By: Mohammad Rahimi
Khadija spends hours every day, selling cucumbers on a pushcart in the streets of southern Kandahar city to feed her six children.
But there is something more valuable than food for Khadija: Education of children.
She said she works to pay the school expenses of her daughters and a son.
“I started doing this for my children, I have lost the hope of having a good life for myself, but I want at least my children to have a good life,” Khadija, 50 said.
She said working as a street vendor isn’t easy for women in Kandahar, the Taliban’s spiritual capital and birthplace, but she is ready to suffer and work hard to support the education of her children.
Khadija is uneducated because she couldn’t go to school due to cultural restrictions in her home province of Kandahar. But she doesn’t want her daughters to remain illiterate.
The Taliban have kept millions of girls of above sixth grade out of school. Two of Khadija’s daughters, who are secondary school students, are also deprived of getting an education due to this restriction.
“They are very disappointed now,” she said about her two daughters. “They want to return to school.”
She said her daughters are working with her because they aren’t allowed to go to school.
Khadija’s husband died of cancer four years ago, and she has been working since. She works in the streets of a city where women rarely leave home, and they are almost entirely invisible.
She said she used to wear a burqa to cover her face, but she decided to throw it away to show for the men who often harassed her that she was an old woman.
“It is very difficult to hear these people, when I go home in the evening I cry,” she said. “It bothers me a lot when I remember what they say about me.”
Nazia is one of Khadija’s daughter who is out of school. She said she had passed the ninth and was about to start tenth grade when the Taliban came to power in August.
“We already lost one academic year, and I am very sad,” she said. “If the gates of our schools are closed, then girls remain uneducated. How to build the country?”
Nazia said she has two dreams. One, to graduate from university, and the other not to see her mother work in the streets anymore.
“I ask the Taliban to not violate our rights, and let us go to school,” she said.
