Afghan Weddings

Imagine entering a giant Easter basket…though to enter you must walk up five flights of stairs decorated with neon orange and blue flashing palm trees. “Paris” Wedding Hall (which now reads as “Pars” due to a seemingly permanent electrical problem) sits on the outskirts of Kabul among a row of similarly alarmingly decorated wedding halls. With the heat and (relative) electricity of summer comes waves of weddings, an event which hoards hundreds of guests…family (loosely defined), friends, neighbors, colleagues, friends of families, families of colleagues, neighbors of friends…you get the idea.

After hiking up five flights of stairs, you are hit with a sound wave only appropriate for a concert at Red Rock and a room full of…women in 80s style prom dresses (no joke). Hundreds of women whirl around the top floor-wedding hall with curled hair up-does and glittered arms, eyelashes, and hair to match their sequenced dresses. In this nearly entirely man-less crowd (wedding ceremonies and celebrations take place in completely separate rooms for women and men) women are free to expose arms, legs, upper-chests, shoulders, and the likes.

The combination of the brightly colored guests with gaudy and gargantuan chandeliers all swinging chaotically in front of the pastel green-walled backdrop can only be appropriately interpreted as a transportation into a titanic Easter basket.


At my second Afghan wedding the other week, I passed the night away dancing to a mixture of Arabic pop music and Bollywood hits…a task typically dominated by single women seeking the attention and approval of potential mother-in-laws (a dynamic only pointed out to me days following the wedding…no wonder I had such a wonderful reception by so many of the women!☺) The hilarity of the dress-code and the hall preparation aside, weddings are a wonderful chance to actually interact with Afghan women rather uninhibitedly. A large proportion of the guests had spent time in Pakistan as refugees, which meant I could blunder away in Hindi in hopes to find something comprehensible in Urdu. The guests were overwhelmingly welcoming, intrigued and eager to discuss the state of Afghanistan, the USs involvement, and what it will take as individuals and nations to move this country into a place of stability.