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[January 8, 2003] -
Afghanistan is rebuilding after the five-year reign of the Taliban. That includes rebuilding an educational system that was essentially destroyed. As part of the rebuilding, 13 women from Afghanistan came to Nebraska for teacher training. They were here for a program run through the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s Center for Afghanistan studies and funded by a U.S. State Department grant. The women studied English and teaching methods. They also visited schools throughout the state. As “Statewide’s” Mike Tobias reports, during the visits these remarkable women left behind lessons of courage and determination, and a message that some things can united two very different cultures.
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Watch the Perspective segment:RealPlayer | QuickTime
Watch our complete interview with Naseemah, one of the teachers from Afghanistan who visited Nebraska. She is a 49-year-old mother of four from Kabul who has been teaching for two decades. The interview is translated from Dari by Raheem Yaseer of UNO’s Center for Afghanistan Studies:RealPlayer | QuickTime |
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Transcript of Lessons in Courage
[Mike Tobias/Reporting] People who've seen both say the farm land of northeast Nebraska resembles the terrain outside Kabul, Afghanistan's capitol city. Except for the small fact that here you don't see the ruins of years of war. Thirteen teachers from Afghanistan left the rubble behind for five weeks in Nebraska, including a visit to Oakland. They came to learn about our state and country. They came to learn English. And learn how we teach our children. Smiling and full of energy, they seem like anything but victims of a Taliban regime that some say treated women worse than animals. Naseemah saw her son thrown in jail for three months because he was in a car where a music cassette was being played. Women were forced to wear veils from head-to-toe, couldn't go outside without a male family escort, couldn't laugh out loud.
[Naseemah/Afghan Teacher – through Raheem Yaseer, interpreter] If they saw somebody or some woman walking with shoes that made noise or with any kind of fancy clothes or shoe polish or something, they would stop and beat them right there on the spot. She says one of her nieces walked out one day and she had nail polish, and they beat her to the extent that she was hospitalized for one month because of the neck injury that was caused by the beating.
[Tobias] Naseemah is a 49-year-old mother of four from Kabul, a city of about one million. She has a college degree and has been teaching for two decades. That includes running a risky secret school in her cramped, bare bones apartment during the Taliban regime, when most schools were shut down.
[Naseemah - through Raheem Yaseer, interpreter] She was teaching the 30 students in three shifts. She could have done them all at once, but she was afraid that the crowd will attrack Taliban attention, and then she will be threatened and also her husband will be arrested. The risk was beating and arrestment for her, and for her husband too.
[Tobias] Other teachers tell similar stories.
[Suraiyaa Aybaadi/Afghan Teacher- through Raheem Yaseer, interpreter] She was conducting classes under the name of tailoring classes, but she was actually teaching literacy to the adult group.
[Baizaa Rakeen Zapand/Afghan Teacher - through Raheem Yaseer, interpreter] She had a secret class in her house in Mazari Shareef up north where she was teaching three times a day, free, but teaching three shifts of people in her own house.
[Tobias] They defied the Taliban to teach for a simple reason - the future of their country.
[Najeebah/Afghan Teacher - through Raheem Yaseer, interpreter] Education is very important and it has to be continued. Though they say there were risks, we accepted the risks because we didn't want to interrupt the education of the children, the education of the adults. And wanted them to build up rather than forgetting what they had learned already.
[Naseemah - through Raheem Yaseer, interpreter] If all of our people were educated and could read and write and were literate, the country would have not face the problems that it faced.
[Tobias] That's also brought them to schools like Oakland-Craig Elementary, for a chance to learn American teaching methods they could bring back to their own classrooms. Roles quickly reversed during the tour. Naseemah and the others began teaching these third graders and their teacher about Afghanistan and how to write in their language, Dari. Kyle, a seven-year-old special education student, had little trouble breaking through the communication barrier with Nassemah. Some things - like the touch of a hand - are universal.
[Naseemah - through Raheem Yaseer, interpreter] There was a handicapped child there, as soon as he saw me, he opened his arms and told me that I was his mom. Tears came into my eyes and I cried, because I was amazed how fast and how soon a child could be so affectionate.
[Naseemah - through Raheem Yaseer, interpreter] They are very fast in realizing that they are loved and that they are paid attention to or not, so the language and other things are not very important.
[Tobias] With the fall of the Taliban, the Afghan women return to a country that again embraces education. Afghanistan is rebuilding, but school facilities are still much different than what they saw in Oakland. This same classroom in Afghanistan would have four times as many students.
[Raheem Yaseer/Center for Afghanistan Studies, UNO] The schools that are supposed to be 350 students, now they are 6,500 students. Now the classes are held in ruins. Schoolyards, under the trees, and some buildings which have no ceilings and tables and chairs. Most of the students sit on the ground, and some of the classes have a blackboard on the wall.
[Sharon Loftis/Oakland-Craig Elementary Teacher] They have a lot of courage and they're committed to teaching. You heard him talk about what they have for conditions. They're teaching in ruins. It makes our job look like...well, we should just be so thankful that we have conditions like this instead of teaching in a war-torn country.
[Mark Ferg/Oakland-Craig Elementary Principal] It must be a whole different world. We're so spoiled. We need something, we get it. They don't.
[Tobias] Naseemah doesn't mind. Now she's teacher and principal at a middle school in a safe part of Kabul. She goes to work at 6 in the morning, gets home at 5 at night, all for about 40 dollars a month.
[Naseemah - through Raheem Yaseer, interpreter] We prayed to almighty God to take the Taliban out and topple them so we could have a chance to educate our children, and we made commitment that we would teach morning to sunset without even being paid, or getting tired or feeling any kind of fatigue.
[Tobias] They at least have books - mostly provided by the University of Nebraska at Omaha. And now they also have some new ideas, techniques to use in their Afghan classrooms. What they left behind in these American classrooms may be just as valuable. Reporting for Statewide, I'm Mike Tobias.