“I’M GOING TO BE SOMEBODY”
One of the best ways of enslaving a people is to keep them from education. The second way of enslaving a people is to suppress the sources of information, not only by burning books but by controlling all the other ways in which ideas are transmitted.
—Eleanor Roosevelt, May 11, 1943
WHILE THE GOVERNMENT FUMBLES, the activists strategize, and the Taliban do their worst, the next generation of Afghan girls is scoring tentative victories. The race for education began almost as soon as the interim government took office: The official back-to-school date was March 23, 2002. But, like everything else in Afghanistan, the celebration was layered with difficulties. The schools were in a dismal state of disrepair and the government did not have enough money to run them. Nevertheless, a contagious thrill of anticipation was sweeping across the country throughout that spring and summer. In the fall of that year, I travelled to the central highlands, to the province of Ghazni and the district of Jaghori, to see whether the enthusiasm had spread to the rural heart of Afghanistan.
It was bone-chillingly cold and barely light when I arrived at the Shuhada School at 7 A.M. The area superintendent had told me the students walk a great distance to get to school, and some turn up well before the 8 A.M. start time. I wanted to be there first, to witness the scene. Would they be “creeping unwillingly to school”? Would they come at all? Was this the start of a new era of enlightenment? As the shadows of dawn started to lift off the mountains, I was scanning the hills and valleys; it seemed like such a long hike for kids to make to get to school. The rugged mountainsides were formidable impediments, hardly an easy path for children; the silent valleys were deserted and seemed immense in their emptiness. Then in the distance I saw movement—two little girls trudging down a rutted track, then three more in the valley below. Soon, the landscape was filled with children.
It was a remarkable sight. They were coming over the hills, down the valleys, in twos, in fours, as far as the eye could see along the furrowed paths and dusty byways in this far-flung place called Sunge-e-Masha in Jaghori. Wearing the required black school frocks and white head scarves, they looked like penguins dotting the earth. They came in droves—little kids, teenagers—the blameless youngsters who bore the brunt of the Taliban’s ruthless decree that girls were forbidden to learn. Tucked in their little satchels and souls were the hopes and dreams of a generation.
The teachers in the seventeen-room school they were walking to gathered at the door awaiting their arrival. The old man at the gate of the walled property pulled on the rope attached to the ancient iron disc perched at the top of the entrance: Bong! Bong! Bong! Back to school had never been a more powerful milestone.
I had become so accustomed to faces full of fear and furtive glances during the hateful Taliban period that I fully expected the children to avert their eyes from a stranger and walk past me into the school. Instead, they stopped where I stood on the doorstep and with the solemn earnestness that makes children so appealing asked instead what I was doing there. I flipped the question back to them and right there, on the threshold of the school they see as their chance of a better tomorrow, they shared their aspirations with me.
With her green eyes dancing and her blonde hair peeking out from the head scarf that has gone askew, ten-year-old Wahida said, “I will learn. And then I want to be an astronaut.” This is a girl who was forbidden to leave her home for five years during Taliban rule, a girl who knew little of the outside world before September 11, 2001, when the international community came to her with bombs and promises to rid her homeland of the terrorists that had trespassed on their lives. Beside her, sixteen-year-old Fatima Anwary, a dark-haired, brown-eyed beauty in grade twelve, answered, “I’m going to change Afghanistan.” Then, with all the pretentious sophistication a teenager can muster, she added, “I’ll do it by getting an education. Knowledge makes change.” Little six-year-old Parwana pushed her way between the older and taller students to the front of the pack and stood staring at the stranger in the midst of her schoolmates. When I asked her why she was here, she said, “This is my school. When I’m grown up, I’m going to be somebody.” “Who might that somebody be?” I inquired. “The president of Afghanistan,” she replied matter-of-factly.
They are the blueprint of Afghanistan. Their faces reflect the history of its storied past—the fair hair of conqueror Alexander the Great, the dark Persian features of occupier Darius the First, and the broad cheeks and Oriental eyes of Mongol invader Genghis Khan. But their plans are for the future. They have barely learned to read and write but say, “It is the time of technology. We want computers. We want to be part of the world and get on the internet.”
For the girls arriving at school on this sunny, cold morning in Jaghori, it almost did not happen. When the schools for both boys and girls were opened, not everyone had the chance to attend. Of the damaged schools, Sima Samar, who was one of the deputy prime ministers at the time, said, “If the schools aren’t ready, let the children sit under the trees. We’ll repair the buildings as fast as we can, but the children have to start learning now.” Most of them could not afford the mandatory uniforms. So she used part of the money donated to the Ministry of Women’s Affairs to buy sewing machines and fabric and asked hundreds of volunteers to stitch together nearly a million uniforms. But a bigger issue lurked in the background. The government could not afford to pay all of the teachers; they simply didn’t have the budget. So a lot of the schools, most of them rural, could not get off the starting block in this sprint to educate the youngsters who had been denied the right to read and write.
That’s when a Canadian woman stepped in. The campaign to raise money to pay teachers in Afghanistan was the brain-child of Susan Bellan, who operates a shop called Timbuktu in Toronto. She knew that, without an education, the girls of Afghanistan would never be able to break the merciless ties that bind them to second-class status. In spring 2002, she came up with a plan to have potluck dinners, where ten or twelve friends could get together for a shared meal and raise $750 (about $50 each), which would be enough to pay the salary of one teacher in Afghanistan for one year. Says Bellan:
I phoned an acquaintance, Marilou McPhedran, a well-known feminist and community activist who, with a group of other prominent Canadian women, had lobbied Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy to speak out for Afghan women during the reign of the Taliban. I told Marilou my idea, expecting her to say, “Thank you so much, we’ll do it.” Instead, to my surprise, she said, “Great idea, but it won’t happen unless you take it on yourself. We are overburdened here with all our existing projects. So—will you do it?” This was not at all what I had anticipated and after a very pregnant pause, I said that I would take it on.
McPhedran suggested she ask her friend Nancy Kroeker to advise her on how to set the project up. Nancy had been executive director of the Writers’ Development Trust for eight years and had raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Canadian authors through fundraising dinners held in people’s homes. McPhedran also advised her to get in touch with Janice Eisenhauer, co-founder and full-time volunteer running CW4WAfghan in Calgary. At the meeting with Kroeker, the initiative was named Breaking Bread for Women in Afghanistan. Then they contacted Janice Eisenhauer. Bellan was adamant that she did not want to handle the money and insisted on tax receipts for donors. Eisenhauer loved the idea, and quickly called Ariane Brunet, the women’s rights coordinator at Rights and Democracy in Montreal. Together they devised a plan that would see 100 percent of the Breaking Bread money going to reliable people who hire teachers in Afghanistan, and tax receipts going to the donors at the potluck dinners. In May that year, the first Breaking Bread potluck supper was held in Toronto and raised $910. The plan took flight.
Potluck suppers started popping up all over the country, often raising more than the requisite $750. Teachers were hired. Students were going back to school. My editor at Chatelaine magazine wondered if this brainchild was really effective. After all, it is a bit of a leap to imagine tuna casseroles translating into girls learning to read. She asked me to check it out. I knew that one of the groups being funded was Shuhada, the NGO started by Samar in 1989 and still under her protective wing even while she chairs the human rights commission. Because Samar’s schools are far off the beaten path, away from what was at that time the relative security and progress of Kabul, I decided to test the Breaking Bread initiative there, to see if the concept was working, as it must, in rural Afghanistan.
While I waited for the students to arrive at school that morning, I thought about the gracious way Canadian women had reached out to Afghan girls. The Breaking Bread for Women in Afghanistan initiative had spread across the country from Slave Lake in northern Alberta and Vancouver on the West Coast to Saint John, New Brunswick, in the east. It had already raised $147,000 at 115 dinners, enough to pay almost two hundred teachers. At between forty-five and sixty kids per classroom, that is more than ten thousand students learning to think for themselves in Afghanistan.
I had been a guest speaker at some of the Breaking Bread potluck dinners, and I knew the heartfelt hopes of the women who wrote the cheques for the girls here. The student enrolment at the Shuhada School, 1,950 girls, attends classes in shifts, half in the morning from 8:00 A.M. to 11:30 A.M. and the other half in the afternoon from 1:00 P.M. to 4:30 P.M. Another thousand students do the same at Shuhada Bosaid School, about twenty-five kilometres away, and also funded by the Breaking Bread initiative. The six- to twelve-year-olds have never been to school before. The teenagers had their education halted by the Taliban when they were in primary school. Principal Habiba Yosufi boasts, “It’s not enough to read and write. My students will be able to go anywhere with their knowledge.” Of the thirty-five teachers who work with her, she says, “We couldn’t do this without the money from the Canadian women.”
The concept works like this: you invite about a dozen friends, colleagues, or people you need to network with to a potluck dinner at your house. Ask everyone to bring a dish and to write a cheque—the goal being to raise $750. At the end of the evening, collect the money, and invite your guests to host a potluck supper of their own with another group of friends. Bellan’s model was to invite ten people and charge $75. But she started hearing from seniors and students who felt $75 was too steep. So she suggested they adapt the idea to their own means: a coffee party for fifty at $15 each, or a book-club potluck at $25. Today they have raised more than $1 million, and fifty thousand little girls are going to school on the potluck ticket. (See their website at www.breakingbreadforwomen.com.)
She explains, “I’m after quantity, not quality. I want to see as many girls and women become literate as possible. The women of Afghanistan have been so abandoned, so isolated, I felt if we could create a network they’d know all of us are watching out for them.” And that, she feels, would help them to get to the next step as equal citizens on their own.
Their infectious enthusiasm is hard to suppress in the classroom where the students clap every time someone gets the right answer. Although each girl has a notebook and pen or pencil, there is no equipment in the classroom except a blackboard and tiny bits of chalk. They sit three to a desk, and some are on the floor because there are not enough chairs to go around. (CW4WAfghan replaced the chairs the Taliban stole, but there are so many more students this year, the shortage of chairs is still a problem.) When I visit in November 2002, they are preparing for winter when the schools are closed because of the cold and the dark. But there are no cheers in anticipation of the three-month holiday. When I ask if they are happy to be having vacation, they respond as one: “No!” They are in a hurry to learn, to become the “somebody” they so often refer to when I ask them about the future.
The problems in running the school are immense. They can’t dig a deep enough well to provide drinking water, so the kids have to carry water from home. There are five toilets for the two thousand students and staff. They don’t have enough books, and even the buildings are in need of repair, but there is enough will in this place to surmount the multiple and confounding problems they face. For example, the school was not registered in the government office because the teachers are not being paid by the Ministry of Education. Since there is no government money to pay the teachers—which is why the Canadian funds are so badly needed—the officials in the ministry take the view that schools like this one simply do not exist. But if the school isn’t registered, the graduates can’t go to the university. District Education Director Mohammad Yousaf Naibi barely hides his disregard for the ministry when he says, “We’re solving that problem now. The graduates of this school will go to university next year.” They did.
The road trip from Kabul to Jaghori at that time was a sharp reminder of the tenuous peace the international community had cobbled together and the perilous path these kids had taken by choosing to be educated. The Taliban had already regrouped with al Qaeda and were making daring raids into the villages. Thirty girls’ schools had been fire-bombed during the previous ten months. Leaflets warning parents not to send their girls to school had been circulated by the Taliban. The day before I was to leave for Jaghori, the Taliban had issued a new, menacing edict: “Foreigners will be executed. Afghans helping them will be tortured. American journalists will be captured and held until Taliban prisoners are released.” Within hours of the edict being issued, a Turkish engineer working on road reconstruction—on the road to Ghazni province that we were to take the next day—was captured and held for ransom. The Taliban wanted ten of their thugs, who were being held by the Americans, released in exchange for this man’s life. Not surprisingly, the people I was travelling with suggested I cover my face, and the driver selected a route that would skirt the Taliban, which meant we were nine hours on the road to Shuhada School, a journey that would normally take six hours.
Little did anyone know at the time that the situation would get worse in the years to come. In 2007, the tally of girls’ schools burned to the ground was 150; another 305 schools were closed due to lack of security. But the worst statistic was this: 105 students and teachers were killed, and beside their bodies were found handwritten messages that warned villagers of the consequences of educating girls.
This push-pull conundrum is commonplace in Afghanistan today. While initiatives such as Breaking Bread are moving the girls ahead, the fundamentalists who oppose educating girls have managed to force the government to uphold a law, written in the mid-seventies, that says married women, although many are in their mid-teens, cannot attend school. Religious extremists are up to their old tricks, blaming Islam for their anti-woman doctrines. One said, “Allah says in the holy Quran that women should stay at home and not expose their beauty.” That is theocracy-speak that attempts to justify denying fundamental rights to women and girls.
Says Samar, “The most useful way to change the mentality of society is education. If you educate a woman, you educate the family. If you educate a man, you only educate one person.” In her view, the Breaking Bread initiative is “excellent and responsible.” She says, “It creates solidarity between the women here and the women of Canada. The amount of money spent by a Canadian woman may not seem very big, but it can change the life of a girl in Afghanistan.”
This school in Jaghori is the very one that nearly cost Samar her life. In 1998, the Taliban demanded she shut the school and reminded her that girls could only attend schools that taught the Quran, and only for grades one to three. Samar made a sign: THIS SCHOOL TEACHES THE QURAN TO CLASSES ONE TO THREE. And she went right on teaching science, literature, math, and history to the students she sees as the future of the country. In fear for their daughters’ lives, most parents decided to keep their girls at home, but officially Shuhada School stayed open. When the Taliban found out what she had done, they threatened to hang her. She replied, “Go ahead and hang me in a public place and tell the people my crime: I was giving papers and pencils to the girls.”
Back in Canada, the women who attend the potluck dinners invariably share their experiences in a letter with the cheque they send to Janice Eisenhauer. Suzanne, from Courtice, Ontario, writes:
As we sat talking about our families and our lives, I noticed that my daughter had slipped into the room. With her ever-present book in hand, she quietly curled up in a chair half-reading, half-listening to the conversation. I tried to imagine what her life would be like, if we lived in a country where attending school could be forbidden to her, simply because she was a girl. We raised $875. It was quite an evening.
The potluck supper in Slave Lake was particularly memorable. I had been invited to speak at the event and expected to find a group of women gathered in someone’s home. To my amazement, the organizers had invited the whole town and booked the hockey arena for the event. They raised more than $5,000, and if goodwill and solidarity counted for cash, there would have been enough money to educate everyone in Afghanistan.
The funds have found their way to some unexpected and usually forgotten centres of learning. One donation went to the Kabul Children’s Centre, which was started by the Afghan Women’s Organization in Canada. When I dropped in for a visit, it was the pots of purple petunias that caught my attention first. They looked so out of place in this heavily shelled district of Kabul. In fact, the white stucco house with the freshly painted green trim behind the flowerpots looked as though it had been dropped here, like Dorothy’s house in The Wizard of Oz. This neighbourhood is badly scarred by the twenty-three years of civil war Afghanistan has endured. So are the children inside the tidy little house.
Adeena Niazi, the president of the Afghan Women’s Organization in Toronto, travels to Kabul regularly. She knows there are thousands of children who have been abandoned, orphaned, or simply left to their own devices in this city. In spring 2002, she decided to do something about it. She found the house, convinced her friends to help her fix it up, hired staff, gathered up twenty-one little girls in need, and gave them a home. They ranged in age from three to eleven, and although all but the three- and four-year-olds go to school, they all need help catching up with what they missed when turmoil took over their young lives. Niazi asked the Breaking Bread team for money to pay a teacher. Now there is a classroom in the house, and a teacher comes every day after the regular school gets out to help them with their homework and give them the boost they need.
Six years later, the house is home to twenty-six girls whose ages range from two to seventeen. None of them has finished high school yet, but Niazi is optimistic about the future. One has plans to be a police officer, and a few others want to go to university, she says. They are like a family, calling one another sister, the older ones taking care of the younger ones. Niazi says they still have obstacles to deal with, like a drug-addicted father or cousin who turns up to claim ownership of a child, with the intention of selling her as a bride. “We pay bribes to keep the girls,” she says. “It’s the only way right now.”
Another lump sum went to hiring a teacher at the Jaghori hospital so that six young women could become nurses. The extraordinary story is vintage Samar. She knew that Herat’s hated warlord, Ismail Khan, was holding thirty “wayward” girls in confinement. Indeed, the girls had broken the rules of Khan’s ultra-conservative province by going out alone, looking for men, and attending forbidden parties. Samar heard about their plight through the United Nations when they asked her, as the chair of the human rights commission, to intervene. She did, and packed all thirty of them up and took them to Kabul. Some are at her women’s shelter; others were returned to their families. But six had the potential to become nurses, she thought. So she asked Janice Eisenhauer if the Breaking Bread money could be used for this kind of teacher, and when she got it, she drove the girls to Jaghori, found them a place to live, and enrolled them in a six-student nursing school.
Denying girls an education is a trick as old as Methuselah. As the woman in the literacy class said, if you can’t read, you may as well be blind because you can’t see what is going on, and as a result, the women and girls think their lot in life is predestined. What happens to the girls in these schools will affect the future of the country, and maybe even the entire region, where women have struggled for centuries to be treated fairly. Susan Bellan reflects on their tumultuous past when she recalls her own troubles while she was inventing the Breaking Bread plan. She was going through what seemed to be a relentless combination of assaults affecting her health, her livelihood, her home, and her children. “I really identified with Afghan women who were under much worse siege, and I wanted to give them backup.” She feels that no matter how terrible a situation you are facing, “you can get through it, or hope to get through it, if you don’t feel isolated, and if you have friends in your corner providing you with moral and material support.”
That support has come to Afghanistan by way of dozens of women’s groups, philanthropists, and governments that understand absolutely that education is the way forward for Afghanistan. The bad news today is that, as the attacks on the schools increase in both number and ferocity, parents become increasingly reluctant to expose their children to the potential violence. Furthermore, while one in four girls attends primary school, only 9 percent continue to secondary school.
Case in point: at the Shuhada School in Jaghori, there are a scant eleven girls in the senior class, as opposed to sixty per classroom in the junior grades. The staff explains that most girls leave school and get married at fifteen. Four of the eleven girls in this senior class are engaged, but claim they won’t marry until they have graduated.
The minister of education, Hanif Atmar, addressed these stubborn issues, as well as the considerable successes his ministry has seen, when he visited Canada in December 2007:
What is happening in Afghanistan in the area of education is a strategic transformation of our society. Whether some would like to see it or not, whether some would admit or not, this is the most fundamental transformation in our society, which is happening around the shared vision and objective of Afghan people—which is the education of their kids.
The numbers back up his claim. Six years ago, there were nine hundred thousand kids in school—all of them boys. Today there are six million in attendance, two million of them girls. “This is the highest enrolment rate ever in Afghanistan,” he says. The country has gone from having no female teachers to having forty thousand; from twenty-five hundred schools to nine thousand; and from ten teacher training colleges to thirty-four, one in each province with special facilities for girls. Atmar said:
If somebody is to take credit for this, that will be first and foremost the Afghan women. Through their sacrifice—had it not been for the strength of their resolve, we the men of Afghanistan would have succumbed to that Talibani pressure a long time ago—it was the strength of their resolve that actually gave us the strength to fight back. And even these days they are making a tremendous sacrifice.
To explain the 40 to 45 percent of girls who still are not attending school, he points to a shortage of female teachers and a lack of proper facilities. At the secondary level, the ratio of boys to girls is five to one. Eighty percent of the rural districts do not have girls’ high schools, and many families still prefer that their teenage girls be taught by female teachers in all-girls’ classes. “Since there are not enough female teachers, they don’t go to secondary [school], and when they don’t go to secondary, there will never be enough female teachers. That creates a vicious circle which needs to be broken,” he says.
But he puts most of the blame squarely on the Taliban:
For the past fourteen months that I am the minister of education, 115 of my teachers and kids have been killed by the terrorists. Why? The terrorists believe that this modern, broad-based Islamic system of education in Afghanistan is contrary to their terrorist ideology because this system will never allow Afghans to hate others, or to become terrorists and suicide bombers. That’s exactly the reason why they are attacking our teachers, our students, and our schools in the most brutal and inhumane way that would be unacceptable to any civilized nation. But despite this, our families are sending their kids to school.
He lists nine obstacles and impediments that have to be dealt with: terrorist ideology; criminality that leads to another impediment, lack of security; teacher supply; distance to schools; inadequate facilities; a poor curriculum; out-of-date teaching methods; and poverty. He says:
If poverty reduction can be achieved only through economic growth, then that economic growth will have to be inclusive. The inclusiveness of economic growth can never be achieved without education. Give them the most precious and sustainable asset of education, and then they will participate in the growth—which will hopefully lead to poverty reduction. That’s the understanding of our nation as to why education is so important for children.
Then he takes a shot at what he calls an ineffective and unaccountable administration. “There are elements in our administration, particularly in education administration, that are abusive. And as long as these abusive elements remain in our administration, they will be an impediment to the girls’ enrolment.” Although he does not mention specifics, he is referring to corporal punishment, which is used freely by the teachers as well as the hard-line Islamists who don’t want girls to be educated, men who wield considerable power in Afghan politics today. “We have to get rid of them,” he says. “There will be zero tolerance for abuse and abusive elements in the administration.” His plan is to take the power from ministers and place it in the hands of the parents. He wants to organize them, turn them into parent councils, and give them full responsibility for their schools. He claims 90 percent of the operating schools now have a council of parents. Their mandate is to provide security and protection for the students, teachers, and the school, responsibly manage the resources allocated for the schools, supervise and monitor the performance of staff, and develop a relationship among teachers and parents.
Tough talk from a cabinet minister. But those who know him claim Atmar is sincere, a reformer who is close enough to President Karzai to get the action he wants on education.
Atmar also secured a $60-million pledge from Bev Oda, the minister of international cooperation, while he was in Canada that will go into curriculum development, teacher training, building additional schools, and hiring more than two hundred specialists, both inside Afghanistan and outside, including Afghan Canadians, to come back to the country and write the badly needed textbooks.
Atmar wants a people-centred, parent-led governance system, not only in the education sector, but also in other sectors of reconstruction and development. He also wants to address the troublesome madrassa schools that preached hatred and brainwashed boys to become jihadists. “They are not only a security threat, but also the biggest enemy of girls’ education,” he says. He does not call for their closure, but says:
We must reform them. We must reform their curriculum. We must broaden their base of education. And we must include them and bring them into the mainstream. The old policy of exclusion led to this disaster. Exclusion breeds fundamentalism and terrorism. It’s inclusion and having a broad base that would lead to better understanding and better ways of cooperation and shared values.
If the minister and his department can get the security issue under control and convince parents to send their girls, particularly their teenage girls, to school, there is still another major problem to solve: Most teachers in Afghanistan have little or no professional training. If you finish school yourself, you are eligible to teach. What’s more, the methods of teaching are hopelessly outdated. Rote learning is still the norm, memorizing and copying text trumps discussion, and teachers shout at students and hit them for everything from disobedience to wrong answers.
The competence of the teachers has been on the minds of the women at CW4WAfghan for as long as they have been funding their salaries. But what is a grassroots volunteer organization to do about teacher training in another country? Well, if you are part of one of the fourteen chapters now operating across Canada, you decide to fix the problem. I am invariably astonished by the bold projects these women take on. So when I heard about their request for $600,000 to train teachers in Afghanistan, I wasn’t exactly surprised. They call it “Excel-erate Education.”
Janice Eisenhauer explains:
Excel-erate Education is a two-year project to provide high-quality teacher training and annual salary support for female and male teachers in several specific, under-resourced communities in Kabul Province. Local community and home schools will be identified in consultation with the Afghan Ministry of Education, and with two, selected, Afghan, implementing partner-organizations with experience in teacher training. Our partners have the ability to access the much-needed community support within these districts. The teacher training ultimately benefits women and girls attending community and home schools in areas where a lack of infrastructure and access to resources, or security risks create an absence or shortage of schools.
Approximately 350 student teachers will be invited to participate in the teacher-training sessions taking place over a six-month period in both 2008 and 2009. A total of eight trainers will conduct the training, with support from an education consultant and project management team. Following the successful completion of the training, and with the support from their communities, trainees will have the opportunity to apply for up to nine months of teacher salary support. A Teachers’ Resource Fund will be made available to purchase teaching supplies and resources and to assist the teachers with other improvements to their classrooms. A Virtual Teachers’ Resource Centre will be established at the project office, to provide access to a collection of resources online (and printed copies where possible), in the Dari and Pashto languages. These additional resources will ensure the newly learned skills acquired by the student trainees are immediately implemented and practised within the classroom setting. Under-resourced communities in need of teachers for girls will have a way to access professionally trained teachers, and schools will be given further resources towards eventual integration within the formal education system.
Janice Eisenhauer and Alaina Podmorow made the trip from their respective homes in Calgary and the Okanagan Valley to attend the lunch Bev Oda was holding in Ottawa to mark International Women’s Day and to announce the funding for the teacher-training project. Oda had a surprise for both of them. She pledged her ministry would match donations received from Canadians as part of their Breaking Bread fundraising initiative.
Eisenhauer, an unassuming woman who wears her heart on her sleeve, has been on this file for more than a decade. She was completing a degree in development studies at the University of Calgary when she and fellow student Carolyn Reicher and author Deborah Ellis launched CW4WAfghan.
In the face of such seemingly insurmountable odds—rescuing women from a medieval theocracy—most people would back away, feeling they could not possibly alter the course of events. But some, such as Eisenhauer and Reicher and the women they recruited to the cause, simply do not see the barriers the same way. I remember receiving a call during those early days from a woman in Vancouver who identified herself as Lauryn Oates, asking if I would speak at a function she was organizing to raise awareness about the women of Afghanistan. I agreed and fully expected to meet a middle-aged woman with experience in the gender stakes. I was wrong. Lauryn was sixteen years old, had Kool-Aid-green dyed hair, and had borrowed her boyfriend’s car to fetch me at the airport. She also packed a room with eager listeners and opened a chapter of CW4WAfghan in Vancouver that night. These activists in Calgary and Vancouver, Oakville and Kingston, Montreal and St. John never let go. While governments dithered, they pumped up awareness; their singular mission being to recast the status of women and girls in Afghanistan.
Eisenhauer is the full-time volunteer coordinator for the project that has at different times been both frustrating and frightening, empowering and rewarding. Combining temerity with collegiality, she invariably rallies more people to the cause when she addresses a crowd. In Ottawa, she thanked Oda and said:
We all know there are many challenges facing women and girls in Afghanistan, particularly in terms of access to education and basic human rights. We are very proud to mark our tenth International Women’s Day on March 8, 2008, working in solidarity, in partnership, and in friendship with women in Afghanistan. Our goals are to advance and protect human rights for Afghan women and girls. Each year, March 8 allows us an opportunity to celebrate these goals, and demonstrate our long-term commitment to the women of Afghanistan.
She and her band of change-makers have provided sustainable funding for Afghan partner projects, to help bear the cost of an orphanage, community schools, books, stationery, heating bills for classrooms, library resources, transportation, medical supplies, and skills development.
Alaina Podmorow stood beside her at the Ottawa event, the quintessential Canadian girl, her wavy hair tied up in a ponytail, seemingly nonplussed by the considerable fuss around her, a ten-year-old who decided she would be part of the solution to crack a human rights problem for girls her age on the other side of the world. “Lainy,” as she’s known to her friends, is a pint-sized humanitarian, a soccer player, a kid who snowboards, tap dances, and performs in musical theatre. Her mom, Jamie, says:
As far as her work goes, that comes from a different place. She is able to be very serious about what is going on there. She gathers the information, processes it, and decides how she is going to help. We talk about the issue, and then she is off playing or doing homework or dancing. That I believe is her special gift—the processing and letting go.
Jamie tells a story that best describes her remarkable daughter’s unvarnished attitude:
After an event in Calgary, the speakers were mingling about, talking to audience members that had joined them on stage. I watched as a woman slowly approached Alaina, her head veiled with a black scarf. She took Alaina’s face in her hands, and with tears trickling down her cheeks, she said, “Thank you for what you are doing for my country. Thank you for what you are doing for my people.” Alaina’s answer was pure: a simple “You’re welcome.”
She and her team of preteen dynamos have held bottle drives, silent auctions, donut sales, and car washes; new chapters of Little Women for Little Women in Afghanistan have sprouted up from Mayne Island in British Columbia to Newfoundland. They have raised $22,000 to hire teachers in Afghanistan and realize Alaina’s dream to make peace through education. “I want to build a bridge of peace,” she says. The logo she chose is Education = Peace.
ONE OF THE RECIPIENTS OF THE PROGRAMS being celebrated in Ottawa is Shegofa Mehri, who comes from Sunge-e-Masha in Jaghori district. It is serendipitous that her name means “blossom” because she is leading the pack in 2008, the first of the Jaghori students to graduate and go to university, proof that the world the girls so badly want to join is available to them. I met her first in 2002, when she was a student at Shuhada High School. Her father, Engineer Akram Mehri (engineers in Afghanistan take their profession as titles just as doctors do), invited me to join the family at home one night after dinner. The blind corners on the dirt roads in the pitch-black night made me wonder why roads are being paved in other places, but Jaghori is not on the reconstruction map. The U.N. employee in charge of the district quipped: “They don’t need roads in Jaghori; they have electricity and Sima Samar.” Once at the two-storey home of the Mehri family, Shegofa acts as host, shyly introducing a stranger to her six brothers and sisters and her mom, Homina. The conversation is all about education: getting it, using it, finding the way out of the troublesome past. “I want my daughters to be doctors, engineers, politicians,” her father said. “They can make this country a better place and stand on their own feet.” His progressive view is unusual, even here in Jaghori, where Shuhada’s schools have been open since 1991.
Today Shegofa is a second-year student at Bolzano University in Italy, one of three girls from Jaghori who won scholarships that cover tuition, as well as room and board and travel. This is the opportunity her parents had hoped for, and one her younger brothers and sisters aim to replicate.
Several international organizations have joined the effort to educate girls in Afghanistan by partnering with Shuhada. In Ghazni province, more than twenty-five thousand girls and boys are attending thirty-four different schools. As early as 2003, three hundred students had passed the university entrance exams, the highest number of successful candidates of any district in Afghanistan. But it is the success of the girls’ schools in Jaghori that brings a triumphant grin to the face of Sima Samar. “Eighty-six of my girls graduated from Kabul University this year. They are the first. They studied science and literature, social science and journalism.”
The Taliban still skirt the area, delivering their cowardly night letters to villagers and sending suicide bombers to terrify both the local population and the humanitarians who work here. You still need to dodge the Taliban hideouts when driving to Jaghori, but once there, the progress in the towns is apparent: The hospital is running at full capacity; the library has been rebuilt and stocked with more than five thousand volumes; the children at the orphanage are attending school; the fields that were drought-ravaged when I first visited in 2002 are now ripe with grain; and the apple and grape orchards that had succumbed to the devastation of war are heavy with fruit. The cows, sheep, and goats that have been part of the landscape for centuries are grazing in the fields and wandering onto the roads and between the stalls of merchants in Sunge-e-Masha, oblivious to the metamorphosis around them. In many ways, the villages also cling to the customs of bygone times.
When the afternoon shift at Shuhada School empties this day and the kids start their long trek back over the hills and through the valleys to their mud-brick homes, the sun is already low on the horizon. It casts yellow streaks of light and long blue shadows on the rocky ranges as I watch them walk away. Filtered through the dust that lingers from the drought, the light creates muted hues that colour the countryside now splashed with the black-and-white figures of the students, who still have homework to do and chores to tend to before dark descends.
By the time I return to the town where I am staying, fires have been lit in the hearths, everyone is preparing for dinner— “breaking bread,” I think. Some are at the river that gurgles through the village, filling buckets of water, hauling them up the steep hills. A couple of chickens swing from a schoolboy’s back. Shepherds are herding their goats nearer to home. A muffled echo of children’s laughter reminds me that during the Taliban regime, they were not allowed to play. A gentle peace descends as the light spills through the trees and around the hills. Calm settles on the hamlets, the sort of quiet that comes from a day fulfilled, a day that brings hope for tomorrow. And although the future is still uncertain, the girls in Jaghori are dreaming big dreams. Everyone is going to be a “somebody.”