Work gives Afghan women hope amid security worries

Nazia is an 8-year-old in tattered secondhand clothes whose name means "hope."

For her, hope comes from the thriving business that employs her mother and 199 other women who sew embroidered clothing, tablecloths and shawls under the label "Kandahar Treasure." They proudly call their collection Kandahar's first designer label.

For women once denied access to both schools and jobs under a fanatical Taliban regime, the enterprise is a chance to earn money and support their families in a conservative part of Afghanistan where it can still be dangerous for women to own businesses or even work for them.

"This country needs people to stand up on their own two feet and work and earn their living," says 33-year-old founder Rangina Hamidi, an Afghan-American who packed up everything and left her home in Stoneridge, Virginia, to return to Kandahar.

Hamidi was born in Kandahar just three years before the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Her family fled and lived as refugees in neighboring Pakistan before finding refuge in the United States.