Walker’s Women in the World Virtual Conversations: Afghanistan

Pam Constable ’70, Washington Post Reporter

Pamela Constable ’70 writes about foreign affairs for The Washington Post, where she was a staff reporter from 1994 to 2019. She has been the Post’s bureau chief in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, and she recently returned from a reporting trip to Kabul to cover the early days of Taliban rule. Before joining the Post, she was a reporter and foreign correspondent for The Boston Globe from 1982 to 1994, specializing in Latin America. During her journalism career she has reported from more than 40 countries, including Iraq, Sri Lanka, Haiti, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Korea, Cuba, Nigeria, Ukraine, the Philippines, and the former Soviet Union. She is the author of two non-fiction books on conflict and society in South Asia, and co-author of a non-fiction book on military rule in Chile. She is a winner of the 1993 Maria Moors Cabot prize from Columbia University’s school of journalism for distinguished coverage of Latin America, and the 2019 Arthur Ross prize for international reporting from the American Academy of Diplomacy. She is a graduate of Brown University and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She is also the founder of The Afghan Stray Animal League, a non-profit organization that has supported animal welfare, rescue and veterinary programs overseas since 2004. She lives in northern Virginia with numerous rescued animals. 

Sahra Ibrahimi ’13 (doctoral student and Instructor at university of maryland), from afghanistan

Sahra Ibrahimi ’13 is a second-year doctoral student in the Maternal and Child Health program at the University of Maryland (UMD) in College Park. Prior to completing her master’s in public health, Sahra worked as a Technical Project Officer at Abt Associates on the Health Financing and Governance (HFG), a 5-year global project awarded by USAID and implemented in 40 countries. Currently, in addition to research, Sahra teaches FMSC110, an undergraduate course on Families and Global Health at UMD.

Sahra was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, and came to the U.S. at age 14 for the Seeds of Peace program in 2009, after which she attended The Ethel Walker School. Sahra graduated from Smith College in Northampton, MA, with a BA in Economics and fulfillment of pre-med requirements in 2017.