Last hope: dreaming

Published in Chrismon 6/2022 (German)

In a suburb of Kabul, girls and young women attend school in secret and at great risk. A teacher has set it up in her former cowshed.

Text: Merlin Gröber, Photo: Johanna-Maria Fritz

In an old cowshed, Samira learns about the great events of world history. The 17-year-old sits cross-legged with her sister on a red carpet, a blue plastic table in front of them, plaster falling from the walls. "The Second World War began in 1939," says Kiana*, the teacher, writing the year in chalk on a black-painted piece of wall that serves as a blackboard. Samira leans over a worn-out notebook and writes down the date. She and her sister attend a secret girls' school on the outskirts of Kabul.

In their classroom, the old cowshed, the young women have painted slogans on yellow, red and blue posters and hung them on the walls.

"Freedom does not mean that we can do what we want," wrote student Safia on her poster, "but that we can do what we are entitled to do.”

Entitled to do what? That is the question. When the Taliban took power in August 2021, life in Afghanistan changed abruptly. The Islamists banned women from travelling alone on public transport, imposed stricter dress codes and closed schools. Primary schools for girls have since reopened, but not the majority of girls' schools after seventh grade. The Taliban said they wanted to create a "safe learning environment" that conformed to the rules of Islam before women could return to higher grades.

When the Taliban came, she lost her job.

Some women did not wait for this promise to be fulfilled - and set up secret schools, like Kiana in her cowshed. Thirty girls and young women, including Samira, study here in groups of eight to ten. Kiana, in her early 30s, with a round face and dark hair that shines through her headscarf, studied literature and taught at a private university. She also worked for the old government in the administration, issuing electronic ID cards.

She lost her job when the Taliban came. And when she had to sell her cow for lack of money, Kiana cleaned out the barn, put carpets on the floor and painted the "blackboard" on the wall. Then she went into the neighbourhood and knocked on the doors of families she knew had girls and young women who were no longer able to go to school. She doesn't charge for the lessons, she even pays extra: "Every day the girls ask me if I have notebooks and pens, because they don't have the money to buy them”.

"What was Afghanistan's position in the Second World War?" asks Kiana. The history lesson is almost over, the exams are in two days. Kiana wants to know how much her students have learned in the past few months. For three hours a day, Samira, her sister and the others kneel or sit in thick jackets on the carpet in the cow shed, white hijabs on their heads. They wear what is left of their old school uniforms.

"The Taliban have changed," says the Taliban.

The sun shines through the open door into the small room, ants crawl over the wooden steps. There are repeated knocks on the blue iron gate that leads from the street into the courtyard. The girls come to class at different times. Coming all at once would be too suspicious. Kiana asks again: "What was Afghanistan's position in the Second World War?" "Afghanistan was neutral," the grils answer together. Kiana nods. "Very good."

If Aziz Ahmad Rayan is to be believed, girls and women like Kiana and her classmates have nothing to fear in Afghanistan, even under the new government. Rayan is the press officer for the Taliban's Ministry of Education. In January 2022, the 32-year-old welcomes the reporter and photographer from Germany. The way to his office leads through heavy metal gates, guarded by bearded men with automatic rifles. Rayan wears a black vest over a white shirt. His beard is neatly combed and a dark turban covers his hair. Rayan is serving biscuits and coffee on a table with plastic flower arrangements - red roses.

"On 21 March, we want to reopen the schools," Rayan announces. All classes, for all sexes. Not until March? "It is important to us that girls and boys attend school completely separately," says Rayan. Universities should also reopen and women should be allowed to study, he says. "We need women in medicine and education”. And what if a woman wants to be a pilot? "She can be a pilot as long as she wears a hijab," says Rayan. "The Taliban have changed," he says. "We are more educated, we know more now." The spokesman takes a sip of coffee and continues: "Twenty years ago, the Taliban were like a 20-year-old teenager. Now the Taliban have become like 40-year-old men - experienced, wise and educated.

There is no security for her as a woman.

At Kiana's school, the girls talk about how they see their future. Their aspirations range from pilot to teacher to freestyle skier. The worries are similar for all of them. And they run deep. Samira, 17, wants to be a surgeon, but has little hope that this will be possible. She says: "I want to be free”. Her little sister Elma, 15, is thinking of computer science and wants to emigrate to Germany or Turkey.

Sarah, 19, is the one with freestyle skiing. She loves winter because the air is clear when it snows. "Being a woman and a skier in Afghanistan was difficult even before the Taliban came to power," she says. Now it has become impossible. Every day, Sarah says, she fears that life will get harder and harder. She now feels like she is dying inside because there is no security or future for her as a woman in Afghanistan. Sarah is still going to school tho because she believes that only a country with educated people has a future.

Fatiha wants to write novels and likes to draw. "I want to write about women who find hope," she says. When she was a child, the 16-year-old says, she would have preferred to be a boy, "because boys are allowed to do more things". Now she feels differently, because "life is about being a good person, gender doesn't matter". When Fatiha is sad, she listens to American pop music. "It makes me happy again - at least for a moment.

Safia sat down next to Fatiha on the red carpet. She is 20 years old and would have finished school last year if the Taliban had not come to power. As a pilot, she would love to fly abroad. Now, she says, she is tired and no longer wants to live on earth. She would rather go to heaven.

"Since the Taliban came, I sit at home all day".

"Freedom is a right, not a gift," Safia wrote on her colourful poster on the wall: "Freedom is not given, it is taken."

A month after the Taliban took power, the teacher says, 40 girls and young women came to attend her classes. Five months later, 30 had remained. Most of them were like 16-year-old Sana, who a few weeks ago was married off against her will by her father to a baker - for a year's supply of flat bread. "Sana could have finished school this year," says the teacher. She says the girl clung to the vines by the entrance gate and cried when her brother came to fetch her. Then the brother grabbed her arm and took her away.

At 2pm, Kiana interrupts the lesson. A short break. The students sit in the sun, whispering secrets into each other's ears, giggling and laughing together. "I used to go to the park with my friends, celebrate birthdays or go out to eat," says Samira. Her eyes dart nervously back and forth, always looking at the blue entrance gate. Since the Taliban came to the city, she sits at home all day when she is not at school. The teacher's and the students' greatest fear is being caught by the Taliban during class. So the women only open the gate slightly when someone knocks. First they check who is standing outside. And if the Taliban come? Kidnapping, imprisonment, murder - anything is possible, says Kiana.

"My father would never allow me to leave the house again.

Many girls fear not only the Taliban, but also their own fathers. No one in the class, says the teacher, tells their father that they go to school in secret. "If my father finds out that I go to school here, he will beat me," says Sarah, the skier. "My father will never allow me to leave the house again," says Samira, sitting on the floor in front of the blue table. "If he finds out you are here, you will get married," whispers her little sister. The girls' fathers leave home in the morning and go to work, some of them running small shops in the town centre. Samira and Elma's father sells spare parts for pressure cookers. He does not come home until late in the evening. By then his daughters will have returned home.

"Watch what you say," Samira wrote on her colourful poster, "because a tongue has no bones but is strong enough to break hearts.

After class, the teacher sits on the floor under the blackboard she has painted herself. The afternoon sun streams in through the open door, illuminating the red carpet in the old cowshed. Why does Kiana take the risk of running the secret school? She hesitates for a moment, then tells her story. And the longer the teacher goes on, the more tears roll down her cheeks. But she pulls herself together. Kiana wants to tell her story.

"Because of the Taliban, I lost my freedom."

During their first rule over Afghanistan, between 1996 and 2001, the Taliban distributed booklets to children in mosques, including the schools in Kiana's hometown. There, a Taliban discovered the girl, came to her father in the evening and demanded to marry Kiana. Fortunately, Kiana's cousin was in the house, and the father claimed that the daughter was already engaged to the cousin. The Talib gave up. "Now we had to find a husband quickly, and I was promised to a farmer from the neighbouring village," says Kiana. "I was ten years old."

A month later, the attack on the World Trade Center took place, the Americans invaded Afghanistan, the Taliban retreated. "Because of one month, I lost my freedom and got married," Kiana says. She wipes her cheeks dry. "I know how dangerous it is for girls to go to religious schools. That's why I teach the girls here." When the Taliban took power in August 2021, it felt like someone had smashed a bag full of stones against her head, Kiana says. Weeks of headaches, tears followed. Then she knew: I have to do something for the girls.

Her school is more than a place to do arithmetic and write. Education is the only way to freedom. The teacher is still sitting on the floor of the cowshed. The sun has disappeared behind the houses of the neighbours, it is cold in the small room.

"Through education and the opportunity to work, women and girls in Afghanistan have become self-confident and free," says Kiana. "We earned our own money, could decide for ourselves what to spend it on." Now the women are dependent on their husbands again. How can someone who used to be free and is now dependent on someone else be proud of himself?

"Some call me names in our street".

Kiana does not know how much longer she will be able to run her school undetected. Her husband doesn't mind the secret lessons, she taught him to read and write, he knows how important education is. But in the neighbourhood, Kiana says, many know. "Some call me names when I walk through our street." Perhaps, Kiana says, she has already been betrayed - a few days ago, a Talib was following her. "When I noticed this, I got so scared that I tripped and fell." Kiana picked herself up and ran away as fast as she could.

Does she ever think about quitting? "I can't", says Kiana. "I don't want the girls to be like I was back then." All she wants, Kiana says, is a job and a peaceful life. "But I don't think I'll ever have either again." Kiana takes a look through the open door into her small garden and adds, "some days I think it would be better to die."

Safia's poster reads, "The strongest people are not always those who win, but those who don't give up when they lose".

It is not easy to find someone in Kabul who is openly critical of the Taliban's education policy. Amid is willing to do so, but wishes to remain anonymous for his own protection. The law professor at a private university and former headmaster waits in a restaurant a few kilometres away from the steel gates and plastic flower arrangements of the Ministry of Education.

Even Amid's gloomy predictions were too optimistic.

When he hears that the Taliban have become wiser, more experienced and more educated in the past 20 years, he laughs. "The Taliban have aged, but in the mountains and the desert, not in modern society," says Amid. The announced school openings are "a public relations stunt by the Taliban". The schools will open, he predicts. But new rules will make it impossible for women and girls to attend them, he says: taxes, segregation, lack of staff. "In Kabul alone, 70 schools will remain closed because they don't have enough rooms and staff to teach students separately".

Two months later, even Amid's gloomy forecast has proved too optimistic. The Taliban are not following through on their announcement. Since the end of March, it has become clear that girls' secondary schools will remain closed.

The Taliban are only waiting for international recognition, then they will radicalise and ruthlessly enforce their rules. Life will then become dangerous, especially for women. Afghan women have become more educated and courageous over the past 20 years. "They do not accept the current situation," says Amid.

In fact, dozens of women in Kabul took to the streets in protest after the schools were closed for good, demanding freedom of education. "Women have changed, but the Taliban have not," says Amid. Gradually, women who resist are being kidnapped, imprisoned and killed. The international community must keep up the pressure, he says. "The Taliban must realise that there are serious consequences if they do not respect women's rights," says Amid.

Fatiha, a student, has made a list: "Sometimes the only thing a woman really needs is 1) a hand to catch her, 2) an ear to listen to her, 3) a heart to understand her."

"Birds are the only creatures that are free"

Two days after Samira and the other girls learned about the Second World War, about Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, it is time for a test. The sun shines into the small courtyard in front of the cowshed, warming the concrete of the veranda. Kiana has spread out the red carpets. One by one the girls scurry through the gate, kick off their shoes and sit down. They whisper to each other, giggle and clap their hands. Kiana hands out white sheets of paper with the exam papers. On the back are copies of electronic ID cards, remnants of her old work. 30 heads in white hijabs bend over the sheets, the whispering dies down, pencils scratch across the paper.

After the exam, 16-year-old Fatiha, who wants to be a writer, spreads out her pencil drawings on the blue plastic table in the old cowshed. She brought them from home: thoughts and dreams on yellowed paper.

The first drawing: a man and a woman sitting at a table, in the background a flock of birds flying towards the full moon. "Birds are the only creatures that are free," says Fatiha. Then she shows a drawing of broken eggs, shell fragments lying next to egg otters. Someone broke the eggs, she says. For Fatiha, women are like raw eggs: too much pressure and they crack.

In the final image, train tracks run through a landscape of grass and trees to the horizon. "Back there," says Fatiha, pointing to where the tracks disappear into the sky, "back there is the end of the line, that's where my dreams are”.

*All names have been changed for the safety of the protagonists.