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Women get a second chance at education
©Associated Press
© St. Petersburg Times, QUETTA, Pakistan -- Off a dusty, clamorous street, in a small room bare except for a lopsided chalkboard in the corner and a woven mat on the floor, a dozen female voices rise in a hesitant chorus: "The ... snow ... is ... melting." These girls and women, all Afghan refugees, are doing something they could not have done at home, on pain of death: They're learning. Harsh Taliban rule, grinding poverty or conservative tribal tradition kept all of them out of the classroom back in Afghanistan. Many are from families that have lost everything they own, but here in Pakistan they at least have a second chance at schooling. Their slender, lively teacher, Aziza Khari, is a refugee too -- a onetime schoolmistress at home before the Taliban decreed that women could no longer teach or study. "My students cried so hard back then, when our school in Afghanistan was closed," Khari says as students work on math problems, veiled heads bent over their flimsy copybooks. "It broke my heart to see it happen. So when I see these pupils wanting so much to learn, so happy, it makes up a little bit for that sadness." Eighty students a day study in two-hour shifts in this makeshift classroom. They sit cross-legged and barefoot on the floor, listening intently, a few chewing their pencil tips in concentration. It is a standard first-grade curriculum: They are learning simple sentences, addition and subtraction. Khari coaxes a shy teenager in a long black veil to the blackboard and points to a sentence in Persian, widely spoken on both sides of the Afghan border and a common language among ethnic Hazaras. "The bear ... has black fur," she whispers. "That is exactly right," her teacher says. The students range in age from Gulnisa, a bright-eyed 12-year-old, to women in their 30s like Hafiza, the star pupil. "She is the very hardest working -- you cannot make her stop," her teacher says proudly. Gulnisa had almost a year of school before Taliban anti-education decrees took effect. She was only 7 then. "I can remember a little -- like something in a dream," she says shyly. Others, like Hafiza, had never been to school at all. "I came from a conservative family -- no one thought women needed to be educated," she says. She is the mother of eight children, ranging in age from nine months to 16 years. Five of them are daughters who have never attended school. The older ones already work in a carpet factory to help support the family. Hafiza has one goal: to learn to read, and then teach them all. Her husband, a laborer with only a little schooling himself, supports her in this aim. Back home, he did not want to go against his elders and tradition, but things are different here. "We want all our children to have a better life, and to do that, we must learn," she says in a determined voice.
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From the Times wire desk
From the AP |
