Greg Mortenson

LALANDER, Afghanistan – Before workers could lay the first stone for a new school in this rural village, a deeper foundation took shape in a showdown with mullahs who insisted that no girls would set foot in the classrooms.

“The easiest way to stop a school is to talk about girls,” said Greg Mortenson, a Minnesota native who has spent the past decade creating schools for girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan. “Culturally, women have been chattel here.”

Mortenson’s team won. The school is rising from a mountainside plot. Girls have been invited to attend when it opens this fall.

The power struggle over this eight-room school is being replayed village by village as official Afghanistan strives to liberate women who were prisoners in their own homes before the ouster of the Taliban in 2001.

Although many remain sequestered by their families, the transitional government has set a top priority on getting them into classrooms, the workplace and the polling booths.

Now, a good share of the women have shed the burqa the Taliban forced on them and instead wear scarves draped loosely around their faces. Many have gone back to work in the capital, Kabul. More than 2 million have registered to vote, and a few hold high-level government positions.

Still, women’s drive for equality has barely begun in Afghanistan, said Habiba Sorabi, the nation’s first minister of women’s affairs.

“Our new constitution guarantees equal rights for women, but negative tradition is a big challenge for us,” she said in an interview in her office in Kabul.

Even before the Taliban, young brides were given to settle debts or to compensate for crimes. Three in four women couldn’t read. Most went without health care. Some were jailed or even killed for disobeying their husband and fathers. And many were victims of beatings and rapes that went
unreported.

Those injustices persist, especially in rural areas, Sorabi said.

“A large number of the warlords force marriage to girls,” she said. “The issue becomes not only the age of marriage but also violence against women.”

At least two provinces have banned women from appearing on television as entertainers or newscasters. Hospitals have reported several cases of women setting themselves on fire as the only escape from unbearable misery.

While advocates set a long-term goal of full civil rights, they are focusing for now on practical priorities. One is education.

Another is reducing the odds that make a woman 150 times more likely to die having a baby in Afghanistan than in the United States. A third is economic empowerment.

“Poverty is the big underlying challenge,” Sorabi said. “We can change the lives of women if we can change their economic base. …”

The priorities add up to a bold bid for Afghanistan’s women considering the intense opposition to the education goals alone.

Schools that accepted girls have been bombed, attacked with rockets, burned and raided by gunmen during the past year. At least three girls have been poisoned as punishment for going to school.

The three girls recovered after they fell unconscious in early May from drinking fruit juice a woman had given to them outside the only girls school in the city of Khost, the Associated Press reported. President Hamid

Karzai took to the radio to vehemently denounce such attacks on children.

Despite the violence, girls’ enrollment in school rose more than 30 percent in 2003, said a U.N. report, and about one-third of the school-age girls were in classrooms.

Many of them are racing to catch up for time they lost under the Taliban.

Beyond cultural barriers, the main obstacles for the 1 million primary-school-age girls who stay home are a lack of local schools and a shortage of female teachers, the United Nations said.

At Lalander, the argument was that girls were needed to work in the fields. The village – a 20-mile drive from Kabul across rough mountain roads and single-lane bridges – lives on milk and meat from goats and sheep and on crops of wheat, corn, potatoes and other vegetables and fruits.

A former home to mujahedeen fighters, it was attacked by the invading Soviets during the 1980s. A good share of the men were killed and nearly half the surviving families fled to Pakistan or Iran.

Among other casualties, the schools were largely destroyed. That’s where Mortenson came into the picture. After reading about schools Mortenson’s Central Asia Institute had built in northern Afghanistan and Pakistan, an attorney named Budd MacKenzie decided to sponsor a school. MacKenzie, from Lafayette, Calif., raised $30,000 for the building and its first five years of operation.

Once Lalander was chosen as the site, Mortenson hired a project manager with local roots, Wakil Abdulghani. His first task was to win support from local elders. Agreeing to donate labor, land and some materials, the elders signed their thumbprints to a letter that Abdulghani sent to the national
ministry of education seeking approval for the school.

Then the other shoe fell. No girls, said two of the local mullahs.

In that case, no school, said Mortenson’s side.

Abdulghani told the mullahs it would be their responsibility to notify the education ministry that the deal was off. Eight months later, they backed down.

The dustup may have been an effort to stop the school altogether, Mortenson said, because “when the people become more literate it draws power away from the mullahs.” And educating girls is the surest way to plant a lasting literacy in a community where men often are killed in war or forced by
poverty to leave home looking for work.

“If you educate a boy, you educate an individual because he often leaves,” Mortenson said. “But if you educate a girl, you educate a community because she stays behind and instills her education in her children.”

It also is the foundation for the social change official Afghanistan is seeking.

“You can hand out condoms, you can build roads and put in electricity, or you could drop bombs, but until the girls are educated, a society won’t change,” Mortenson said.

There was no hint of the controversy at the Lalander school site last month, where local men were breaking granite with hand tools and hefting the stones into place. When Abdulghani and Mortenson arrived, kids spilled from mud and stone houses perched on the craggy mountainsides and scampered through the construction debris with goats and sheep behind them.

Their school’s next test will come this fall. Near Lalander, several schools for girls were set on fire last August and September. The arsonists left leaflets urging families to keep girls away from school and threatening teachers who reported for work.

Elsewhere, though, many villages welcome the chance to seat girls in their classrooms.

© 2004 Scripps Howard News Service