Fifty Shades of Black by Arthur Black

giving up my weekly commute to Vancouver. At my retirement party a producer sidled up to me and said, “Are you sure you can handle living full time on Salt Spring? I mean, I know it’s peaceful and all, but man, it’s the boonies! You’ll go stir-crazy.”
    Well, I’m ten years in and I wish I could sidle up to that producer and say, “Were you drunk?” I’m as busy as I ever was when I slogged off to Vancouver every week. The only things no longer in my life are police sirens, panhandlers and getting stuck in the George Massey Tunnel in rush hour.
    Okay, and a weekly paycheque. That’s missing too. But as for outside stimulation, that’s not a big problem on Salt Spring. In the last month I’ve been to talks by Robert Bateman and Wade Douglas; I’ve seen the movies The Artist and The Hunger Games ; spent an evening listening to world-renowned blues harmonica virtuoso Carlos del Junco . . .
    Oh yeah, and I got to hear Sally Armstrong, too. She spoke at the Salt Spring Legion and she is a powerhouse. I first met her a million years ago when she was editor of Homemakers magazine and I was a freelancer trying to sell her a story about a brothel in Thunder Bay.
    That story didn’t pan out, because of a lack of enthusiasm. Not on Sally’s part; she was gung-ho but I kind of lost interest when I discovered that the proprietors of the brothel had strong-ish Montreal Mafia connections.
    But that, as Sally would probably say, is another story. She uses that phrase a lot as she segues from one chapter to another of her turbulent life. She’s been an editor and a columnist and a reporter and a documentary filmmaker. She’s hit most of the world’s hellholes: Rwanda, Somalia, Bosnia, Bangladesh. She’s spent much of the past fifteen years in that hellhole of hellholes—Afghanistan. She specializes in investigating zones of conflict—specifically, the plight of girls and women trapped there. She’s not doing it as a sightseer or a thrill-seeker. Sally Armstrong wants to change things. And she thinks that mobilizing the women is the way to do it.
    Hard to argue. Males have been in charge of those hellholes since forever, and look at the mess they’ve made. And contrary to the tone we detect on the news, Sally Armstrong is optimistic about Afghanistan’s future—albeit guardedly. She talks about the actions of one group called Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan. It’s headquartered in Calgary but has volunteer chapters across the country. They threw a series of potluck suppers, “that most Canadian of institutions,” as Armstrong calls them. They raised enough money to put fifty thousand Afghan girls in schools. It doesn’t take billions. An Afghan teacher earns about $750 a year. And when you’re in a country with an illiteracy rate of 85 percent, the only way out is up.
    More importantly, women in Afghanistan are taking their first shaky steps in support of women in Afghanistan. Armstrong told the story of Noorjahan Akbar, a student who started a group in Kabul called Young Women for Change. They collect books, set up libraries, arrange lectures. She’s just twenty-one, but 65 percent of Afghanis are under the age of twenty-five.
    They’ve only known bombs and blood and chaos and corruption but they have access to iPhones and the Internet and they want something different. With agents like Sally Armstrong and Noorjahan Akbar spreading the word, in venues as various as Kabul markets and the Salt Spring Legion . . . they just might have a shot at it.

 
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    Cuts Like a Knife
    I once saw the oldest knife in the world—well, the oldest one we’ve found, so far. It was in a British museum and came all the way from a gorge in Africa. It was just a chunk of volcanic rock chipped with another stone until it was roughly triangular, rounded at the top for a handhold, tapering in two sharp edges to a