‘I Am Still Willing To Work' - Women Teach For Free In Face Of Mixed Messages From Taliban

The walls of the Malalay school, in the centre of Lashkar Gah, Helmand , are pockmarked with bullets from the last weeks of fighting between the Taliban and government forces, the glass windows shattered by a blast.

- Emma Graham-Harrison

Its teachers have not been paid for two months and several say they were bombed out of their homes in the final battles, but they are staggering on, somehow, for their students, most of them girls.

“My home has been destroyed by a bombing, even my shoes have been ripped to pieces, but I am still willing to come here and work,” said one geography teacher, Arezoo Sayedi, who shared photos of fragments of the shell that ripped apart her home weeks earlier.

They are missing almost half their students and unclear about the future of their jobs. The Taliban brought in a de facto ban on education for teenage girls . Boys in grades 7 to 12 have been back at school for two weeks, while girls have been ordered to stay home.

Those girls make up 1,600 of the Malalay school’s 3,600 female students, and it is unclear if they will ever be allowed back, or what will happen to the women employed to teach them.

Teachers who are mothers of teenage girls say they will leave Afghanistan unless their daughters are allowed to study, even though they want to stay in their homes and jobs. “My daughter is in 8th grade and she is still at home,” said one teacher, whose family fled Afghanistan the first time the Taliban came to power, a generation ago, allowing her to get an education . “If schools don’t restart here, our family is ready to go and be refugees again.”

The Taliban have asked women – many of them educated abroad last time the group were in power – to return to work in the healthcare and education sectors , while blocking the training of a new generation. The irony is not lost on Afghan women.