Laura Bush Does Afghanistan

First Lady Laura Bush made a surprise stop in Afghanistan en route to an Afghanistan donors conference in Paris. Mrs. Bush has been calling for more financial pledges from other countries, as has the President. The betterment of the lives of the Afghanistan people, especially the women and children who lived so poorly under the rule of the Taliban, has been a special cause for the First Lady.

Unlike Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush doesn't need to embellish foreign travel stories. She just goes. And, the far left bloggers on sites like the ABC News blog, went over the cliff. How dare the First Lady make this trip. Who does she think she is? What does she think she'll accomplish? The trip is a waste of fuel, global warming, global warming.

Hey, maybe if she brought along Sheryl Crow and Sinbad, the trip would have been justified.

Laura Bush was highlighting U.S.-funded work, including the $40 million USAID grant for the National Literacy Center in Kabul and $40 million for support of the American University of Afghanistan.

Mrs. Bush will address the donors conference in Paris Thursday.

On BookTV, C-SPAN over the weekend, I watched some of the Printers Row Book Fair from Chicago, sponsored by the Chicago Tribune. It was held at the Chicago University Center. Two authors on their own panel caught my attention. Both women, one wrote of her experiences in Afghanistan and the other of discovering an old diary and then meeting the now elderly woman who lost the journal long ago.

In Deborah Rodriguez's Kabul Beauty School, she speaks of going to Afghanistan in 2005 and using training she received pre-9/11 in a Vacations with a Purpose program in which she participated on foreign soil, opened the Kabul Beauty School. The women of Afghanistan had no access to proper hair grooming under the reign of the Taliban and were ruining their hair with improper techniques and very old, out of date products. Under the Taliban it was illegal for women to get their hair done, their nails manicured and of course, absolutely no make-up.

She said she wanted to put into practice the theory of it is better to teach a person to fish than to give the person the fish. She must not be a Democrat.

She still has the beauty school up and running. She is currently in America on a book tour.

The other woman author who was telling a fascinating story was Lily Koppel, author of The Red Leather Diary. She tells the story of walking to work one morning, she writes for The New York Times, and came across a dumpster filled with old steamer trunks. She pulled one down and discovered old 'flapper' style dresses and items from the 1920's and 1930's. Among the treasures was Florence Wolfson's red leather bound diary. The entries were of a girl from the age of 14 to the age of 19, from 1929 to 1934.

Florence Wolfson was the daughter of a doctor and she lived in Manhattan. She dreamed of being a writer. Koppel speaks of her life as she writes entries in her diary, a voice more mature than her years.

The kicker is that Wolfson is still alive, will celebrate her 93rd birthday in August and wanted to meet Lily Koppel when Koppel tracked her down. Wolfson was vacationing at her Connecticut home and Koppel traveled there to meet and visit with her.

Florence Wolfson now has a laptop computer and is contemplating writing a diary again.

As Deborah Rodriguez said, "Everyone has a novel in them".