Afghanistan

Real lives

Afghan girls continue to re-enter the classroom

© UNICEF Afghanistan/Premfors/2003

Over 4 million children have flooded back to Afghanistan's classrooms. 5,000 girls alone now attend Maleka Jalaly High School in Heart.

It is eight o'clock in June 2003, and the Maleka Jalaly High School for Girls in Herat City, western Afghanistan, is in session.

Tahera Hakimi looks out of her office window on the first floor and surveys the mass of girls in the courtyard below. She has been teaching for 38 years; 18 years ago she took over as principal of Maleka Jalaly High.

In 2002, 3,000 girls enrolled at Maleka Jalaly and in 2003 that number leapt to 5,000. Accommodation is limited and the main building of the school holds 12  classrooms, seating 3,000 children in three shifts throughout the day.

The city’s long history of art and culture perhaps explains the thirst for learning that today consumes so many of its young people. In 2002, the first full academic year after the fall of the Taliban, more than 250,000 children re-entered the classrooms in Herat province.

In a freshly painted classroom in the school, the girls have desks and benches – a considerable improvement on many schools in the country. They even have enough textbooks between them.

But teaching aids are limited to a single map on the wall and a small plastic globe. And this is a Grade 11 class. In two years, these students will leave school and should be ready for university.

Principal Hakimi is optimistic about how education is going to develop in Herat.

Girls: “the future of our country”

"Even if we don't have the resources we need, we will find a way to teach the students," she said. "If we have no chairs, no desks, no classrooms, we will teach them under the trees. The future of our country, it lies with these girls. Their education is the future of Afghanistan; and some education is better than none at all."

Mrs. Toba, a geography teacher at the girls’ school also believes that the students will succeed, in part due to the creativity of teachers like her. Mrs. Toba has been assisted by a new teacher training programme run by the Ministry of Education and UNICEF.

She was one of the trainers, passing on new child-friendly techniques to her peers, looking at ways of making lessons more interactive and relevant to the students' lives.

"Last year I did not even have a map," she remembers. "And so when I needed to show different countries, I would draw them on the ground, or on the wall. You can always find a way to deliver lessons.

"We need many more facilities and more materials for our teachers," she said. "We have excellent teachers but they are not being given enough support."

Promises and patience

But in an education sector that still lacks so much, how much longer will the admiration, the respect and the patience of these girls endure?

Mrs. Toba counsels optimism. "The girls ask me often, 'will we be as good as children in other countries?'. I tell them not to worry about this. They are intelligent; even without facilities they remain intelligent.

“All we can really offer them is hope." But she sounds a note of caution. "People in other countries know that we are just standing up. We are still helping each other, students, and young people, all of us. In the past, we lost our country, lost our people.

“Now is the time to remind people outside Afghanistan about what we lost, remind them that we still need their help in order for us to stand up alone. We were promised many things to help us stand up – those promises should not be forgotten.”