan, the evening news began to show pictures of women who reminded Retik of herself. Women who had lost their husbands and were bereft and grieving. No one was filling their homes with food and company.

"I felt the terrorists who flew the planes into the buildings were the same people who had been terrorizing these people for years," Retik said. "A widow is a widow. It doesn't matter what country you live in. In some ways we were victims of the same terror. I thought I'd be able to help."

When the Taliban took over Afghanistan in the mid-1990s, women and girls became nearly invisible.

Women were banned from working outside the home, except in special cases. They could venture out only if wearing a burka, a sack-like, head-to-toe covering. Their girls could no longer attend school. They depended on their husbands for their most basic needs: food, clothing, shelter.

Today, almost seven years after the U.S. invasion, those restrictions have eased in law but not in practice. For tens of thousands of Afghan women, the death of their husbands - in the Soviet war, the civil war, the U.S. war - has left them as the sole provider for their children, a role for which they are ill-equipped and unprepared. Many survive by begging on the streets.

"Women are now permitted to work outside the home, but it doesn't happen," said Deborah Zalesne, a law professor at the City University of New York, a Beyond the 11th board member, and, not least, Retik's sister. "A lot of it is about these traditional, cultural attitudes toward women."

Women have been conditioned to think they're unworthy, undeserving of respect or decent treatment.

Beyond the 11th seeks to change that, by making grants to organizations in Afghanistan that train widows to work and even to run small businesses. For instance, the group Arzu helps women weavers sell handmade carpets, one of the few culturally acceptable ways for women to earn money. CARE teaches widows how to raise chickens and sell eggs - which seems a small thing, but a woman who has the basic veterinary skills to run a poultry operation will always have food for her family. And maybe even money to send her children to school.

At first, the title can sound a little tabloid:

Beyond Belief

.

But that's not what filmmaker Beth Murphy intended. The title, she said in an interview, is meant to signal the ability of people to move beyond personal belief, both secular and religious. Retik is Jewish, she noted. Quigley is Catholic. The women in Afghanistan, Muslim.

The film shows how Retik and Quigley, both pregnant when their husbands were killed, reached out to these women in a profound, shared humanity.

"They are the poorest, most disenfranchised group of people in the world," Retik said. "I'm not going to say I don't have anger toward my husband's murderers. Of course I do. For the people who got on that plane. For the people who incite anger and terror, of course. But it's not the women."

The Afghan women in the film have only a dim understanding of what happened on Sept. 11. They heard that a building fell down, and a few people may have been killed. They're not sure. They recognize, though, that Retik and Quigley are widows, too, and that they want to help.

In the documentary, one woman says she wishes the Americans had come sooner; maybe her children wouldn't have died hungry. "I believed from the beginning that this was a social-activist film," director Murphy said. "It was the story of two people motivated to action. I believed that people would be inspired, as I was."

The film premiered at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival, and has won honors at other competitions since then.

Retik grew up on Ashbourne Road in Cheltenham, graduated from Cheltenham High School, met her husband at Colgate University.

Her life changed on Sept. 11. And it has changed since then. She has remarried, and given birth to a fourth child. She has forged an intimate connection with a different group of women in a different country.

Between 2003 and 2006, Beyond the 11th raised about $490,000 and spent $270,000 in grants, tax records show. In 2005-06, the organization paid out 89 percent of what it took in. As president, Retik works for free at what is essentially a full-time job.

So far, Beyond the 11th has helped about 1,000 women, each of them raising an average of five children. That's a thousand among perhaps 50,000 widows in Kabul, maybe a million across the country. Perhaps the number is a drop in the bucket, Retik said, but it's better to do something than nothing, better to try than to accept a sorry status quo.

"It's not going to be changed overnight," she said. "The women aren't throwing off their burkas and shouting for women's rights. They don't understand that there are women's rights. Before I went, I thought, 'How are we going to change the minds of the men?' On the plane home, I thought, 'How are we going to change the minds of the women?' To teach them that their lives are just as valuable as the men's lives?"

Beyond the 11th

will hold a fund-raiser tomorrow at the Ambler Theater, 108 E. Butler Ave., Ambler. A cocktail reception begins at 6:30 p.m., followed by a screening of

Beyond Belief

and a question-and-answer session with Susan Retik.

Tickets are $45,

available through

» READ MORE: www.ticketleap.com

.

Donations to Beyond the 11th can be made at

» READ MORE: www.beyondthe11th.org

or sent to Box 457, Needham, Mass., 02494.