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Vice Blog

TURQUOISE MOUNTAIN

If you listen to the media's coverage from the frontlines of Operation Enduring Freedom you hear a lot of hemming and hawing about how shitty it is over there. It's all I.E.D. this, and soaring death toll that. What you don't hear too much about is the country's new fashion school.

Turquoise Mountain is a joint British and Afghan charitable school that takes experienced Western teachers and puts them in classrooms with Afghan youngsters to both educate and create employment opportunities.

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Vicki Beamon is better known for the jewelry store Erickson Beamon, that she runs with Karen Erickson in London. So it was surprising when Beamon--whose life is making high-end jewelry for the likes of Chanel, Dior, and Givenchy--decided to up and move to Kabul, one of earth's most unstable, poor, and godforsaken places, to teach impoverished 15 to 25-year olds how to make jewelry.

Vice: How did you end up in Afghanistan?
Vicki Beamon: I was at a White Stripes concert quite a long time ago when my friend told me she was going to Afghanistan to head up this school. A couple of years later she asked if I'd like to help, because the jewelery department was the last part of the project they'd been working on and it was a bit slow, it needed some more structure.

You knew that there was a war going on over there, right?
There comes a point in your life when you want to give something back. I figured the best thing for me to do was to help create jobs for people. I believe that's where self-respect comes from, and ultimately that's what the Afghan people want. They just want to be working, have a life, and not be poor. They are very isolated there and you know, more or less in a survival mode, so sometimes they don't get to go to school because it's not safe to go out for whatever reason. Before I went there and talked to them they didn't really think about anything further away than a little market called Chicken Street. Or maybe they would think about Istanbul, because that's quite a good marketplace for them too. They didn't think further than that though, so just going there helped to open up and expand their minds, you could practically see it happening right in front of you.

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Your line is very high luxury, and the Afghanistan we see in the media, er isn't.
The Afghans have a long history of making jewelery. A thousand years ago Afghanistan was the center of the world. Because of the silk road it was the place that everybody traveled through from about 600AD – 900AD, and that whole region was incredibly wealthy. So there's a tradition. Coins are very big in jewelry at the moment, and even John Galliano has used Afghanistan as the inspiration for the last two seasons of his own label's Galliano show. I have a poetry book from when I was a kid that's about all that Persian stuff. I always linked that stuff with the Middle East, but really it connects more with this Central Asian area that includes Afghanistan. The last 40 years have been so sad when you look at how abundant life in this area has been. It's very strange.

How scary is working in a war zone?
Twenty years ago I lived quite close by Victoria station when an I.R.A. bomb went off there--I heard the explosion in my house. So you know, you could be living in London and have bombs go off. This year they had a peace Junta that was called by President Karzai for all the heads of the tribes to come together to talk about what they were going to do about the Taliban. So while we were there, there was this "lockdown" time--that's what they call it--so they closed the school the last couple of days and I heard rockets going over my head. I didn't ever feel afraid, but we were in a very protected situation. They really look after people quite well, and we had very tough security the whole time. Also, you could only go out and about with certain drivers, so there wasn't much freedom, but you could still do other things like go to dinner and meet some interesting people.

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Were the students political at all?
They aren't pro-Taliban and they aren't crazy about President Karzi, but they want peace.

Did you meet any up-and-coming talent?
There was one superstar student named Fazil Ahmad, and I discussed the possibly of getting an internship with UK jeweler Stephen Webster with him. It would be great if a couple of students could come over here to see what it's like to work in a Western environment, then they could take that back.

Did you have any moments that made you think, "Yes, I'm definitely in Afghanistan?"
When I arrived I had a broken foot I had to deal with. They had a German clinic I had to go to, but due to some crisis on the way out there there were tanks on the streets. Then we had to pass through a lot of areas where the embassies are and the roads are unbelievably bad. There were potholes everywhere--the roads made it feel a bit like the Wild West. Then you get to where the museum that the Taliban destroyed used to be. They're fixing it up now, but a couple of the buildings around it, like the presidential palace, are just skeletons, and that's really quite frightening. Eventually I had to go to a normal Afghan hospital alone, which was quite scary. It was kind of dirty and there were lots of people, but the people were very nice and friendly. My doctor refused to charge me because I was a guest in his country.

Did your time in Afghanistan affect your own work?
Well, I worked very directly with the students and my time there was more about their future and helping them. Also, after having learned so much about Afghan jewelry I didn't want to toy with it anymore, I can't mess with that kind of authenticity.

FAY ANN SMITH