Excerpt from Veiled Courage by Cheryl Benard, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

That was how I found RAWA.

I didn't know, at that moment, exactly what it was that I had found, or what it would come to mean to me. I didn't know yet that besides running schools and clinics, RAWA was also a political movement, determined to offer Afghan women more than sedatives to palliate the injustices of their lives. I didn't know that the Taliban would come and establish a reign of terror far worse than that of the fundamentalists who currently held sway, or that RAWA would become the only group, male or female, to organize an underground resistance against them. And I certainly did not anticipate the grip RAWA would claim on my heart, the painful disillusionment I would suffer on their behalf as world politics showed its worst and most cynical face, the long-standing partnership that would extend from fundraising events in Vienna to conference halls in Bonn to interviews conducted practically under the rain of American bombs falling on Kabul. And I did not know that, for the small help I was able to give them, a determination to carry on under all and any odds would be their gift to me.

Excerpted from Veiled Courage by Cheryl Benard Copyright 2002 by Cheryl Benard. Excerpted by permission of Broadway, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.