By Nosha Asiyan
When Lina* became one of the few girls from her district in rural Afghanistan to win a place at university, she hoped she could help pull her family out of poverty. The sacrifices they made to support her – selling livestock to fund her studies – made her all the more determined.
But Lina never got to complete her economics degree. As she travelled to Kabul from the family home in Badakhshan province in the mountains of northeast Afghanistan in 2022 with her brother to start her final semester at the university, the Taliban issued a decree banning women from formal studies.
Now 24, she is back on the family farm in Badakhshan’s Zebak region, near the border with Pakistan. She spends her days toiling on the farm, a mix of crops and livestock that provides the 13-member household with a meagre livelihood. Her hands are roughened by hard labour and her nearly three years at university are a distant memory.
“I told him, ‘This time, when I return to Zebak, it will be with my degree in hand.’ But instead, I came back with tearful eyes and a heart full of pain,” says Lina as she recalls the day her hopes of a different life were cut short.
Every day, she remembers how close she came to completing her university education. But the memories are painful ones, and talking about those days is hard.
“I dreamed of finishing my studies, getting a good job and moving my family to [the provincial capital] Faizabad or Kabul to save them from this hardship and the exhaustion of rural life,” Lina told Rukhshana Media as she carved rows in the dry soil to plant potatoes.
“[I thought] if I ever came back to the village, it would only be for a visit or a vacation.
“If the Taliban had allowed it, I could be supporting my family now. Instead, I have become a burden to them, living each day with a heavy heart,” she says, wiping tears from her eyes.
Lina doesn’t complain about the physical demands of her work. It provides a welcome distraction from her sadness at the loss of a life she once dreamed of – dreams cut short by the Taliban’s return to power in 2001.
Since then, Afghanistan’s new rulers have introduced a slew of draconian restrictions on women, barring them from all education beyond the primary level and from most forms of work outside the home.
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There were no female students at Afghanistan’s public universities under the previous Taliban regime. But over the two decades that followed their ousting in 2001, the proportion of women swelled to between 35% and 45% according to statistics from the Ministry of Higher Education.
Since the Taliban’s return to power in 2021, they have banned both higher education and most forms of employment for women, effectively confining them to the home in urban areas.
But in rural parts of the country like Zebak, many women still work on the land, farming and taking care of livestock – tough physical labour that has not changed in centuries.
It is a life that Rahil, 20, had hoped to avoid when she won a place to study literature and humanities at Mazar-i-Sharif University in 2022. She dreamed of becoming a teacher, but did not even get to start her studies before the Taliban barred women.
Instead, shel lives with her parents in a village in Zebak, where she spends half her day working in the fields and the other half in the kitchen, baking bread and making tapak, the bricks from animal dung that are burned as fuel.
Like Lina, she remembers vividly the moment that her hopes of a different life were dashed.
Rahil said goodbye to her parents, who had borrowed money for her travel and schooling, and headed to Faizabad where she planned to stay the night at a relative’s house to break the journey. That night, she learned of the ban on the television news.
“I almost went crazy,” she says. “I felt like everyone was laughing at me, mocking me.”
The very next day, she returned to her village, she says, recalling how she spent that entire night crying in her mother’s arms.
The older woman is tall and strong, but describes her life as full of hardship and says she hoped for a better future for her only daughter.
“All the work in the winter pastures falls on the women’s shoulders,” she says. “We work at home, cooking and baking bread, and we work in the fields, digging and tilling the soil. Looking after the animals, making tapak… it all falls on the women.”
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Like Rahil and Lina, Tahira*, 21, carries a heavy sorrow in her heart. Before the ban on women’s education, she was a nursing student in Faizabad. Now, unable to study or work, she faces being forced by her father into a marriage she does not want.
Tahira’s story is far from unique in her village, where she says some girls were married at 15 or 16 after the education ban was introduced and their secondary schools closed.
“I have completely lost hope in life. I had completed three semesters, halfway through my studies, and was supposed to graduate in about a year and a half, but it didn’t happen,” says Tahira, who has moved back to her family’s village home.
“While I was in Faizabad, life was easier. I wasn’t even engaged. In the city, no one cares if someone isn’t married by 30, but here, if you’re 18 or 19 and still single, you’re quickly labeled as an old maid.”
She points sadly to the nursing textbooks and notebooks tucked away in the corner of the chest that contains her wedding clothes and says she may never be able to go back to them.
All three women came close to fulfilling their dreams of study and a career, only to have those opportunities cruelly snatched away.
“I was just one step away,” says Lina sadly. “Just one year left until graduation. I studied for three years, worked hard, endured poverty, low resources, hunger, and thirst, but it was all in vain.”
Note*: Names have been changed to protect identities.
