Rubia began in 2000 in Lahore, Pakistan when Ghulam Sakhi Rustamkhan asked Rachel Lehr, an artist and ethno-linguist living in New Hampshire, to help his impoverished family who had fled Afghanistan to escape the Taliban. We honor the memory of Sakhi who passed away on July 14, 2011. Rachel Lehr describes Sakhi’s role in the founding of Rubia:
When Ghulam Sakhi Rustamkhan — Sakhi — contacted me in 2000, he was a refugee in Lahore, Pakistan, desperately seeking a way to improve the lives of his immediate and extended family. Sakhi and I had been students together in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, in the early 1980s but had lost contact in the intervening years. When he approached me all these years later, his family was living in appalling conditions in Lahore’s slums, along with other Afghan refugees from their home region.
Rachel responded with a plan for an indigenous enterprise where woman and teenage girls bound by the tradition of purdah(social segregation) could work at home through the age-old Afghan craft of embroidery, beginning Rubia’s two decade long collaboration with women around the world. To learn about Rubia’s past programs in Afghanistan click here!
