2025/'24: Feb wk2 -- Feb wk1 -- Jan wk5 -- Jan wk4 -- Jan wk2 -- Dec wk4 P2 -- Dec wk4 -- Dec wk3

 When one hurts or kills a women
one hurts or kills hummanity and is an antrocitie.
Gino d'Artali
and: My mother (1931-1997) always said to me <Mi figlio, non esistono notizie <vecchie> perche puoi imparare qualcosa da qualsiasi notizia.> Translated: <My son, there is no such thing as so called 'old' news because you can learn something from any news.>
Gianna d'Artali.

Pashtana Durrani
Zan Times - February 11, 2024 - Interview with Pashtana Durrani
Pashtana Durrani is a human rights activist and the founder of Learn Afghan, a non-governmental organization dedicated to educating girls. The organization operates through a distributed network of tablets equipped with an offline learning platform and runs six underground schools in Afghanistan. In 2018, Pashtana founded Learn Afghan. After the Taliban’s return to power, Pashtana was forced to leave the country due to her work as a prominent advocate for girls’ education and women’s rights. She is pursuing a master’s degree at Harvard University in the United States. Recently, she talked with Zahra Nader, editor-in-chief of Zan Times. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Zan Times: I’ve been wanting to talk to you since the day I saw your interview on an American TV channel after the Taliban had returned to power. At the time you were in Kandahar and you said, “Any moment the Taliban can come and just arrest me.” Your courage and energy inspired me and made me hopeful. Since then, I have been following your amazing work and, deep down, I want to learn from you on how to be a powerful, badass Afghan woman. I feel honored to finally meet you and get the chance to interview you.
Here is my first question: What is the story of Pashtana Durrani?
Pashtana Durrani: First of all, thank you so much. And secondly, I’ve been obsessed with you for quite some time, too. In 2021 you helped us get connected with people in northern Afghanistan. There are a lot of people who were forced to be displaced in that province and we were trying to support them. What makes me, me? A lot of trauma. I don’t want to deny the fact that humour is the only way we can cope with a lot of things in our lives. I think I became a powerhouse because my father treated me as his primary person. I was his number one priority.
ZT: When you say that you were his first priority, what does that mean? As Afghan women, I always felt we are treated as secondary by default. So, I want to know what being priority really means?
Durrani: You need to understand the reason why a man would prioritize his first born. My father was 11 when his mother separated from his father because my grandfather married a second woman. And my grandma was like, “Enough of this. Bye-bye.” She separated. She came from a very powerful family. It’s the Mehrabhi family in Kandahar in Maruf district. She goes to her brother. My father was raised by a woman who, though from this semi-aristocratic family, would literally go to people’s homes and do menial work to put her kids through school. My father grew up seeing the world differently. My aunt was married off into an abusive family who used to beat her up a lot. When my father became the chief of the tribe, the first thing he did was to make her divorce her husband. It was unheard of. He loved her so much and he couldn’t bear the thought that somebody was laying hands on his beautiful lovely sister. When my grandfather passed away, my father sort of revolutionized a lot of things for us. The first thing he did was to put my aunt in school, and then open a school. My father literally issued a decree that said you have to send your daughters to school. My aunts would go to people’s homes and would ask them to send their daughters to school. My grandmother passed away 40 days before I was born. My mom says, “Your dad was broken and he was crying. The minute you were born, he looked at you and he said ‘You know what, she’s gonna be my son!’” People were expecting a son because he was a tribal chief.
ZT: What were the women like in your family?
Durrani: In my book, I have written about the fact that I am in love with my grandmother, although I have never met her. I hold her as this epitome of a gorgeous feminist woman who was so badass. My father’s liberalism comes from my grandmother and her side of the family. At the same time, my father’s older brothers, who were educated in India, sort of changed the narrative of people towards school. There’s a lot of internal family politics, too. I’m gonna be honest that there were times when my grandfather was against his sons because they had different political beliefs. My grandfather was known to be an extremely religious, extremely conservative, traditional man. When my grandfather was in a refugee camp in Quetta, my dad’s side of the family were educated, and already involved with the UN and the World Bank. When I’m born, my mom said that everybody was expecting a son. But when I was born, everyone was sad but my father. He’s like, “No, she is my son.” To the day he passed away, I was his number one priority – what I do, where I go, what I say, where I get educated, how I get educated, who teaches me. He sent me to the best schools. He also used to talk to me about politics. He would make me meet his middle-aged friends. That made me the powerhouse I am today. So the way I feel about Afghanistan is also because of him. He went to Afghanistan after 2001, and I used to miss him so much. He used to come every other Thursday. I used to miss him so much that I would get sick. When he came, I would wake up from my fever and run towards him. I used to ask him to take me to Afghanistan. He said, “There are no schools. There’s still war. I cannot take you.” I said that one day when he built Afghanistan, I was going to stay with him. I moved to Afghanistan in 2016 but the reason I fell in love with Afghanistan was not because I knew it as my country. I fell in love with Afghanistan because it was a country where my father was when I was young, and I missed him so much.
ZT: Was he fighting the Taliban? What was his vision of Afghanistan? What did he do after the Taliban left?
Durrani: We planned to move back in 2002 during the first elections of the interim government, when my uncle got elected as a member of the Wolesi Jirga [House of Representatives]. I think his office was attacked during that time and my father went missing. For six months, we were in limbo and didn’t know what was happening. My mother’s grandfather heard on the BBC that Spin Boldak has been bombed. He had heard my father’s name was on the list of the people who had been taken. For days we weren’t sure if my father had been murdered. We didn’t know for months what was happening. My father came back and you could see that he was hurt. I grabbed him by his feet, and I’m crying, my mom is crying, everybody’s crying. I think that was when he realized that it was still not safe for the family to go back to Afghanistan. All the men were at war in Afghanistan, the house was filled with women.
ZT: Tell me about the first day that you entered Afghanistan?
Durrani: We went to Chaman from Quetta. When we crossed the border, a friend of my father had prepared lunch for us. They served us separately. My sister Sangina and I were the only two women there. Sangina needed to use the restroom but while finding it, let out 40 or 50 lambs that were locked in the backyard. It was the first few hours in Afghanistan! I was supposed to set an assessment for the American University while in Kandahar. While there, I talked with my cousins and found one who couldn’t go to school. She was learning from her nephew, who’d teach her every Thursday and Friday. So that’s where I met [my cousin] Dordana, and that’s where I got to know about life in a camp for internally displaced persons.
Where I grew up, girls getting education being the norm – the entire community contributes and your family believes in schooling. The reason I was so interested in supporting my cousin Dordana was not because I wanted to save her or anything. It’s just because I was a girl and she was a girl, and I bonded with her. She was my cousin, and I felt that the best I could do was support her in what she was trying to learn. She said, “When you go to Kabul, ask the government to build schools.” I remember that she envied all I could do because I was educated – flying to Kabul, sitting for an exam for the American University, being loved and respected. I wanted the same for her. Why not? My highest priority was to get her into a school or get her some sort of access to drawing. That’s how it started. I got her a tablet so she could continue learning. By this way, I’m going back and forth from Quetta. Later, I got an internship in Kabul with a non-profit organization. I was still helping Dordana and we used to talk until the middle of the night. We shared lessons and talked about strategies. They were still in Spin Boldak, which didn’t have a single public school. I begged my father to talk to her brother about moving to Kandahar, which had better public schools. We moved the whole family to Kandahar and got her into the best school that is. After a week, she said, “I don’t want to go to this school.” I’m like, “Are you kidding me?” So I went to Kandahar and met her teachers. They explain that they have 50 students in one class and don’t have the capacity to help each child. I’m angry and go to my father. “Dad, you need to give me money, and I need to open a school for Dordana.” He gave me $2,000. I go to Kabul and march into the Ministry of Economy. I registered it as a non-profit. A friend gave me five tablets that became the foundation for everything. I started the school in Spin Boldak because my father has a lot of support there. We have tribal relations with almost 400 families. This meant I didn’t have to seek a lot of permissions. That’s how this whole thing started. And then we start working with public schools. The Director of Education was my [tribal] cousin and he was very interested in supporting all public schools and bridging the gap. How do we make public schools more attainable to all children, including internally displaced persons? We start working with all the 18 public schools within the first two years. We started fundraising online. We thought of creative ways to engage with students from these war-torn communities. We trained teachers and used an offline app that had everything in it to teach girls and boys on how to access educational resources when you’re not in school, how to write an essay without a teacher, how to work with mathematical issues if you don’t have a tutor. By the way, Dordana graduated from school. She is now a midwife in Kandahar.
ZT: What a beautiful story.
Durrani: When we had a community engagement program, she used to advocate with me. I have so many pictures with her.
ZT: So it’s a combination of online and offline schooling.
Durrani: During the Republic times, we went into schools and worked with students. We taught them digital literacy so they could use an app and connect to the internet, use a cell phone safely, and set up an email account. For teachers, we taught similar lessons, such as how to work without internet, or to find good Persian or English websites. I think we translated more than 700 pieces into Dari. We barely had anything. I think it worked because people had respect for my father, and I was using that nepotism to my advantage. So it worked out well for us.
ZT: There is a perception that not many people in Afghanistan want to send their daughters to school. Give me an example of the kinds of pushback you faced when asking elders to support girls’ education.
Durrani: I want to tell two stories. By the end of 2019, in one of my community meetings, a friend of mine says, “You should go to my community in Damon.” My father knows that Doman is a Taliban-controlled territory, my friend knows it’s Taliban-controlled territory, but I don’t know that it is a Taliban-controlled territory. My father is not on board with sending meAlso, I don’t know If this friend was doing it out of the goodness of his heart or if it was a trap. I would never know. I go there and meet his family, and then I start talking to his uncle, and his uncle asks, “Why should I send my daughters to school? Why?” It’s a good question. I was a little intimidated, because he was an older guy who definitely respected me because of my father’s name, but definitely didn’t want me telling him what to do. He says, “I live in a mud house. I barely have a paved road. We don’t have electricity. We are 40 villages. We are three hours away from the main city. We don’t see the need for education for boys or girls.” I asked, “What are your problems? What are you struggling with?” He tells us that a lot of women struggle in childbirth. By the time they get to the city, either the kids are born in the car or it’s too late and the mother and child both die. I told him, “You were right to say all of this. But here’s my question for you: ‘How long are you willing to make your daughter, your wife and yourself suffer? How long are you willing to bet how the dice is gonna roll your way?’” I told him that in the Quran the Prophet said that if you have to go to China to learn, you should. The Prophet didn’t say man or woman but he did say that you have to learn. I told him that the best thing he could do was to open a school in their own community. I said, “Let us run it for five years. I’m going to send you doctors from the city every week, and they can do the checkups for free. They could be on call for you. They could be people who could supply you medicine and stuff, and they could take care of the women, and they could tell you of complications early on. And they could be on call when you go to the city, if you are delivering an emergency delivery and something like that. In return, you’re going to send your daughters to school. We’re going to put them to accelerated learning classes, and by the end of this five years, not all of them are going to become midwives, but some of them will pass and some of them will be sent to the city. They will learn, and when they return back, they can be the midwives that you need.” That moved him so much that he said, “Okay, let’s open a school.” The second story is about when I went to Dand with Dordana. All the women came from their houses and made tea for us. Most were the decision makers in their communities and their families. I asked, “Why don’t you send your daughters to school? What is the problem?” They said they were willing but there is no school in the community. We chat and they give me bangles and clothes. And so as we leave, the man hosting us in his house for that tea comes up to us and asks who we are. I told him my father’s name, to which he said, “Oh my God, I know your dad, we are good friends.” He asks about the school and then offers this land to build a high school. I’m looking at him, thinking “Dude, that was so badass.” This guy is very Watani. He’s wearing his traditional cloth. I then asked an MP to help me build a school, but she refused. I was really shocked that a village man literally offered his only wealth to build a school, but someone who is educated and had resources refused to help us. I’m sharing this story to challenge the assumption that Kandahari men do not want to educate their daughters. Every time I think of all those men who had never been to school but were willing to put their daughters in school and were willing to walk that extra mile.
ZT: It’s very hard to lead, be visible, and be unapologetic about the work you do. How do you do it?
Durrani: This is the reality of our society. You can’t run from it. Let me give you a few examples. My father’s friends whom I used to meet all the time helped me smuggle myself and others across borders, and helped me smuggle laptops and books into Afghanistan. I use the word smuggle because this is all post-2021, and my father is no longer there, so they shouldn’t feel in debt to me. They do it because they love and respect my father and me. These people have never been to school. These are people who do manual labour or have a lot of money, and would literally walk miles for me.
There’s also my own blood uncle. In 2019, when I was supposed to meet the director of education, my uncle asked my father, “Why she was meeting men? How dare she meet men?” This is a guy who came from Canada, and his family was all in Canada. So I don’t want to say that it was all rosy and rainbows. My father had to fight so many fights that I didn’t even know about. Those are also my struggles, and I want to own them. My mother also fought against those. When I was very young and my father was not at home, my uncle screamed at me, “You are studying with boys in school. You’re gonna bring us a bad name. How dare you do this?” These my blood uncles.
ZT: You have the power to mobilize people who are willing to put everything they have on the line to make it possible to educate girls in Afghanistan, including running secret schools today. Do you think there is a way to do it across Afghanistan and transform our society in a way that every home becomes a school?
Durrani: That’s a very good question. I think that in Afghanistan I envisioned for my daughter, we won’t have to worry about being educated. One thing that people tend to forget is that learning is part of our culture. Growing up, I grew up in a family where my grandmother used to tell stories and my father used to read to me about Zarghona and Nazo. My mother’s grandfather would listen to the BBC and he educated the kids all around us. I grew up in that culture of learning, politics, history, geography, and poetry. I was a kid who had to be in school. Learning continued after school; it was part of my life. I want that to be the situation in Afghanistan. I want that to be felt in every house. Right now, I think we are scared of our learning culture, scared of learning about Rahman Babur, Hafiz or Quran Sharif or its interpretation, or about the history of Afghanistan. I feel like all of us together, all these educators, will come together and do this in the short run. I want to educate 100 girls per province through the mechanisms that we have built in place. We help communities establish their own schools, and then they can start learning from grade seven to grade 12. We provide them with laptops, internet maintenance, fees, resources, and training as long as they can introduce female teachers and female students to us and give us a safe space to work with them. We’re looking for partners whom we can help and trust and do the sort of thing around Afghanistan. Hopefully, in 10 years, we will have 100 leaders per district or province who will rebuild their own communities from a micro level. We’ll be walking schools and communities of educators. We could be so innovative that Yemen in Syria and Iraq could learn from us. Who knows? We have been pioneers for so many things that maybe we’ll be great at this. I believe in Afghanistan. We have such a strong history. We come from a strong line of women who have done so many things. I think we’ll navigate through this.
ZT: This is so inspiring. And just last one, can you tell us, what’s a safe way for people to reach out to you or to learn?
Durrani: I’m gonna give you an email address. They can also reach out to us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or contact us through our website.
ZT: Thank you so much. Pashtana, Jan,>>
Source: https://zantimes.com/2025/02/11/lets-open-a-school/

Women's Liberation Front 2019/cryfreedom.net 2025