A school that started up in a remote district of Helmand province now has 200 students after opening last year through a 20-year-old volunteer.
Abdul Qadir Pasoon’s family is from Tarmaki, a remote area in Helmand’s Nahr-e-Seraj district. When he returned to Tarmaki after 16 years living in Kandahar, he realised that most of the people he met there had never been to school and where most children did not even know what it was.
“It takes at least two hours to reach Tarmaki area from the center of Nahr-e-Seraj district by road,” Abdul said. “We had no school and no teacher and not even a small step was taken in the field of education.”
So he decided he was going to start one himself.
‘Pasoon Kaliwal Shwanzai’ (Pasoon Rural School) is more officially a literacy centre as it doesn’t have the facilities to be classed as a “school”.
Abdul holds classes in the open air with a shelter made of wood and bushes and teaches the children to read.
He told Rukhshana Media that his goal is to prepare children for school.
“Until now, we had neither a school nor a teacher. I talked with the young people and children. I realized that all the children and teenagers of the village grew up without education and did not have any clear future. Our society was completely illiterate and deprived of science,” he said.
Abdul said that he has about 200 students, 70 of whom are girls.
“The age of the girls is from six to thirteen years. We don’t have higher classes. So far, it is only the literacy available.”
Children have been the main victims of decades of war in Afghanistan. Many children are deprived of education due to the war, violence, and opposition of the Taliban. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has previously said that half of Afghanistan’s children do not go to school with a key reason being war and insecurity.
Tarmaki area was mostly under Taliban rule during the two decades of war between the previous government of Afghanistan and the Taliban. And until a year ago, Helmand was one of the provinces with the highest incidence of war fighting. However, since the return of the Taliban to power, there has been relative security in the southern regions of the country, including Helmand.
Abdul said that in such a situation, he felt that the main priority of the people of his hometown was education and schools.
“Although in the beginning, the people of the village did not show much enthusiasm to establish a school and to send their children to get an education, because they were unfamiliar with its value, little by little I was able to convince them by talking and encouraging them,” he said. “After a few months, people are very happy with my work. They do not spare any kind of support, they send their sons and daughters to school with a lot of enthusiasm and interest.”
As a child, Abdul was himself a victim of the war. At the age of four, his family left Tarmaki due to the war went to Kandahar. He studied in the city of Kandahar until the 11th grade, but then they had to move again due to fighting and he never had the opportunity to finish school.
Abdul says he teaches four separate classes for seven hours a day. But for all his efforts, he says the lack of educational materials, including books, is one of his biggest challenges.
“We don’t have a specific curriculum. Our students do not have books,” he said.
Abdul hopes more international aid organizations try to bring education to children and youth in Afghanistan.
“My dream is to build schools in all remote areas,” he said.
Recently, the deputy spokesperson of the Taliban told Rukhshana Media that nearly 10 million students go to school across the country, of which 4 million are girls. But it is unclear what share children in remote and war-ravaged areas have in this statistic.
Bashir Ahmad, 12, is one of the students at the Pasoon Rural School. He says he is happy with what he’s learned and can now both read and write.
“I didn’t go to school before, I didn’t know how to write, I couldn’t even write my name, I couldn’t spell and I didn’t know the alphabet,” he said.
The enthusiasm that Abdul sees in the faces of his students makes him determined to overcome any problem.
“Children come to lessons with great enthusiasm and interest and they do their assignments,” he said. “Many of children were able to learn to read and write in a few months.”
