We hope to provide the women of Afghanistan with opportunities to use their minds and talents to create better lives for themselves, their children, and their country. Our vision is to provide poor women with opportunities to gain an education or vocational training or to start a micro-enterprise.

Partnered with a local NGO, PBI now employs 6 very talented local jewelry craftswomen. Our objective is to provide these women with the support they need to sustain a workshop and to produce marketable jewelry. Currently, the local market is not reliable. In reaction to this, we intend to export for brief period while performing local market research assessments. Our hope is that in the future, this project will function on it's own. These ladies are jewels themselves- they are full of joy and excited to put their talents to use. Ultimately, they feel that this project will help them regain their independence.

Partnered with a stateside NGO, we are working to empower close to 30 women to continue their education or vocational training or to start a micro-enterprise through a small sponsorship program. These women have shared with us their life stories, allowed us to photograph them, and to counsel them in the pursuit of their dreams. Many of these women desire to start small tailoring businesses. With them we hope to form a small cooperative. They have agreed to pool their resources and go into business together, to produce and sell very stylish women's clothing. We hope to provide these women with continued tailoring training, along with simple business development seminars.

Many women simply want to continue their education. Most of these women are between 20 and 30 and have never had the opportunity to go to school. Some have attended school, but were not allowed to study beyond grade 6. These women now have the opportunity to attend "fast-track" courses. These are condensed grade school courses designed for non-traditional students. Through these individual sponsorships, we hope to provide a culturally appropriate way for these women to finish school- AND maintain their ability to provide for their families. I continue to be amazed at the tenacity of some of these 3rd and 4th grade level women who insist that they will become doctors, judges, or even university professors. I believe that with a little help and perseverance- they will achieve all that they put their minds to and more.

The world wants to see the faces of these mysterious women under the burqa. We want to know them, to know what life is like for them, and to help them. Mosaic portraits of Afghan women's faces produced by their own hands and with raw materials from their own country serve multiple purposes:

1. To raise awareness of their plight and their needs as people see these one-of-a-kind artworks hanging in corporate office buildings, art galleries, and people's homes.
2. To generate revenue that can be used to fuel their dreams, whether to get an education or start a micro enterprise.

There is also a healing that comes by working with your hands, breaking things into pieces and putting them back together again to create something beautiful. It resembles the story of Afghan women's lives. In creating the mosaic portrait, they are symbolically and literally putting the broken pieces together to create something new.

The Mosaic Portraits Project will produce art quality mosaic portraits of the faces of Afghan women and be assembled by the hands of the very women who will use the revenues to fuel their dreams and support their families. The mosaic portraits will be made of thousands of tiny pieces (as small as 1/2 cm by 1/2 cm) of marble, a natural resource in Afghanistan procured from an Afghan vendor. The concept is similar to pointillism, with the tiny squares of marble corresponding to "points" of paint in pointillism.

One Afghan woman who participated in the first mosaic portraits project said, "If you can give me the pattern, the marble, and these nippers, I can make these at home." With the color-by-number patterns, creating the portraits will be as simple as nipping pre-cut strips of tile into squares, placing on the correct number on the pattern, and gluing. This technology will enable rapid production of one-of-a-kind images and auto-generate the marble order. Eventually, the women themselves can learn to cut the large squares of tile into strips before nipping into smaller squares.