By Pratap Chatterjee
MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Afghanistan, May 20 2002 (IPS)

When the door opened in the sixth grade classroom at the Fatima Balkhi girls school in a district in northern Afghanistan, it brought the lessons to an immediate halt.

That was not because of the arrival of new students or visitors, but by the simple virtue of the fact that the back of the makeshift tin door was doubling as a chalkboard.

Zarmina, the principal of the Fatima Balkhi school here, estimates that the school houses some 6,000 students. “They are taught all the subject that they were taught before the control of the Taliban such as mathematics, history, geography, Dari, Pashto, English and some religious subjects as well.”

For the best part of last five years, girls and women have been forced to stay at home in Afghanistan under the ultra-fundamentalist Taliban regime and all their schools were shut down.

Since the fall of the Taliban in mid-November, girls have flocked back to classes every day, even during the long winter break, in order to catch up with the boys before school formally opened in late March.

Today, there are 39,000 girl students here in Balkh district in northern Afghanistan, making up a third of the student body in the 180 schools. Across the country some 1.5 million boys and girls are back in school this year, about a third of the estimated 4.4 million school-age children.

Zarmina and her colleagues have been teaching the girls every day without receiving a penny in wages. But the conditions under which they teach are harsh at the very least.

One third-grade classroom was a better off than most of the others, because it had a proper wall-length chalkboard, but in other respects the students were worse off: 140 little girls aged eight to 10 crammed into a space that measured five metres by seven meters — with neither chairs nor tables.

Down the stairs, the first graders suffered the worst plight. No chairs, no tables, no chalkboard and a huge gaping hole in the roof , which brought in gusts of wind during the winter. Students sat close together to keep warm on the mud floor, balancing notebooks on their knees.

Faizullah Ansari, the director of education for Balkh province, says: “During the four years of Taliban control, we lost everything. Now we don’t have any tables, chairs or desks, we don’t have any books. Even the buildings of the schools have been destroyed. We have to rebuild everything even new desks and chairs, we have to publish new books also.”

“The Taliban burnt a lot of books, they used to say that those books were for the infidels, not for Muslims. We agree that we are Muslims, but the Islam they taught us was not the real Islam. In their opinion the only person who was a real Muslim was a person who prayed five times a day and studied religious subjects,” he added. “They weren’t interested in doctors, lawyers or engineers.”

Help for these schools is on the way from non- governmental groups.

Sarka Kuchtova is a programme officer with the People in Need foundation from Prague in the Czech republic, which set up a little office in Mazar to rebuild a dozen schools with money from the British government.

“Under the Taliban, one of the schools was only for boys, but now there are both boys and girls. The boys study in the afternoon and the girls study in the morning. During the control of the Taliban, this school only had three active classes, but we have repaired the schools and all the classes are active.”

Some 4 million brand new primary school textbooks in Dari and Pashto, the two principal languages in Afghanistan, are also making their way back into the classrooms under an emergency back-to-school program funded the Japanese, German and Swedish governments, and printed at presses in the United States.

The new school books have attempted to update the older ones, which portrayed women only as housewives, if at all. In one of the Dari books, the picture beneath the word “teacher” is of a woman in a simple head scarf, but not an all-encompassing ‘burqa’, the Taliban-mandated covering for women that leaves only a small patch of mesh through which the woman can see.

There is an age range of four years between fellow students in every classroom here, depending on whether or not they were able to study at all in the last four years.

Camilla is an eighth grade student at Sultan Razya school in Mazar who was able to study secretly. “During the time of the Taliban, we studied in secret. Sometimes we would go to my teachers home at 10 am, sometimes at 3 pm, sometimes at night, in order to fool the Taliban,” she says.

Her school was taken over by the Taliban and used as a military base for the last few years. In early November last year, however, United States jets fired missiles at the building, reducing it to rubble — the only major building in the city to be destroyed in the recent war.

Camilla and her classmates have been assigned to study at the Sultan Ghiasuddin boys school until money can be obtained to rebuild her old school.

Meanwhile she and most of her friends are already sure they know what they want to be when they grow up. “I want to be a doctor and help my people,” she says.

All of her classmates nod in acknowledgement, except one named Halina. “I don’t want to be a doctor,” she says firmly, “I want to be a journalist and travel to foreign countries.”

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