PARSA Community Village Schools in Paghman-Cheryl Campbell

I asked Cheryl Campbell to visit our Paghman programs and to report on them. Our funding for them through CRS has run out and we have been trying to decide whether to continue. Her is her report for me. Marnie

PARSA runs a programme in the sweet little village of Paghman, some 20 minutes towards the mountains from Kabul.

Girls and women have been being educated in the homes of the teachers, who were recruited at the inception of the programme 3 years ago. Before that, the village men prohibited women from engaging in formal study. Now they permit them an education, albeit with restrictions - they are allowed to go to a neighbour's home for the programme lessons. Not a school. Not just yet.
Every women wears a burqa out of doors.

One of the women teachers was married off at the age of 10 by an uncle to a 30 year old stranger from a distant village. He needed the money to pay off some debts he had, so he sold his unwitting niece. The formalities of the marriage were that he gave the man's family sweets, and together they fired a gun in the air. She was then formally and incontrivertably married, as per pashtoon custom. Neither she nor her parents even knew of the arrangement, and despite their protestations and grief, she was bundled off to this village hours and hours drive away to live with these strangers whom she had never met, to be wife before she had even reached puberty.
She recounts tales of the routine beatings she was subjected to for 5 or 6 years before they accepted her. The beatings were on account of her not knowing "how to be a wife properly".
Her mother died without ever seeing her lost daughter again. It has been 6 years this time since she last saw her family.
Her struggles and worries persist, though in different form now. Her daughter she fears, is at risk of being killed by her son-in-law who is a wealthy landowner but wants his wife's share of the legal ownership. She couldn't bear more than this one child, and so she adopted a relative's newborn baby boy, partly to ward off the likelihood that her husband would take another wife. Now she worries that the villagers will tell her boy that she is not really his mother. She cries as she talks. She has one eye which doesn't close and waters freely. She has to wipe both eyes now as she talks on and the tears pour forth.


Another teacher, Laila told me her story. When she was 13 years old, mujahideen raided her home accusing her father of collaborating with governmental factions. During their torment of him in order to get him to reveal his 'indiscretions', the brutalists shot her under the chin. The bullet exited her head under her opposite ear, and she managed to survive, after a long stay of recovery in the hospital.

In an unlikely second misadventure with gunfire, some years later she was shot 29 times by her enraged cousin after she intervened in a fight between him and her brother - both young recruits for the jihad and newly in charge of weaponry. She spent 2 and a half months in hospital this time recovering from wounds in her abdomen, thighs, wrist and arms, each wound she displays as she talks.

Teaching with the village education initiative has enabled these 2 women, and twenty?something besides, to have a life outside the confines of their homes. It has given them the chance to be able to contribute positively to their wider community and it also provides them with a salary, however trifling, with which they can buy such items as needle and thread without having to ask their husbands for the money.
Although teaching classes in both the mornings and afternoons mean they may have to work at nights to get all her housework done, the women I spoke with were insistent that the work contributes only positively to their lives.



Four men knocked on the door today requesting the chance for discussion of the future of the Accelerated Learning education programme. Three of them were teachers.
They spoke movingly about the importance that the schooling has for their community as a whole. They fervently hope that the programme will continue.
One of the men was young, and disabled. He wants the opportunity to work as a teacher should the classes continue. He hopes he can get the chance to give back to his people something of what he has himself has derived such benefit from - education.

The men also have a further hope - that there be another programme initiated. They want vocational training in their village as a way of moving towards developing sustainable small industries there. Specifically they would like to have carpet weaving, carpentry and tailoring classes made accessible to residents. They attest that the village people have roundly given their support for such a venture. (The village has set up a committee for education of which these visiting teachers are all participant members).
The Kuchi people of the district, they said, are unwilling to let their daughters go to school, for the school is too remote from their homes, but would have them join vocational training programmes in the bazaar.

It would be more than a disservice to allow the teaching programme to end. It would be a little tragedy.

We are putting together "Giving Groups" that will work to fundraise for these villages. We would like to find one "Giving Group" to sponsor each village. The cost per year will be $6K per village. This is working well in Hazarajat-we keep the "Giving Group" updated everytime we go up to do work and they are even considering coming here and working in the village. Let me know if you are interested in this kind of contribution! Marnie

From an outsider's perspective-By Cheryl Campbell

Cheryl Campbell is a physiotherapist from New Zealand who has been volunteering and living at PARSA...in her own words-

"I have been in Kabul with PARSA for some 6 weeks, and still cannot get enough of the place. It is just so fascinating.
The people I work with, for “fierce, implacable, ruthless, savage, brutal” Afghanis as they're commonly described in the texts, are unerringly nice.
They each have a compelling story.
They tell me things like that they cannot marry the person they love because their family is unaccepting of their choice.
That they met the person they were arranged to marry at their own engagement party when, some hours into the celebration they had to sit down next to their betrothed and 'meet' them by looking at them in a mirror.
About their growing up as one of twelve children in this, one of the poorest countries in the world. 
About their having multiple wives and the burden / responsibility that that entails.
About the trials in getting a bride’s family to accept the price you have offered in marrying her – not so low that you offend their honour.
One day a group of women discussed with me the current dilemma of one of themselves. The woman has talked twice more by telephone now to a man she met briefly at a public exhibition. She is wondering if she should "marry with him". Her family are liberal and educated, so she gets to choose (or at least help choose) who she might want to marry. 
I suggested she go for tea and cake with the guy first, before rushing headlong in. I said I'd be her companion. (Helpfully I don't speak Dari, so they could have a whole lot of private conversation). They all gasped and said no! that just wouldn't do. They have their values, you know. so there is no question of her fraternising with him as boyfriend/girlfriend. It is all or nothing... fiance or marriage-prospect reject.
It can seem a pretty desolate place when you get into the detail. Remarkably though, the spirit of the people beams out of each of them. They're unfailingly courteous and cheerful.

In the beginning days of my stay, I went to a grand event for the promotion of women’s rights at which President Karzai spoke. Amongst other horrors he told how a 4 month old baby was recently sold to a 70 year old man as a wife, and how he has stepped in to try to prevent this type of thing which is reasonably prevalent in the remote, poorest areas.
The officials had seized on me as a horoji (foreigner) and had me sit with the ambassadors and ministers of the cabinet. I was wearing a coat made from a blanket that some aid organisation had given to PARSA and that the sewing women had thought could be satisfactorily re-constructed into an actual garment. I had thought that quite hilarious of them. I didn't know that I would be on telly with all the UN and government officials or I may not have chosen to look quite so bohemian. 
The security was staggering. I went with 3 afghani women from here. we had to pass by four checkpoints where we got sniffed by bomb-sniffing dogs, frisked by women, our bags searched by soldiers. There were snipers on the rooftops all around us and helicopters hovering above.
Luckily, I didn't look too progressive or threatening in my blanket-coat and they let me in. 

Here in the compound the predominant noises are muezzin (call to prayer), occasional helicopter rangers overhead and the police academy at target practice in the next door compound. 

The broken people of the insane asylum are variously pacing patches of earth or gently rocking back and forth under a tree, for it is a fair-weather day in Kabul.
The dirty children play in the dirt, and the one-legged men lean on their crutches and look forlornly on.
Five or six tents of kuchi people (nomads) and all their animals are living for the spring season on the hills behind the compound, and shepherd their flocks of sheep and goats daily out to grazing grounds on the city's fringes. or rubbish dumps.




I spent a week in Bamiyan province a week or so back. PARSA headed out there to work towards opening a new school in the region. We hiked way up to a remote village in the mountains from the 4WD track-end. It snowed. we squatted on earthern floors of mud houses in negotiations with headmen, and potential teachers. Eventually the headmen agreed to our starting schools in their two (neighbouring) villages. Though in one village the girls won't attend because of a lack of a female teacher...


The Bamiyan army soldiers whom I met and sat down with for some earl grey tea and solid homeland reminiscences, said that someone was mutilated by a mine just last week in one of the old tourist sites (the city of sighs, which is so-named because Genghis Khan and his marauding hordes made a vengence attack on the city back in history with the objective of killing every living thing there, sparing none). It is a fortress town built on a hillock - all ruins now and very melancholy.

We hiked up to a different impressive fort city built onto a cliffside promontory down the valley a little. I found a human skeleton. There were mine warnings all around it too (rocks painted red), and we came upon mine-esque bits of wire and bits of shiny metal at one particular point so had to skirt a long way around to get safely up to the site.

On the 10 hour trip back to Kabul, on an unpaved surface that shouldn't really qualify as a 'road' it's so rutty and scored, we passed huge long convoys of de-mining vehicles. the de-miners were out on the hillsides next to the road de-mining at various points. (It's never prudent to stray too far from the road verge on a toilet stop).
I hope the de-miners get to those tourist sites before tourists come back in numbers...

A few weeks ago I travelled up north to Mazar-i-Sharif. I went as a guest with an afghani organisation in kabul whom I had visited when first I arrived in the country. They work to provide orthotics and prosthetics, and I had been keen to learn what resources the country has to deal with the amputee patients. They were opening up a new health clinic in Mazar.
At the opening ceremony I was sat right in the front with the most pivotal people to the project. The speeches went on for 4 hours, in Dari which I do not understand. I was desperately trying to fend off somnolence because the TV cameras were insistently panning onto me, thinking I was someone of status. How awful it would have looked if I was looking bored or fell dribblingly to sleep. I had to try to be alert to pick out the Dari of when the speakers welcomed me specifically as 'honoured, esteemed guest' so I could nod and smile for the camera. It was a kind of torture.

Toothbrushes were this week handed out to the kids at the hopelessly grey and awful government-run orphanage for older boys. The plumbing is not working, so the boys defecate outside. The smell in the dormitory is gag-inducing. They need the electrical system overhauled. (they have no electricity). There are no pictures on the walls and no carpet in the corridors. The classrooms are filthy and barren. But the boys are lovely. They want to learn and learn. 
 
From time to time I sit in on the afternoon lesson for the mentally ill (the afghanis cheerfully call them "the crazy people classes"). Currently the focus is washing oneself with soap. There is a fair bit of repetition in these classes I note, and the students remain thoroughly unwashed, so I imagine they'll be persisted with for some time yet.
They have started on their gardening project. Yesterday they weeded and started planting out the volleyball court in carrots...

I was invited to go to an afghani family's home for dinner the other night. It was a looong saga of going to the aunt's for snacks and tea, then to another relative's for more snacks and tea, then finally - the climax - a big feast of kabuli pilau (rice cooked with carrot, raisins and meat) and meat and leek-filled bread with about 15-20 family members all eating together down on the floor.
First though, before the feasting, Hamid's wife, bless her misguided heart, sat me down in front of the whole extended family and painted me in the most garish and god-awful make-up. complete with glitter applied by the fistful. I felt for the rest of the night like a cheap clown. It was so nice of her, but terribly humiliating for me also.
 

Earlier in the week, a group of International security force soldiers wanted to see around one of the orphanages we have some involvement in, and Mohsin and I were assigned to take them. We had to meet them in their compound first (at 0800 hours and after succumbing to a thorough frisking each) for a full briefing - to map out the exact route we would take getting there and back, to learn the radio password, get the alerts on nearest hospital and know precisely what to do in the event of an attack on our convoy, what to be vigilant for in case of suspicious tailing vehicles etc.
 
The commander then barked "action's on!" (I'm not telling lies) and the soldiers turned to a bench to briskly load their humungous machine guns and stash loads of ammo into their vest pouches, then leapt into their protected vehicles each with body armour and ballistic glasses and helmet on. Meanwhile I climbed unremarkably into our tinky little van with Mohsin and our driver, and put my scarf over my head (the limits to my own personal maximum protection plan). And as a focussed unit we burst enthusiastically out of the compound to charge through Kabul in convoy, me spectacularly obvious as the best target choice by anyone keen to diss us.

I rather prefer travelling out of convoy, thank you just fine.
After-all, that is what I love most about working with PARSA - the unglamourised engagedness of the experience. I feel like I have had a chance to see some parts of afghanistan from an un-veneered perspective (as compared to what must be the case when one has a security cordon in situ). It can't be the real thing just yet, as restrictions on foreigners still prevail because of the safety threats that remain, but this is as close to afghan living as foreigners might realistically get at the moment.
Thank you Marnie and PARSA for that."

PARSA's trip to Bamyan and Jawzjareen..

This is our dining room in our offices and residence in Bamyan. Our PARSA team was lucky enough to be joined by Camilla Barry, her son Nicholas (reading) and photojournalist Ginna Fleming. Camilla is a San Francisco based science teacher that routinely travels to Afghanistan to teach teachers scientific inquiry and working with simple experiments she teaches people to think. She and Nicholas have been working on PARSA projects for the last two weeks and we are very appreciative of all they have done. Ginna is the genius behind the pictures shown here and generously is letting us use them. Cheryl Campbell, a physiotherapist from New Zealand, has been visiting for two months helping in our physiotherapy clinic. She will work with Yasin to formulate a project for developing physiotherapists in Bamyan as there are no physiotherapy services currently.

Thank you to our Northwest group of teachers who are sponsoring this project!!!!!

Program Update for the Jawzareen Funding Team;
Yasin, PARSA national director ,traveled to Bamyan last week to begin the process of setting up the school. We begin the process with one of our senior staff members meeting with the village “shura” or elders. They recommended villagers to be hired by PARSA to teach the literacy courses and Early Childhood Development Courses. Yasin took up testing materials for the teachers so we can select appropriately. Many of the candidates are quite young and have been schooled in Pakistan. We have an excellent candidate for the literacy course for women.
The village elders selected a home to start the literacy courses in for the women. We will be using that until summer when we can negotiate with the villagers for land that will be donated to the project and then we will work with them to build a two room school house in a central location. We are being careful to include everyone interested to insure that the villagers develop “ownership” of the project and contribute as much as they can to the process.
Next Steps:
In this next month I will be traveling to Jawzareen with our teacher trainer, Naheed and our economic director, Palwasha to hire and train the teachers and to set up our economic program. We will select 28 women to be in our program and over 60 children in two locations for our Early Childhood Program. Classes will start as soon as we hire the teachers and distribute the school supplies.
We already have some women quilting for us, and doing a great job but we will be taking up a number of projects for the women in the program to work on as a start to the economic component.

May/June we will have land donated and begin work on our school and women’s Garden.

"A Safe Place"-Rehabilitation for the Chronically Mentally Ill

Today we start our rehabilitation program with eight women from the "Deawana Khana Zan" which loosely translates to "The Women's Crazy House". The understanding of mental illness has a ways to go here for a more politically correct name. We like to call it "The Safe Place".

Below is a bit of writing I did about it last year:Marnie Gustavson June 2007
PARSA moved into our newly renovated building about four weeks ago, and my staff greeted the residents as if they were old friends. In fact, when Mary MacMakin, the founder of PARSA, started her work in Kabul PARSA worked at Maristoon also. Yasin, our national director, is a physiotherapist and he found some of his old patients still residing at Maristoon. There hasn’t been much of a turnover here in this, last place of safety for the disabled in Kabul. I stood at the door of one of the many buildings that make up the Maristoon and realized it was a house that makes few Afghans want to come into Maristoon. It has many names but the most common is the “crazy women’s” house. Fatima Gailani, president of ARCS, told me that one of the reasons that she took the job of being president of this agency was to somehow make a difference for these women. During the wars, soldiers would come to this house and commit unimaginable violations. Fatima told me that she has been able to keep them safe but no more. For four weeks I worked with my husband, a clinical psychologist, and director of American Friends Service Committee, my staff and the ARCS doctors and medical staff to assess the women inside and come up with medical therapy that could do more than merely sedate them. For years the illiterate attendants had been giving them a sedating anti-convulsent simply to control their behavior. As a result of our new plans these medications had been taken away so that they could be started on medication more likely to help them.

My staff member, Salia had been chosen by our ARCS/PARSA team to dispense medications for the next month while the medical team “titrated” the medication so that it worked for the patients. Salia and I faced a thin, angry female attendant; arms crossed who was refusing us entry. She was throwing time honored Afghan curses on our heads, and telling us that Allah would punish us for us for distressing her-a widow. Behind her I could hear shrieks, wailing and the breaking of glass. We had had a tough few days removing all previous medications from the attendants and it was imperative that Salia and I begin the new medication therapy so that the attendants could control the inmates. I called the supervisor, the supervisor’s supervisor and finally Fatima to gain entry as the attendant was simply doing what she had been trained to-protect her women. Any change in routine was highly suspect especially by a foreign agency. Three hours later, we finally walked through the doors, and as inured as I am to suffering I realized I had been avoiding visiting this house with its chaos of human minds gone awry. Salia, very comfortable with these women professionally set about medicating them. The attendants were affectionate also but had various tough methods of restraining the agitated ones. A number of the women were naked, talking to themselves in a language that only they can understand. But the images from this first visit there still haunt me. Salia and I and the attendant walked out to the courtyard to the far back corner where the attendant took out a key and unlocked a door. Into the doorway stepped a beautiful, unclothed young woman, with startling blue eyes and long black hair. She stared at us, took her medication and juice and the retreated back into the dark hole that was her room and the attendant closed and locked the door after her. Two months ago, she had bitten off another inmates lip and now this dark room is her life.

My husband says that we may experience some “miracles” with our new therapy because they have never been treated. Salia and the ARCS attendants are beginning to add “activities”. Salia has designed a pretty uniform with Velcro fastening for the inmates that feel compelled to rip off their clothing from time to time. We collect small gifts for the attendants and try to make their work easier. This has to be one of the darkest most unconfrontable corners of Afghanistan. We hope that if we can change something in the quality of these women’s lives, it will provide inspiration for other changes, giving hope to the Maristoon residents, and the Maristoon staff-so many who have worked for so long during the impossible conditions of the wars. We hope to support Fatima Gailani’s vision of a compassionate social protection program- Afghans caring for Afghans.

Bamyan and the Community Village School

Tomorrow we send up a crew to start our Community Village School in Bamyan-it has been funded by a wonderful group of school teachers in Seattle. The following is a story about how this project came to be:

The Village of Jawzjareen “The Village of Golden Oats”

Last fall I was traveling through Bamyan province on a survey project and on my day off, my translator, Hassina and I decided to tour up a valley that was recommended to us, near Bamyan City. We stopped our car at the point the road ran out and started up the valley on foot. Halfway up the pathway we encountered two little girls, and a donkey carrying 200 pounds of flour, stopped in the middle of the path. The girls were tugging, pulling and beating the donkey that was not to be persuaded to move one inch. Upon examination we discovered the donkey was very sick. Reluctantly, I decided to get involved and sent Hassina up the hill to find another donkey. We unloaded the sick one and waited for Hassina to get back. I asked them where their parents were. The older girl said “ Our father was killed by Taliban, and we live with our mother and two other sisters at the top of the valley by ourselves. Our brother is a sheepherder high in the mountains and we are able to live because of him.”

Hassina arrived with the other donkey and a young boy; we loaded up the donkey and walked up the mountainside, stopping at our benefactor’s house for tea. I decided at this point to continue on up with the donkey to see where these two little girls lived. Discussion over tea with the Afghan man about the community situation revealed that about 60% of the families were trying to support widows, war victims and orphans. I asked if the girl children were able to attend the public school 2 kilometers down the valley and he just laughed. Of course! He said, but they are needed by the mother to do the work of the house and to tend the animal’s -if there was time for them to go-they had no male relative to escort them!

After tea this gentleman escorted me up the mountain introducing me to various families, giving me an account of the people of his village. A father without legs from a war wound struggling to support his family, a fourteen year old girl taking care of six siblings living in the ruins of a house-both parents dead from the war, a man caring for his own family and three widows with their children-his three brothers dead from the war. I was very moved as I walked through this village, not by pity but by pride in these people as they struggle after such loss to care for one another.
At the very, very top of this community was a little tiny house. We panted our way up to meet two beautiful older sisters of my two little girls. They ran to get their mother, who was younger than I but looked twenty years older-a no-nonsense, snuff eating, hard working woman who was astonished to see me show up on her front door. As I sat with these women my resolve to work in the Hazarajat crystallized and I promised to come back in the spring with a program and work for the women. Hassina and I distributed what money we had with us to the poorest women, which is something I just do not do here any more. I did it that day because I was so present to the imminent harshness of approaching winter and so impressed by the sweet strength of these families.

Descending the valley, Hassina and I extracted a promise from the leader of the shura for land and a place to make a community garden.

Last month I returned to Jawzjareen with my son, Colin with a sun oven donated by the New Hudson Foundation. The little girls, faces so hardened by work and responsibility had a smile for me. Bibijan, the hard bitten mother looked at me as if I was nuts, bringing her this contraption as well as showing up to keep my promises to her. (The sun oven reduces their work by hours everyday as well as expense) We spent a leisurely afternoon, learning about the sun oven, discussing plans for the Community Village and the garden, negotiating with the shura leader for land to build. I told Bibijan that it was her responsibility to learn the sun oven so she can teach others when I came back. She noted that I was putting a lot of responsibility on her. I agreed with no apology. The two older girls drew me aside to ask me for face cream. They addressed me as ‘auntie” and as “auntie” I answered…”Help your mother figure out how to use the oven and I will teach you to make face cream, and you will go to school!” Jawzjareen is now part of our work, our community, and our family. We have begun it together. Our first Community Village School.
Marnie Gustavson, Executive Director, Spring 2007