It is six in the morning and dozens of young people enter through the small door of a private school in Kabul. Some are covered with the black abaya, the veil and face masks required by the new Taliban government, but others resist. They show their faces and cover themselves with bright colors that are according to their age, between 12 and 20 years.
Among them comes Saida, 18, who this morning has chosen a salmon-colored scarf. She walks concentrated with the backpack on her back. She left her house half an hour ago to be on time. An older man with a Kalashnikov on his shoulder – who still protects himself from the night cold with a traditional patú, or blanket – watches the entrance of the women, who quickly go to the dark rooms due to the lack of electricity, where they barely have space.
They squeeze in as best they can, take out the notebooks that many put on their legs, and concentrate. Some learn physics, others mathematics… They only have two hours; at eight o’clock they will have to leave as quickly as they entered before the city becomes active and the Taliban patrols become more active. His education is not allowed in Afghanistan. “But what are we going to do? Are we going to leave all these women uneducated?” explains the owner of the institute, who after negotiating here and there has managed to get at least the commanders of the sector to accept – turning a blind eye – that the girls attend the center for these morning hours, before the boys arrive. Even so, he knows that at any moment they can be rounded up.
The same scene is repeated in multiple schools, training centers and mosques in Kabul and other cities in the country, which have made the decision to continue training thousands of adolescents who have been excluded from the education system since September, when the government ordered not to reopen schools for women from seventh grade. Some government voices argue that they are working to solve this problem… “No one understands what problems they are referring to, since most schools in the country already had segregated classes,” adds Aziz, the institute’s academic director.
The week at the end of September that we toured Kabul doing this report, Afghan television and networks were dominated by a disagreement of opinions within the Taliban government. The deputy foreign minister, Mohamed Abas Stanikzai, assured that it was very important that the entire population had access to education, “without discrimination”. He even stated that everything was being prepared for the return of the young women to the classroom. But in the same act, the minister of the recently created portfolio of Virtue, which replaced that of Women, again closed any door to this possibility.
Sitting in the second row of the twelfth grade class is Saida. “It has not been easy to find the motivation to continue, but I want to be a doctor,” says the young woman, with a nostalgic smile that does not go away despite the anguish that she carries inside of her. In her house there are economic problems, hers two brothers emigrated to Iran in search of work and she, thanks to the support of her mother, fights every day against the doubts of her father who asks what sense she has to keep trying.
In addition to this institute, she was lucky to be accepted in another smaller educational center, open since March, which is dedicated to preparing final year students. The objective of this center – which has permission to give English classes or teach the Koran – is to prepare young women so that they can take part in the contest, the Afghan selectivity, if at some point the Taliban allow women to do so.
So after finishing her first classes at eight in the morning, Saida walks fifteen minutes in the direction of the other center, much more comfortable. A select group of teachers who lost their jobs in public institutes teach these students geography, history, English, Islam… everything that includes formal Afghan education. “I know I am lucky to be here. There are many girls in Afghanistan who cannot go to school; many girls are forced to marry”, acknowledges Saida.
At least 20 young people are sitting at a round table. Today’s topic is how to manage time in the face of uncertainty. “We try to make them aware that life has not stopped; We give them tools so that they understand that there is a future, that it is possible to make their way,” explains Yalda, 30, who until a year ago was an English professor at Kabul University. A few months ago, she accepted the challenge of leading this center, financed by an organization that supports women. At first, she says, all the girls were depressed.
The inconsistency of the new Taliban government is that although young women are excluded from secondary education, they are not from universities. In a subsequent conversation, Dr. Fazal Rahman, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Kabul University, confirms that women who finished school last year will be able to apply for the contest, which is about to take place. But it is not known what will happen in the following years. “This is a big problem for us. We are hopeful that it can be fixed and women continue to educate themselves,” he adds.
The optimism disappears. The situation in Afghanistan has changed in recent months and the pressure on women, students, activists, teachers and journalists is increasing. “Day after day they try to erase the trail of women in the country,” explains Zual, who directs the educational centers supported by the Ponts per la pau association, led by the Barcelona-based Afghan activist and writer Nadia Ghulam.
“Lately we are having problems,” says Zual. Although they have permission to operate as an educational center, the Taliban seem to distrust the activities they carry out, such as the book club they are holding this afternoon. Zual assures that they do not know the origin of the problem, it could be the books in English or the way the girls dress. “They have said that we educate women in the wrong direction,” he says while the women, some accompanied by their little ones, write their opinion on a text they have read on cardboard. On the walls there are handicrafts, such as sewing, that teach them.
Zual is soon forced to interrupt the activity. She receives a call from another center. As has been happening for days, they have been visited by the Taliban and she fears that they are on their way to this place (as they will be). She asks the students to slowly and quietly leave the house, which has no sign to identify it as a teaching center.
In the Dashte Barchi sector, inhabited mostly by the Hazara minority ethnic group, dozens of Taliban guard the entrance to the street that leads to the Kaj center, where thousands of students are preparing to present the contest. The press is forbidden to pass, but the faces of the locals are the mirror of the tragedy. Hours before, a suicide bomber blew himself up in a classroom with hundreds of students. The majority of victims are young women. Like Samira, 17 years old.
Next to her grave, moments after she was buried, her father says that she was the best student in her class. She also dreamed of being a doctor. That day she had gotten up at five in the morning to attend the contest preparation class. “What country is this where our daughters cannot study, and if they do they kill them?” says this 56-year-old man, who has spent most of his life in Iran working.
Meters above, Alina observed the funerals that were celebrated at that time in the cemetery located on a bare and desert mountain. She was at the institute that morning of September 30. She came out unscathed, but she kept telling herself over and over she could be being buried in one of those holes right now. “My mother works in this cemetery putting water on the graves so she can educate me and I could have died. They are my friends”, insisted Alina, who is the first woman in her family who knows how to read and write.
“I don’t know if I want to continue studying, why?”, the young woman repeated. Like Samia and Samira, he also dreams of being a doctor.
