Rotary Club - Index

Rotary Club - Experience - Index

March 28, 2008
A Shared Experience 1 March 28, 2008
Empowering girls,
women in Afghanistan
By Aretha Fouch Price
Rotary International News - 19 March 2008
Girls in the village of Deh'Subz , near
Kabul, Afghanistan, anticipate the
opening of a school for girls and an
adult center for women. Photo courtesy
of Razia Jan
Girls living in and near the village of
Deh’Subz, outside of Kabul,
Afghanistan, will hear school bells
ringing closer to their homes for them for
the first time starting in March.
Rotarian Razia Jan, a native of
Afghanistan, visited her homeland in
2001 after the Taliban’s reign (1996-
2001), and in 2002 she began working
with the orphanages in the area. It was
during her visits that she decided the
girls who walk more than two miles each
way on a dirt road to school and those
who have never had any formal
education needed a school
closer to where they live.
“A whole generation of girls
have never been to school
because of the Taliban’s
rules prohibiting girls from attending
school and the destruction of the
schools,” said Jan, a member of the
Rotary Club of Duxbury, Massachusetts,
USA. “But that is about to change.”
Seeing firsthand the need for girls and
women to be educated and productive
in her homeland, Jan became inspired
to build a school for girls that also will
serve as an adult education center for
women.
“Our club is just about to open a school
for girls in Afghanistan to help break the
cycle of poverty [through] access to an
education in a very poor village,” Jan
says. “By providing them with an
education, we are giving them a ray of
hope to protect them from the vicious
cycle of poverty, malnutrition, and
hunger.”
The year-round school is scheduled to
open with about 200 girls, ages 4-18.
The adult education center is expecting
20 to 30 women, many of them widows
with children, to come to learn a trade or
how to start a business.
During two visits to Afghanistan, Jan
found the site for the school, which she