via Washington Post: In Afghanistan, women and girls are being erased
I was standing in the arrivals hall at Kigali International Airport in Rwanda this month, waiting for an Afghan girl and thinking about the days that brought the two of us here.
March 23rd marks one year since the Taliban decreed that Afghan girls don’t need to be educated past sixth grade. One year since they closed the doors of schools in the faces of an estimated 3 million girls, though of course these girls have been out of school much longer than that, really ever since the Taliban took power.
In 2001, when the Taliban’s first regime fell, there was officially not a single girl in elementary school and only a handful in secondary school — that’s in the entire nation of Afghanistan. Less than 20 years later, we had 3.6 million girls enrolled in primary and secondary school, and around 90,000 in higher education.
All of it is gone. Live in silence now behind the walls of your home, the Taliban say to women and girls. Live a ghost life.
In that airport terminal, I was waiting for a 12-year-old girl, a new student at SOLA, my Afghan girls’ boarding school. She was en route to Rwanda from an Afghan community in exile, one of many such girls who have arrived in March thanks to a continuing partnership between SOLA (or School of Leadership Afghanistan) and the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration (IOM).
This girl, like every Afghan girl who refuses to give up on her education, had two choices: go overseas or go underground. Become a refugee from Afghanistan or, effectively, become a criminal within Afghanistan. Pursue the limited educational opportunities open to refugees, or pursue them in our homeland and hope the Taliban never find out.