I would like to ask for help in bringing an extraordinary student to Millsaps College from Afghanistan.
I went to Afghanistan in June as a representative of the Fulbright program and a visiting professor at the American University of Central Asia in Kyrgyzstan. The Soros foundation had funded a number of scholarships aimed mainly at young women from Afghanistan to study at the American University in Kyrgyzstan.
Over the week I was there I interviewed about 24 students for these scholarships. I heard some terrible things. Most of the girls had been forced to study in secret as the Taliban had a policy of beating and sometimes beheading any parents that allowed their daughters to read. Inside Kabul education was severely retarded, in the provinces it was completely halted.
Most of the young women were over 20 because their educations had been delayed so long.
There were two groups, those that came from Kabul and those that came from outside the capital. These are two different worlds in Afghanistan. As conservative as Kabul is—I only saw one woman’s face in public—it is light years ahead of the rest of the country in educating women.
Kabul is in bad enough shape. The picture above is from outside the American educational center, one of the better parts of Kabul. In the foreground it a goat; behind him is a wrecked piece of field artillery. But in Kabul it is at least possible to find books and get access to computers. The young ladies from Kabul could carry on a conversation in English with little trouble.
The girls that had come from outside the capital carried on their interviews almost entirely through my interpreter, Sami. In fact, at one point I even asked Sami if he thought we should confine our attention to the women from the capital. That is when he told me what he had to go through to get the candidates from the provinces to come to Kabul.
Sami had to go on his own to a number of places that were not controlled by the central government and negotiate with warlords to allow him to recruit women for the scholarships. Afghans had good reason to be suspicious. During the period of Russian control, women were commonly taken to Russia and elsewhere in the Soviet Union on the pretense that they would be educated. Most never returned and are believed to have been forced into prostitution.
Many of the girls came from places where the Taliban is still in control and their parents are liable to be killed by the Taliban if it becomes known that they had allowed their daughters to go abroad for an education.
Sabira stood out among all the other candidates for being very poised and self-assured. The thing about Afghans that you always hear remarked on is how dignified they are. Sabira stood out even among Afghans as having a very calm and self-possessed manner. Unlike almost all the other young women from outside the capital she was able to speak English without using the translator.
Her family walked out of Afghanistan when she was 12. Her Father was working in Saudi Arabia and supporting the family with his repatriated earnings. They had to cross the border into Pakistan at night on foot. They waited until a patrol passed and went into Pakistan with what they could carry on their backs. Sabira carried her youngest sister.
Her best subject was math. It was what she loved, that and engineering. But when I asked her what she would major in if she won the scholarship she said medicine. I asked her why.
In Pakistan, Sabira got a job in a hospital thanks to a program run by the Japanese. After a three month training program, she worked in the hospital maternity ward. After that she was in effect the doctor for all of the people in the camp.
After the fall of the Taliban the family returned to the village where they came from. Then their father decided that the family should move to Kabul where the girls could try to get into the university (there is only one public university in Afghanistan). But she has continued to the be the person the people around her go to for medical care. Even in the city they can’t get anyone to the hospital in time and she already knows more than the doctors in Afghanistan anyway. So, she wanted to be a doctor because the people around her needed a doctor more than they needed a mathematician.
That made me realize something. All through the interviews, I had been asking American style questions. One of the things we typically look for is a social conscience: does the person want to do something for humanity? Our unstated assumption is that a social conscience means following your genius, to do what you think is right no matter what society or the people around you say. But for Sabira, having a social conscience meant doing what she could to help the people around her. It meant not thinking about what made her happy, but what helped her community. So for her, compared to the fact that she could help the people around her—people who might otherwise die from lack of competent medical care—her personal interest in math didn’t carry much weight.
At the end of the interview we routinely asked the young women if they had any questions for us. Most of them asked when they would find out if they got the scholarship or if they passed the audition. Sabira asked if the American University at Kyrgyzstan could help her become a doctor.
I said no but they had lots of other programs that could get you into graduate school in the US and that sometimes medical schools in the US took students from different backgrounds. She was polite (the Afghans are always polite) but made no effort to hide her disappointment. She smiled a little half smile with one side of her mouth while looking down and said, “Then what is the point of going there?”
Now here I am offering this kid a chance to spend four years in what is the Paris of Central Asia on the Soros Foundation, instead of living in a country that could come apart at the seams any moment. The money she received from her living allowance from the Soros foundation would be more than anyone in her family ever made. But she wasn’t interested unless she could become a doctor.
She turned down AUCA to take her chances at becoming a doctor in Afghanistan.
After returning to the American Education Council that day, I asked Sami if we could invite Sabira down to their offices so I could talk her into taking the AUCA offer. That way, she could at least be studying in English while I looked for a way to get her into Millsaps College pre-med program. When Sami got off the phone he looked a little surprised. “Her mother has invited us to their house.”
This is surprising because foreign men are not invited into Afghan homes to meet women. Moreover, people usually have very modest homes so prefer to meet in restaurants and coffee shops.
Sabira’s cousin was coming to the American Education Council to lead us to the Family home in 30 minutes—there was no official street system, so the only way to get there was to be lead there.
Sabira’s family lived in a mud-house on one of the hills surrounding Kabul. People built these houses themselves and usually did not have title or electricity. The only roads leading to houses were those that came from ruts being made from use. It took us 25 minutes, driving, to get three miles. At one point we had to get out of the car and position two wooden planks to make it over a small ravine. I understood why getting to a doctor in a timely fashion was a problem.
When we finally made it there the whole family was waiting. About 13 people live in two rooms. In addition to Sabira’s mother and two younger sisters there are several male cousins and aunt and a couple of her children.
After eating the food that they had laid out for me and making some small talk with the male members of the family Sabira came in with her mother and two sisters.
The thing about a mud house is that it is made of mud on the outside, but inside it can have plastered walls and be pretty nice. Sabira’s family had tapped into the local power lines and was even running a refrigerator.
On her father’s orders, the family had relocated to Kabul to give the girls a chance to further their education. The rest of the people in the village thought that moving the family because of girls was foolish, but her father was an independent thinker. He had insisted on his girls getting an education from the first. He had always told Sabira that she would have to be the daughter and the son in the family.
She talked about her father quite a lot. In the narrative of the family everything was “and then father decided that we should…,” so it came as something of a surprise to hear that Sabira had seen her father twice in eight years. He was always off in another country, usually Dubai or Saudi Arabia, earning money. But there was one constant in all his decisions, that the girls get an education.
His picture was on the wall on a little mantle, commanding the room. It reminded me of the pictures that people in Japan put up on the Buddhist alter for the month after someone dies. She would talk about what her father wants her to do so much that it sounded like they were in contact everyday, but instead it was simply that whatever he said has so much weight that it was quoted for years afterwards.
I had Ted Achillies, the head of the American Education Council in Afghanistan, interview Sabira at his office. He was also extremely impressed and agreed to do anything he could to help. He told me that Sabira had originally been selected for the interviews because she had the strongest academic record of any applicant bar none. He persuaded Sabira to take the offer to go to the American University in Kyrgyzstan and then transfer to Millsaps College if I could find the money. She is there now taking an intensive course in English.
I think that Sabira would be an asset to both Millsaps College and the country of Afghanistan. She would be the kind of person that would make us proud.
Michael Reinhard
Assistant Professor of Political Science
Millsaps College
Click here to read a statement from Sabira
Click here to donate to the International Sponsored Scholarship Fund
