Tag Archives: afghan refugees

I visited schools in Kabul in 2004 and what I saw there reinforced what I had learned in Peshawar almost twenty years before, about Afghans and education. That is, if you put up a sign that says “School” it will be full of Afghans in about a New York minute. No matter if you hang your sign outside a bombed-out building or a vacant lot, if you teach it, they will come. In 1987 when my colleagues and I opened a journalism training center in Peshawar a line began to form almost immediately. We had to conduct our admissions interviews on the lawn of the venerable Dean’s Hotel, where adult Afghan refugees patiently queued up waiting for a chance at a seat in the classroom. Of course there were no Afghan women in that waiting line. The women were queued up elsewhere, at the offices of Save the Children and other NGOs seeking treatment for depression or shelter from battering husbands; the lot of women in the refugee camps was even bleaker than it had been in the home villages they had abandoned during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

In Kabul, as schools began to reopen after the ouster of the Taliban, Afghans of all ages and both sexes (though not together) flooded the classrooms of the primary schools, high schools, and Kabul University. One of the most joyous sights in Kabul was seeing young schoolgirls in their new uniforms bouncing along the street in happy bunches on their way to and from school. It is easier for them in Kabul, where the level of security is still better than in most parts of the country, but even there the children have to be aware of kidnappers, suicide bombers and Taliban terrorists. Still they are not deterred, and are willing to risk their lives for what most American kids take for granted.

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