Duckworth pays her weavers 50 percent more than the going rate. Arzu’s wages vary widely based on the type of rug, but, for example, a weaver in Shash Pul will earn $60 per square meter, while the market standard is $40. In return for the extra money, she requires weavers to take literacy classes and send their children to school.

Fortunately for Duckworth, most of the rural villages that maintain historic weaving cultures are outside areas where the Taliban is dominant, in the relatively safe provinces of Kabul, Andkoi and Bamyan. Nevertheless, when she or her Afghanistan staff travel to visit the weavers, they worry about highway bandits and land mines, as well as the safety of weavers who might incur local wrath because they work with a foreign organization. "We try to stay under the radar," Duckworth says. "There are still areas where schools are under attack." In some communities, she must work with local organizations and village elders to assess the possibility of her weavers being able to send their children to school at all.

"I’d never been in a helicopter before, and I’m sitting in an open sling with a guy next to me in full body armor holding a machine gun. It’s so fascinating, you kind of forget about fear. You get caught up in the moment."

Other Afghanistan-based philanthropic entrepreneurs say that Duckworth has chosen her areas of operation wisely. In the Kandahar region, where Sarah Chayes recently founded Aghand, a company selling skin-care products using locally raised almonds, pomegranates and roses, obstacles to educating and employing females are significantly worse.

"In the south, after a high-water mark during the six months to a year after the fall of the Taliban, the ability of women and girls to gain education is being curtailed every day," says Chayes, a former NPR correspondent who has been living in Afghanistan since 2001. "It does not take much in the way of a threat to dissuade people from any behavior that might stand out. Threat letters induce whole neighborhoods to take their girls out of school."

Cultural Currency
The first rugs Duckworth commissioned did not meet her standards. She uses them as doormats in her home in Chicago, which features four Arzu rugs and a lapis box that was a gift from Karzai. Hiring is difficult; she had to fire her first employee in Kabul because of fiscal irregularities. The weavers do not have bank accounts, so Duckworth must pay them via the centuries-old hawala system, which channels funds through village middlemen known as hawaladars, in whom their neighbors place their financial fortunes. Duckworth’s staff gives wages to a hawaladar, "and our people get the money from one of his guys," she says. "We keep three pairs of eyes on every dollar and have developed very careful monitoring from the beginning."

Her Afghani employees register each weaver, and conduct follow-up interviews every six months, asking what the women have done with the money and how their life is different. Some of the weavers and their families have been able to pay off debts and buy food, clothing and fuel. In areas where electricity is available, they have purchased radios and televisions that give them a glimpse—the first glimpse for many—of the world beyond their villages.

Duckworth is making her fourth journey to Afghanistan this fall, and will participate in formal meetings with government ministers. She will most likely sleep on the grounds of the U.S. Embassy in a hooch, a shipping container that has been converted into a trailer home. "A number of people along the way have said, ‘I don’t think you can do this.’ I think of it this way: Doing something is better than doing nothing," she says.

Jackie Cooperman is a writer based in New York.