
A Writer, Widow, and Empty Nester Helps Afghan Women Tell Their Stories
In December 1994, driven by a passion to adopt a child, New York City-based marketing executive Elizabeth Titus and her architect husband, Gregory Clement, traveled to Hefei, China to adopt a 10-month-old baby girl then called Wei Xin Fei. China at that time had a one-child policy, and parents often abandoned baby girls in hopes of later having sons. What Elizabeth didn’t know is that the girl they named Lili would be the first of many girls to come into her life.
The family was living happily in Weston, Connecticut, when Clement died of melanoma, an aggressive skin cancer, in 2007, when he was 56. Five years later, Lili left for college. A widow retired from corporate life and an empty nester, Titus was at a crossroads. “When Lili left for college, I was trying to figure out what to do with my life,” Titus says. “I had little sense of the next chapter. I was pretty lost without a child to take care of every day. Lili jokes that I just went out and got myself more daughters, which is kind of true.” She became a committed advocate for other young women in need of her help.

Titus met a young Afghan woman named Tabasum at a dinner party in Connecticut around the time Lili left for college. Born in Kabul, Afghanistan, Tabasum had worked as a freelance reporter for the BBC as a teenager. A proficient English speaker, she eventually made it to college in the United States. When Titus met her, she’d just graduated from Middlebury College in Vermont and was preparing to move to England for a master’s program in anthropology at Oxford.
“That was five years ago,” says Titus, now 66. “Most Americans didn’t know a lot about Afghanistan other than from the headlines. I’d never met anyone from there. Tabasum is such an impressive young woman that all of us at the dinner party were blown away. I knew I had to do something to help women like her.”
Tabasum introduced Titus to Women for Afghan Women, a grassroots, human rights organization dedicated to securing and protecting the rights of disenfranchised Afghan women and girls in Afghanistan and New York. Working with that organization eventually led Titus to a program aligning with her passion to help girls and women and her love of writing, the Afghan Women’s Writing Project.
Based in Kabul, the organization supports the voices of women in Afghanistan, with the belief that telling one’s own story is a human right. That right was crushed for many Afghan women during the Taliban’s reign, from 1996 to 2001. The Taliban not only outlawed schooling for women, but it often killed women who tried to pursue an education. Today, Afghanistan has one of the world’s lowest female literacy rates, just 17 percent, according to UNESCO.
Titus has been a writer as long as she can remember. “It was something I picked up early on. It came easily to me,” she says. “I’ve always been convinced it’s what I wanted to do.” She received her master’s in English from the University of Pennsylvania, and spent the early part of her career as a high school English teacher in Philadelphia. In 1982, she earned an MBA from Penn’s Wharton School, then worked for five years at an advertising agency in New York City. Later, she became director of marketing communications at American Express, where she worked for 15 years. Since 2002, she’s been a freelance marketing consultant and writer.

Despite her breadth of experience, nothing had prepared Titus for the stories she’d read working as a mentor for the Afghan Women’s Writing Project: Stories of violence and abuse, war and massacre. “Working remotely via Skype, every Sunday, I’d give a writing prompt,” she says. “It would be something like, ‘Describe the person you admire most.’” One of the first women she worked with, Nasima, was married to a Taliban-affiliated man who brutally beat her. She fled from him, fearing for her life. “It was really difficult to read about the horrors she’d been through,” Titus says.
“You can read about it in books and watch all the movies, but until you’re working one-on-one with these young women, you can’t believe it.” Nasima eventually gained asylum in Austria, where Titus traveled to meet her. She also met other young Afghan women she had worked with, including one named Sabira, whom Titus brought into her home when Sabira was in a boarding school and later college in Connecticut.
“You can read about it in books and watch all the movies, but until you’re working one-on-one with these young women, you can’t believe it.”
Titus sees the impact writing their stories for the world can have for these Afghan women, especially amidst the largest refugee crisis in history. “Working with this project and meeting these women has changed my worldview,” she says. Titus continues to fight for the rights of women, and is now working with a Swiss foundation that supports education for young women in South India. She plans to return to India next year to find more ways to help educate girls.
“This work has shown Lili and me how courageous these young women are. They just never give up fighting for an education,” Titus says. “It’s an inspiration to everyone.”
Sponsored by Edwards Lifesciences.
