Aghanistan talk tops off “Tea” season

As a culmination to the 7-week-long Reads, Kansas State University’s Diana Farmer, who has worked in Afghanistan, will show photographs and talk about her time there. Farmer will speak at 7 p.m. March 11 in the Iola High School lecture hall.
Farmer was in Afghanistan “advising them about their libraries” in both November 2008 and June 2009, she said. She helped select library materials and “offer(ed) training sessions to faculty and some graduate students on how to do research on the Internet.”
The talk will teach Iolans more about life in Afghanistan, where Greg Mortenson, author of Iola Reads’ spring selection “Three Cups of Tea” works building schools, especially for girls.
While Farmer did not work with Mortenson, she did note the impact education has on the culture there.
Afghanistan is very conservative, at least toward women, Farmer said.
Women have to keep themselves concelaed at all times. Farmer had to abide by similar social mores, she said.
“I did have to wear a scarf and keep my head covered,” she noted. “The clothing I wore had to cover me from the wrist to the neck and also my ankles. The clothing also had to be loose and not form-fitting.”
At Kabul Univeristy, where Framer spent time, her lectures were attended by both men and women at the same time, a habit not typical even at the university level.
“Most of them understood the cultures are different and they were happy to get the information,” she said. Even so, she noted, “when they would come in for a class the women would sit on one side of the room and the men would sit on the other.” Outside the university, men and women who were not married couples could not be in the same room at the same time, she said.
Kabul University has no women teaching in their engineering department, Farmer said.
In addition to Kabnul Univeristy, Farmer visited Mazar-i-Sharif in Balkh province while in Afghanistan, she said. It is home to the blue mosque, believed to entomb Hazrat Ali, cousin and son-in-law of the Muslim prophet, Mohammad. The mosque is reverred as “the tomb of one of the religious leaders of one of the sects of Islam,” Farmer said.
Farmer will present a PowerPoint presentation of her trips during her talk.