Girls have catching up to do as new school year begins

KABUL, Afghanistan -- The United States and other foreign governments rebuilding war-battered Afghanistan have provided Afghan children with new schools, uniforms, textbooks and knapsacks for the start of the school year on Saturday.

But they haven't been able to give back lost time to Afghanistan's schoolgirls, who were banned by the Taliban from getting an education and are only now returning to the lessons they abandoned five years ago.

For some, the 2002 academic year has come too late: They have already gotten married and given up on finishing their education. But for others, Saturday's start of school is a new beginning -- even if they have a lot of catching up to do.

"By now, I should be graduating high school," 16-year-old Latifa Samadi said. "But I'm happy we're back."

Samadi completed sixth grade before the Taliban took over in 1996. She will enter the eighth grade Saturday and likely will not graduate from high school before she is 20.

"I want to be a doctor," she said, sitting in her yellow classroom at Mir Ahmad Shahid school, which was destroyed during 1992 factional fighting and rebuilt in the past two months.

Many schools destroyed

More than 2,000 schools were damaged or destroyed during Afghanistan's 23-year civil war, and for the last few months, aid groups and government-funded agencies have worked around the clock to get at least some of them functioning.

While some girls enrolled in catch-up classes as early as last November, the official school year starts Saturday, the first working day after Afghans celebrated the Islamic lunar calendar's new year on Thursday and the start of spring.

President Bush said this week that the U.S. government had helped get 4 million textbooks into Afghan classrooms and that another 6 million were on the way. Efforts were also under way to supply school uniforms for more than 3 million students, first lady Laura Bush said.

Other countries have funded specific restoration projects, with the German government spearheading the reconstruction of the Mir Ahmad Shahid school, which now stands as a pastel oasis in the beige rubble of war-battered west Kabul.

The U.N. Children's Fund says 1.5 million primary school children will start school Saturday and that it hopes that number will reach 2 million by May.

Afghanistan's primary school-age population, however, is estimated at 4.4 million according to 1999 statistics, meaning only about a third of eligible children are enrolled.

For some children in remote provinces, there simply aren't enough functioning schools after 23 years of war. In other areas, teachers have refused to go to work because they haven't been paid for months, UNICEF says.

But even in areas where schools are operating and accepting girls again, many Afghan parents have yet to enroll their children, UNICEF spokesman Edward Cowardine said.

Some parents may not know that notebooks and other school supplies are being provided free by donors, he said. Others may be unaware that female teachers, who were also banned by the Taliban, have been rehired to teach girls.

"It's not that people don't have confidence in the system," Cowardine said. "They've just been out of the system for so many years."

UNICEF launched a campaign to encourage parents to send their children back to school -- distributing pamphlets and broadcasting radio messages to persuade parents that no matter how far behind their daughters were, they could still catch up.

A remedial school has opened in one of Kabul's most destitute neighborhoods for girls who lag so far behind their peers they can't enroll in public schools.

The school, run by the nonprofit group CARE and funded by the British government, features an accelerated curriculum cramming two years into one 12-month term.

CARE officials hope their 350 students, many of whom lost their fathers in Afghanistan's civil war, will be able to catch up in two to three years of intensive, year-round learning.

This week, 12-year-old Nasibah sat hunched over her new desk in the dirt-floor schoolhouse and recited numerals along with other girls as old as 14. As second-graders, they were learning math concepts they should have been taught when they were 7 or 8 years old.

"I'm very happy that after a period of five years I can go back to school," said Nasibah, who said she hoped to one day return to public schools and eventually go to university to become a doctor.