Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan–Mariam, with her five children, has to walk for 30 minutes from her home to the nearest station every morning to take a bus to school. She is a teacher at the Sultan Razia High School.
“The teachers cannot focus on their profession because of their own difficulties”, Mariam says; and she is right: Like any other teacher, she earns $76 a month. In Afghanistan, one kilogram of beef—a regular Afghan diet—costs $3.4. And with winter on the go, she has to pay $10 a month for firewood. And with all the other expenses, she has to work magic to make ends meet.
After the fall of the Taliban, a record number of girls in Afghanistan’s history flocked to schools. Accordingly, her school—being the largest girls school in the province—received an enrollment of 6000 students…and counting.
Classes are overcrowded. Teachers and study materials are scarce.Students sit on broken furniture and shiver with cold as they take their final exams. There is no arrangement for heating, and furniture is inadequate. Some sit on their burkas or newspaper, some even carry their own chairs to school. All wear warm clothes.
The science lab lacks equipments; and, even if there were equipments, they would be covered up with dust in the racks due to a lack of expertise to use them; because the teachers themselves have been educated in deprived circumstances and those few with a better education have simply not been in touch for too long.
It’s not only this but also their turbulent past that haunts them. Mazar witnessed a massacre in August 1998 in the hands of the Taliban. Many of the students and teachers lost friends or relatives during the Taliban.
But, there is a remarkable resilience. They are regular and punctual, and more importantly, they are optimistic about life and future. On the school’s wall magazine, a student gives her peers the message to continue the struggle because, she says, “Life is hope”.
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