The Gazette
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Adeela lifts the blue burka over her head and rushes into her frigid, one-room home.
She kneels to embrace her five seated children. They are leaning against a pile of blankets in the corner of the room, bare feet tucked under knees, huddling together to keep warm.
“Where were you?” asks Adeela’s eldest daughter, Zamirah, 12, the light from a single lantern illuminating her look of consternation. “We were so worried.” Adeela, who like many Afghans goes by one name, was late returning from a literacy and vocational training program run by the non-profit Aga Khan Foundation. After a life of poverty, ignorance and turmoil during Afghanistan’s decades of fighting, Adeela is desperate for an education. She leaves her children – including her two-year-old son – alone for hours each day to attend the classes that are given in a building an hour’s walk away.
“When I was young, I never knew about education,” said Adeela through an interpreter. “Now it’s good. Now there is peace. I am so happy that I have this opportunity to learn.” One of four provinces visited by the Manley commission – which issued its report this week on Canada’s future in Afghanistan – Bamiyan has emerged as an oasis of peace in this war-torn country.
Despite extreme poverty, there is virtually no poppy cultivation or guns; it’s said that Bamiyan’s provincial reconstruction team, a staff of about 100 from New Zealand, hasn’t fired a shot in years.
About 45 per cent of Bamiyan’s girls now attend school, up from almost none in 2001, Governor Habiba Sarabi said. That’s a far cry from the situation in the south of Afghanistan where 590 schools have been shut and 300,000 children left without classes since March, compared with 350 schools shut during the previous 12 months, the Associated Press reported this week.
Complete at the source
Ismailimail 