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