Sarah Chayes

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Sarah Chayes (b. Washington, D.C., 5 March 1962) is a former reporter for National Public Radio.

Sarah Chayes is the daughter of law professor and Kennedy administration member Abram Chayes. She graduated from Phillips Academy, Andover, in 1980, and Harvard University in 1984, with a degree in history. She later served in the Peace Corps in Morocco, returning to Harvard to earn a master's degree in history and Middle Eastern studies, specializing in the medieval Islamic period.

Chayes began her reporting career free-lancing from Paris for The Christian Science Monitor and other outlets. From 1996 to 2002, she served as Paris reporter for National Public Radio, earning 1999 Foreign Press Club and Sigma Delta Chi awards (together with other members of the NPR team) for her reporting on the Kosovo War. She has also reported from other nations.

She has lived in Kandahar, Afghanistan since 2002. Having learned to speak the Pashto language, she has helped rebuild homes, set up a dairy cooperative. In May 2005, she established the Arghand Cooperative, a venture that encourages local Afghan farmers to produce flowers, fruits, and herbs instead of opium poppies, by buying their products and producing soaps and other scented products from them for export.

She is the author of The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban, published in August 2006.

In July 10, 2007 Chayes published an op-ed in the International Herald Tribune saying that NATO was not to blame for the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan. "When things go wrong, it is typical to blame the equipment, or the help. In the case of the unraveling situation in Afghanistan, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has become the favorite whipping boy of American officials In fact, after watching rotation after military rotation cycle through here since late 2001, I see NATO as an improvement over its American predecessors."[1]

She is the author of 'Scents & Sensibility' an article detailing the story of the Arghand cooperative in the December 2007 issue of The Atlantic Magazine

She was also on [[2]]Bill Moyers on February 22, 2008.

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