By: Sherin Yousfi
Fatima started the ninth grade six months before Kabul fell to the Taliban in 2021. She was 31 years old. Education opportunities had been denied to her when she was a child due to the previous Taliban regime, and now she is reliving the nightmare of her stolen childhood again.
“The Taliban took my youth. I could not study. Now after twenty years, they took my pen and books from me again. They are the enemy of women’s education. These days, I only wait for one happiness: the opening of girls’ schools,” Fatima said.
When Fatima went back to high school last year as a mature adult, she had big dreams of going to university and herself studying to be a teacher.
“I had many dreams, but the Taliban has shattered all of them,” she told Rukhshana Media. “It was so difficult to convince my husband to let me go to school, and I overcame a thousand other challenges. Studying was not easy at my age.”
Under the previous Afghan govern, a literacy project known as critical literacy, was launched through the Ministry of Education. The purpose was to eradicate illiteracy and provide an opportunity for older women and men who had missed out on a regular education. The lessons were the equivalent of the school curriculum.
When the Taliban ordered the closure of girls’ schools above sixth grade, they also banned women from schools teaching critical literacy. Thousands of women and girls who were in critical literacy programs were forced to remain home without any further education.
“I feel like a 14-year-old girl who is deprived of school,” Fatima said. “I don’t know if I can go to school again!”
After the Taliban banned girls’ education in the 1990s, Fatima was young enough to go to the schools that were allowed for her age, but her parents never gave her the opportunity. Then when the Taliban were ousted after the US invasion in 2001, her family had other plans for her. She was forced to marry a relative at the age of 16.
Now a mother of two children, Fatima said that despite all the limitations, she was able to pick up an education from her eldest child.
“When my little daughter went to school, I started learning the alphabet,” she said. “I was able to read and with difficulty, I convinced my husband to let me go to the course to study mathematics and Dari.”
Even before the Taliban’s takeover last year, many women in the country did not have much access to education. Poverty, insecurity, and social traditions were among the basic factors of the situation. That’s why the Ministry of Education of the previous government tried to at least increase literacy.
Khurshid (pseudonym) began studying a primary school curriculum three years ago when she was 19 years old after passing the literacy course. Her biggest hurdle to continuing her education through the regular school program was her family.
“My relatives said that it was not good to go for me to go to school at that age and it was time for me to marry and be a housewife. But I made it through, even with all the challenges.”
Like Fatima, she also dreamed of going to university. Now she is an eighth-grade student at Zainab Kobra School in Kabul. But has been homebound for over a year because of the Taliban ban.
“In the beginning, I studied at night secretly from my family. My brother was strongly against girls studying at home. He used to say, ‘There is no need for girls to get an education and they should work at home’,” she said.
“I had to fight with ‘the Taliban at home’ to go to school, but then the wilder Taliban came and stopped me,” Khurshid said, referring to her brother’s beliefs as similar to those of the Taliban militants.
Salima, 28, is a mother of two children and had joined a literacy school in Kabul just four months before the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan.
“It was very painful when my little son asked me to help him with his homework, but I could not assist,” she said. “I decided that I should learn to read and write for myself and my children, but unfortunately the Taliban came and I could not continue studying.”
For a year, girls above the sixth grade have not been able to go to school, and literacy training centers are also closed to women.
Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary-General, on the first anniversary of the ban on girls’ schools above sixth grade said that the Taliban should allow girls to return to school in Afghanistan.
“A year of lost knowledge and opportunity that they will never get back,” Antonio Guterres tweeted on Sunday, September 18.
UNAMA called the one-year ban on girls’ education sad and shameful.
“This is a sad, shameful, and completely avoidable anniversary,” said Marks Putzel, head of UNAMA in a statement.
“The continuous deprivation of girls from secondary and high school has no valid justification and has no parallel anywhere in the world,” Putzel added. “This is very harmful for a generation of girls and the future of Afghanistan itself.”
I was denied education for 12 years over a mistake in mott college systems s showing I owed money when I had emergency surgery and they still are taking a year at Full Sail to fix my stuff if I was a kid there’s no way i would even do this.