The most striking aspect of the photos Diana Farmer showed of Afghanistan Thursday night as a culmination to the spring Iola Reads program was the lack of soil in the region.
“It’s high plains desert,” she noted of the mountainous terrain. Ragged peaks jut menacingly from thin valley floors. Snow scrapes farm fields and rock faces alike. And people, millions of people, live here, with only two lane roads and the crumbling remnants of a decade-long war with Russia that hammered what was once a nation that “led the region in education of women,” Farmer said.
Kabul is located in a narrow valley at about 5,000 feet elevation, cupped by 8,000- to 10,000-foot peaks. Two million people live in a city designed for 500,000, Farmer said. The city has only two high schools, which house 500,000 students between them. Students attend classes in shifts.
Farmer — science collection manager at Kansas State University library, who visited the country twice to help Kabul University enhance it’s library collection — said that as a result of the Soviet conflict and subsequent takeover by the Taliban regime, there is not much left of Kabuil University’s libraries.
“Many of the books are from the ’50s and ’60s — they’re no good for teaching,” she said.
“The Soviets shut down the University and hunted down as many educators as they could and killed them,” Farmer sad. “When the Taliban took over, they stripped every bit of metal from the buildings — radiators, boilers, electrical wire.” As a result, the buildings of Kabul University, which stretch over 600 acres in the city’s square, are mere shells. Uninsulated and barren, classes are limited to spring and fall, to take advantage of moderate weather.
The World Bank awarded the school, originally established with U.S. funds in the 1950s, a 10-year three-tier grant to revitalize its engineering and English programs. Farmer’s visits were part of that. In exchange, K-State is serving as a temporary home to some of Kabul’s engineering faculty, who are pursuing masters degrees through the grants.
The grants have meant a return of female students. “If the Taliban were in control, women would not even be allowed in” Farmer noted.
While women are present at the university, they must remain segregated from their male counterparts in all public settings.
In the library, men have the main floor, while women use a small balcony, Farmer said.
While “men can wear almost anything,” women — even visitors — are required to be covered top to toes.
“Nothing from my chin to my feet could resemble a human body part,” Farmer quipped, explaining that women’s clothes must be loose-fitting and all-encompassing.
As the Taliban’s hold on the country loosens, women are beginning to wear slightly more form-fitting garb, she said, but even saris of India are too revealing for the strict religious culture. Women “can show the hair from the top of the head forward, but from there back you must be covered,” Farmer said. The clothing tradition dates to long before the Taliban, Farmer added.
The 1979-1989 war with Russia devastated Afghanistan, Farmer noted.
Almost everyone educated person between the ages of 30 and 50 either fled the country or was killed.
“There’s almost two generations of experience and skill missing from this culture. I don’t know how that’s going to affect the future,” she observed.
In addition, Russians planted land mines throughout the rocky terrain.
There are lines of rock in fields and along roads, Farmer said, that denote safe areas to walk.
“If you walk between the rows of rocks painted white, you won’t be blown up. If there are rocks painted red, it’s an area that has not been de-mined yet.”
Because of the mines, about 1/5 of Kabul’s 2 million people have at least parts of limbs missing. Children are especially vulnerable, she said, as they tend to their family’s sheep and goats as the animals wander in search of forage. The animals, Farmer said, “get blown up quite frequently because of the mines.”
The country’s transportation system is tentative. Roads are narrow and unpaved, jutting from mountainsides through steep avalanche corridors and around blind curves.
“The transportation system is not organized,” Farmer said. “Everybody’s going in every direction at the same time.”
Old army trucks, bedecked with jangling chains over the wheel wells, are common. The trucks are painted shades of blue, and with numerous eye balls, Farmer said, to ward off evil spirits.
Camels and donkeys still convey goods across precipitous peaks and high plains, Farmer said. Shipping containers are used as houses. Husks of airplanes and tanks litter Kabul. Electrical service, even in the capital, is erratic, Farmer said.
At its worst, the Taliban would follow behind Afghan crews who erected high voltage towers and tear them down immediately.
While in the country, Farmer visited Mazar-i-Sharif, home of the famed Blue Mosque, tomb of Mohammed’s cousin, she said. It is every shade of blue, Farmer noted, ranging to deep turquoise. Mazar-i-Sharif is one of the country’s main cities, on a road that circumvents, as much as possible, the precipitous peaks of the country’s interior. The loop road hopes to connect each province in Afghanistan, save a thin strip of land that is the country’s most formidable.
The far eastern edge of the nation is a thin buffer zone between Pakistan and Russia, established by the British in the late 1800’s.
The Hindu Kush mountains engulf the span, rising 20,000 feet and peopled by various ethnic tribes distinct from the dominant cultures of the nation, Farmer said.
A new government, in place about a dozen years, hopes to unify the country through establishing an offical language.
Schools built through the Central Asia Institute, which Iola school children recently collected pennies for, also teach English, noted Gail Dunbar, USD 257 curriculum director.
At Kabul University, Farmer taught English department and library staff Internet use and software.
Farmer said the World Bank grants did not achieve as much change as the organization had wished, mainly due to lack of oversight of how the funds were used. Leaking roofs are still the norm in some of the University’s buildings. But, Farmer showed slides of locally handcrafted bookcases lining walls, of mission-style tables and chairs also constructed by Afghani craftsmen, of floors covered in locally loomed rugs. Certainly these changes improved conditions for students at the University.
In addition, about a dozen women were hired to teach in the English department until regular professors, on leave to attain their masters degrees in Colorado, Kansas and Turkey, return.
The women hope the experience is a career step, Farmer said. Teachers at the university earn about $50 per month, she noted. In contrast, interpreters for non-governmental organizations can earn 20 times that much, she said.
Many male students, she noted, work as interpreters, and cram all their classes into one day per week so they can hold such jobs.
Farmer noted other changes in the countyr bvetween her first visit, in Novemebr of 2008, and her second, in June 2009.
More building is occuring in Kabul, she said.
“In November, there was not the comfort with the government to want to do anything.” She said “the last stable government they had was their king,” in the 1940s and ’50s.
But now electricity was on up to 12 hours a day, she said. In Novemebr, three hours was the norm.
Slowly, she said, the region is recovering.
Still, “it’s not going to be an easy job to make Afghanistan a nation.”
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