Determined to learn: Simagul’s iron will
One woman’s fight for literacy transforms her community
DOKANI VILLAGE, Afghanistan, 11 March 2018 — Growing up without an education in the foothills of Baba Mountains, a remote and mostly underdeveloped area of Bamyan Province, young Simagul felt tortured watching her brother learn as a child.
At times, I would look at the books my brother brought home and just stare at the text, wishing I could read it. Tears rolled down my cheeks and disappeared into the pages. How I wished there was a school for girls in Dokani so that I could read and write too.
Simagul frowns as she recounts her childhood, the lines in her face deepening, evidence of the hardships life has brought to her. Born to a family of farmers and without access to education, Simagul’s frustration has influenced her attitude towards herself, but also motivated her to do better for her daughters and the girls in her community.
“‘Dokani’s daughters need to be educated to help the village and community develop like the rest of the country,’ I told myself.”
This sentiment gave birth to a personal mission to campaign for a girls’ school in her village. Today, at 30 years old, she has helped to make that dream a reality. In April 2017, Dokani got its first girls’ school. Even though at the time she thought she would be too old to enroll herself, Simagul found solace in the fact that other girls wouldn’t have to watch their dreams wither away.
Simagul pays close attention to her own children’s experience at school. Her two sons — Mahdi, 8, and Omaid, 6 — sometimes get impatient with their doting mother. “I ask them daily about their studies and sometimes they get frustrated with me. Then I tell them how it was when I was a young girl and couldn’t go to school.”
The Golden Village programme in the village of Dokani is a bottom-up, community-led approach to education for all girls younger than 15, alongside commitments to improve immunization, nutrition and maternal health, and ensure there are no child marriages.
This all aligned with Simagul’s determination to help other girls avoid her fate.
She became very interested in volunteering for the programme, recognizing the opportunity for girls’ education. Motived by her own story and the knowledge she’s gained from the ‘Golden Village’ trainings, Simagul has become an advocate for girls who are out of school, including those who are older and missed the opportunity to study when they were young.
As a Golden Village volunteer, she began campaigning for an accelerated-learning centre in her village to provide ‘catch-up’ courses for girls who are not in school. She eventually succeeded in bringing a survey team from the Provincial Directorate of Education to the village to determine if Dokani was eligible for such a centre.
I won’t give up on the girls deprived of education. When the survey team came and decided our village should have an accelerated-learning centre, at last my dream was coming true, if not for myself, then for other ‘Simaguls’ in Dokani.
At 30, Simagul wasn’t prepared to let fate play her again. Though Ministry of Education policy said that she is too old to join classes, even at the accelerated-learning centre, her zeal for learning and life-long struggle to get an education resulted in a seat in the class.
Now, she is painstakingly learning to read and write. And though the process is slow and difficult, with each new word Simagul is one step closer to realizing another Afghan girl’s dreams.
