Afghan Girls, Back in the Shadows

Gul Khanum, 11, said her parents were farmers who could not read, but that she hoped one day to become a doctor. Nazia, 10, stood to recite in Pashto a poem about nature, speaking nervously but without a hitch. Afterward, she said she had learned to read at home but had not attended school before.

"Before, we were just sitting in the dust," she said. "Now we have desks and chairs and a roof. This is much better."

In the remote and rugged northwest provinces, the international nonprofit agency Save the Children has been working closely with education officials to promote schooling for girls. Its field workers sponsor mobile lending libraries and meet with parents to talk about the benefits of having girls stay in school, delay marriage and produce fewer children.

"Every kid in Afghanistan has been affected by conflict, but you still have to try and educate them. It can't just stop," said Leslie Wilson, who directs the Afghan office of Save the Children. In Sar-e Pol province, she said, there are three times more girls in school than there were three years ago. "It's still a drop in the bucket, but it's progress," she said.

Where public schools are either too distant or too dangerous for girls to attend, hundreds of communities have turned to private home schools, many of them sponsored by the nonprofit Swedish Committee for Afghanistan. During the Taliban era, the committee operated inconspicuous home schools in many provinces. With the revival of the Taliban threat, they are again becoming an important alternative.

In the central province of Wardak, the main highway was crowded last week with boys on bicycles traveling back and forth to a large high school. But school officials said not even they were safe from attack now. In one village hidden among the brown, rocky hills, the only boys' school was heavily damaged by a bomb six months ago, and teachers said some students had stopped attending.

"It happened at three in the morning," said Syed Hassan, 46, a math teacher. "When we came running, the windows were all shattered and the pages of books were scattered on the ground, even our holy Korans.

"If our people do not get educated, it will be a disaster for our country," he added. "We see how far ahead other countries are getting, and we are just falling farther behind."

To keep girls in class, many villages in Wardak have opened home schools, but despite security precautions, some of them have come under attack. Sulieman, who is also the headmaster of a boys' high school, took a journalist to visit several home schools where girls were studying Pashto, Islamic subjects, art and math.

In one village, a three-room home school was crammed with students, but another had recently closed after being attacked by arsonists. Officials said five girls had switched to the first school but the others had stopped attending altogether.

Sulieman said the arson was not necessarily the work of insurgents, noting that there are intense rivalries for contracts to run home schools now and that sometimes "personal enmities" lead to violence.

But he said the Taliban threat also existed and that he had used various strategies to keep his home school safe.

"Once I was walking late in my village, when three Taliban came along and warned me to stop educating girls," he said. "I told them the Koran says girls should be educated as well as boys, and that my school was teaching young girls to memorize the Koran and pray five times a day. They seemed convinced, and went on their way."