By: Zainab Wafaie
Translated by: Sakhi Rezaie
These days, when you walk around the city of Mazar-e-Sharif, you will come across a sign of women’s tailors in the city, where it is written: “We accept apprentices for tailoring training”; Every sewing workshop has attracted many girls for training. Apparently, each of these girls is 18 or 19 years old and some of them are younger than that. Before the Taliban ruled their destiny, everyone was moving in the same direction but with separate goals for their future; But now these girls are working in one direction and only for one small goal.
With the establishment of the Taliban government, schools across Afghanistan were closed to female students above the sixth grade; But Balkh was one of the few provinces where, in the first year of Taliban rule, girls above the sixth grade were allowed to go to school. This situation did not last long and female students above the sixth grade were also banned from going to school in Balkh too.
Boring days pass one after the other and the face she sees in the mirror every morning looks more withered and depressed than the day before. She does not remember that she ever liked being alone; But lately, perhaps for the first time, she feels at peace in solitude. Asiyah – a nickname – like tens of thousands of girls left out of education, is dealing with the difficulties of life these days. She says that he sees the destruction of her life before his eyes; But she can’t do anything to save her from this quagmire.
After she stops going to school, Asiyah falls into severe depression. “Before, that, I was not like this a year ago, maybe I was enough in a room to make others laugh; But from the day when the gate of my school was closed, I also lost all my joy and happiness.” These days, Asiyah doesn’t like to sit with others, laugh and get out of her loneliness for a moment. “I don’t like to be in public and talk to anyone, and this feeling creeps into me more and more every day.” The loneliness that Asiyah has sunk into has created a void in her that she cannot understand and explain. Asiyah, when she turns the pages of her dreams, the words choke her and won’t let her say anything.
Asiyah, who is an 11th grade student, wanted to study law after finishing her studies. But now, like a husk separated from a seed, she is separated from her dreams and is thousands of miles away from it. To escape from the depression that gripped her, she took refuge in a sewing machine and every morning in the hot and exhausting air of Mazar-e-Sharif, the center of Balkh, she picks up a suitcase full of pieces and spends a long way through the dusty alleys of the city to get to a small sewing machine workshop. “Every day my life became more difficult. I could feel the negative changes in my being. Every day I became more depressed and sad than the previous day. I had become a completely different person. To save myself from excessive depression, I had to take up sewing class. Now that my knowledge and education are short, I will continue sewing so that in the future I can at least cover my daily expenses.”
After the Taliban returned to power, female students above the sixth grade in Balkh, unlike in other provinces, could continue their studies at school. Although the Taliban had established strict rules for the presence of female teachers and students in school; But even so, all these Balkh girls were happy that they could go to school.
The Taliban did not hesitate to scare and discourage girls from going to school in this province. They moved a mine and blew it up in “Shaheed Abdul Khaliq” girls’ high school, and then in a declaration, they said that “we are not against girls going to school; But we cannot ensure their security.” These tricks did not affect any student and they did not refuse to go to school. After taking the final exam of the 1401 academic year, the Taliban finally closed the gates of schools and colleges in Mazar-i-Sharif as well.
Zahra -pseudonym-, a student who was forced to work in a sewing workshop, says that she fought for years against the obstacles that were placed in front of her by her extreme family, in order to pave the way to acquire knowledge; But, these days, she has a stronger opponent than her family, who does not let him go to school; The opponent that Zahra is unable to fight is the Taliban group.
Zahra went through tough challenges to prepare herself to enter the university; But as soon as one year is left to achieve her dream, the Taliban become a barrier against it.
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