Brave Hearts
Young Afghan women are studying at Roger Williams University, gaining political and financial skills that will help rebuild their ravaged country. What no one anticipated was that these students would change our lives as much as we’ve changed theirs.
Beth Schwartzapfel
May 2005
This piece was awarded Rhode Island for Community and Justice's 2005 Metcalf Award for Diversity in the Media. SHE HAD HEARD OF JEAN-CLAUDE VAN DAMME. She had heard of “Ah-nold” and Times Square. But other than that, Mahbooba Babrakazai wasn’t sure what to expect when she arrived in the United States of America. She was exhausted after two days and two nights of travel, starting in Kabul, Afghanistan, continuing through Islamabad, then Karachi, Dubai, Zurich, and finally arriving in New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport on a rainy night in August 2002. So when she and her four weary fellow travelers thought they had missed their last connecting flight to Boston, they sat down on their pile of luggage and tried to decide what to do next.
It turns out that they had misunderstood about the flight to Boston. Paula Nirschel and a small entourage of supporters, expecting them in New York all along, had already piled into a van at Roger Williams University. In the van were Nirschel, her husband, University president Roy Nirschel, and the school’s dean of business, Maling Ebrahimpour. A sign that Ebrahimpour had made was on the seat beside him, its blue letters spelling out Mahbooba’s name in Dari Persian. Meem. Heh. Bey. Waw. Bey. Hey Gerdak.
On the way to the airport, Nirschel’s husband tried to prepare her, gently, for the possibility that it still might not happen. Visas, exit permits, navigating customs in five countries – not to mention cold feet – were a lot of obstacles for a handful of young women to handle on their own. “Everybody said, Paula, really, they’re not going to be on the plane,” she recalls. Logically, even after her months of dedication and work, she knew they might be right. And yet, she says, “I knew they were going to be there.”
Needless to say, the travelers were there, the inaugural class of the Initiative to Educate Afghan Women, a scholarship program that Nirschel had dreamed up less than a year earlier.
While many in America turned inwards after 9/11, Nirschel was glued to the television. The images of Afghan women haunted her. “It was like an out-of-body experience. Days and days would go by…I actually could not sleep.”
She got on the phone – to Washington, to Kabul, to “anybody who would talk to me at the state department.” She was making up a scholarship program as she went along until eventually the details took shape. Her husband offered the first one at Roger Williams University. Nirschel used that scholarship as leverage and sent out letters to 3,500 college presidents around the country, asking for additional help. Robert Finn, the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, offered roundtrip airfare for the first group of students, and assembled a group of U.S. Foreign Service officers, Afghani academics, and government ministers to interview applicants.
Nirschel then hand-picked women who planned to return home after graduation to serve their countries. She designed the program knowing that there were two potential stumbling blocks. She realized that many recent graduates get lured at graduation time with American salaries and jobs. She also knew that students who’ve spent too much time in the U.S. can find returning home very alien. So each June, the students go back to Afghanistan. Nirschel helps them secure internships with nongovernmental organizations, government agencies, and other groups. The summers spent working at home allow them to help support their families, build their resumes, and stay grounded in their country.
As a result, “these women…will end up in key positions,” says Nirschel. “President Karzai and ministers I have spoken with…are waiting for educated women to help to run the country…They’re very eager to get them back.”
So when Nirschel pulled up to the terminal at JFK Airport, she knew she was looking at more than her dream coming to fruition. She was looking at a handful of trailblazing women who will help rebuild Afghanistan from its shattered ground up.
Mahbooba, for her part, was flooded with joy and relief when she finally laid eyes on the people whom she still calls “Mrs. Nirschel and Mr. President.” Any concerns about whether the Americans would be friendly evaporated when she saw Ebrahimpour’s sign. “My name? In my language? I was like, Wow! We have somebody waiting for us!”
The group piled in the van and headed towards Bristol. After a short orientation, the women would spread out to Universities all over the country: the University of Montana in Missoula, Notre Dame College in South Euclid, Ohio, the University of Hartford in Connecticut, and Bristol’s Roger Williams University.
AS ONE MIGHT EXPECT, there have been some growing pains and reshuffling as the program evolved. A couple of the women transferred to different schools. Another made the difficult decision to leave the program and return home. Overall, however, the arc of the Initiative has been an upward-swinging one. Three years after the program’s inception, thirteen Afghan women are studying at universities throughout the United States. Several of the women from the first group to arrive are now preparing for graduate school and threeAfghan women now attend Roger Williams.
Mahbooba Babrakzai, twenty, and Nadima Sahar, nineteen, are juniors, and Arezo Kohistani, twenty-three, is a sophomore. All three women grew up in Kabul, but as teenagers all three moved from Afghanistan to Pakistan.
Mahbooba explains that when the Taliban came to power, her parents knew that she couldn’t go to school anymore. “They didn’t want a future for me that was dark and I’d have no ideas,” she said. “That’s why my parents moved to Pakistan, to get my education. And then whenever the Taliban went, they would move back to Afghanistan.”
That is roughly what happened. The Taliban fell just as Mahbooba finished high school. “I was joking with my mom,” Mahbooba says, “that the Taliban were there until I was finished with my school. When I was finished, I could go back.”
In fact, just after she graduated from high school, her father heard on the radio that there was still time to take the Kabul University entrance exam. “He was so happy,” Mahbooba recalls, “and he was telling me, there is a chance, so me and you are going back to Afghanistan.”
They left the rest of their family behind in Peshawar and returned to Kabul so Mahbooba could take the test. Mahbooba says the house felt cold and empty without her family. She passed the exam and enrolled in medical school at Kabul University and was a few weeks into her first semester when she got a scholarship from the Initiative.
Mahbooba’s major is financial services – she plans to get a masters in finance when she graduates – but she changed majors a number of times before making up her mind. In Kabul it was medicine, but when she arrived in the U.S., she switched to computer science, then engineering.
Now that she has settled on business, Mahbooba sees the possibilities of women’s empowerment in finance. One summer Mahbooba’s job was in Afghanistan’s new Ministry of Commerce; she helped a woman secure a small grant to open a women’s clothing shop. The shop sells business suits, casual clothing, and party dresses for women. It is the first female-owned business in all of Kabul. Under the Taliban, Mahbooba wrote in an email, women often made and sold clothing. But since they weren’t allowed to own a business, “they would sell their hand made products to shops and those guys would keep the most profit.” Now women get to keep the profits.
Arezo Kohistani arrived in 2003 as part of the Initiative’s second generation of students. When Arezo finished high school in Peshawar, she got a job as an Operations Assistant with the United Nations International Organization for Migration in Islamabad. Her father, a lawyer, also worked for the U.N., so the family moved to Pakistan and lived there until the Taliban fell and they were able to return home. While in Islamabad, Arezo started a chapter of the youth-run NGO Youth and Children Development Program, which offered weekend classes in English, math, and Islam to Afghan refugees. The Youth and Children Development Program originated as a series of secret basement-schools for children in Afghanistan who were unable to attend school under the Taliban. However, even in Pakistan, where children were able to attend school, Arezo was not surprised to find that their desire to learn was fierce. Even before the Taliban, Arezo explains, Afghan schools were only open intermittently. The years of civil war that ravaged the country meant that it was not always possible, or safe, to keep them open.
When the family returned home after nine years in Pakistan, their house was in ruins. The seven members of Arezo’s family – her mother, her father, Arezo and her two sisters and two brothers – now live with Arezo’s uncle and his family while they slowly rebuild.
Nadima Sahar moved to Peshawar with her father and 3 sisters when she was nine or ten. Her mother was a lawyer with the World Food Program, and stayed behind in Kabul to secretly continue her work. Each morning she would put on her burka and take a cab to her office. What gave her away, though, were her trips to Pakistan to see her family. Though she only visited two or three times a year, the Taliban kept catching her as she crossed the Khyber pass. They gave her many warnings until one day they put her in jail. She was released with another, more scary warning this time: she had better not get caught again, or else. She was in the midst of despairing about how she might see her family again when the Taliban fell.
Nadima is a political science major with aspirations to become Afghanistan’s first female president. She plans to attend law school after graduation. Dr. Jennifer Campbell, Assistant Professor of Writing Studies, taught her for two semesters and says her student is a force to be reckoned with. “Nadima Sahar says she’s going to be president of Afghanistan?” Campbell says. “Then Nadima Sahar is going to be president of Afghanistan.”
Encouragement from her mentors at Roger Williams, not to mention her mother’s striking example, helped Nadima to develop the confidence to voice such lofty ambitions. Though there are now women governors of several Afghan provinces, and there was a woman candidate in the recent presidential elections, there’s a segment of society that doesn’t view these as acceptable jobs for women, Nadima says. She initially thought she might study business, or medicine but changed her mind. “The only way I could really make a difference is to get involved in government,” Nadima says.
Campbelladds, “She’s got this completely quiet demeanor, but you don’t want to mess with Nadima.”
IN SOME WAYS, THESE THREE ARE serious young women. They’re determined to succeed and devoted to their country and their religion. They spend far more hours studying than most of their peers. Their professors are unanimously impressed with their dedication and their focus. The women pray five times a day. They will have their marriages arranged when the time comes. They do not date. They do not drink or go to parties. Nirschel says this single-mindedness is because they are on a mission to become role models for the women of Afghanistan. “They take that responsibility very seriously,” she says
The women are also hilarious and fun to hang out with. They are relaxed, laugh easily and often, and tease each other constantly, though they are too polite to tease most anyone else. (Arezo laughs as she tells Nadima the word in Dari that she uses to describe Mahbooba. All I can get out of her is that it is a small bird. Suffice it to say, she says, that “most of the time I just tease her. I call her small and cute, and she says, ‘don’t call me that!’)
They love shopping, and it took them some time before they learned how to manage their work-study paychecks wisely. “My first paycheck,” Arezo laughs, “all gone to Target.” Now they have a code--don’t look at things you can’t buy.
“Sometimes she’ll say, ‘Nadima, look at those shoes!’” Nadima teases Arezo. “And I’ll say, ‘Arezo, you are blind’,” which is their code for ‘don’t look at things you can’t buy.’ “And Arezo will say, ‘right, I have no eyes.’”
But even as she describes the self-restraint she has mastered, Arezo shakes her head in mock sympathy for all the things she does not buy. “We feel really bad for the clothes. They will really miss us if we leave them there.”
The women love the ocean. Nadima calls it their soulmate. Arezo said that she had seen the ocean in Pakistan, but it was not until they were homesick that they realized how comforting the ocean can be. “Whenever we feel sad,” Arezo says, “we just go and sit.”
While all three women are friendly and warm, Arezo and Nadima agree that Mahbooba is the most outgoing, social, and talkative of the three. Lindsay Toto, a Roger Williams University senior who is one of Mahbooba’s closest American friends, says that the most important thing she has learned from Mahbooba is how important laughter is. Before she met her, Toto explains, it was easy to get overwhelmed by school and lose perspective. But Mahbooba “told me her dad is someone who makes everyone laugh when times get bad…so I can tell that’s from her family.”
IT’S CLEAR THAT THE AFGHAN STUDENTS’ lives have been changed by the Initiative. What’s less predictable is how American students have been altered by it, as well.
When they first arrived on campus, for instance, the Afghan women encountered many misunderstandings about Afghanistan and Islam. Countering these misconceptions was part of the women’s mission when they put aside their fears and got on that plane in Kabul. “If I I think the people would not be friendly to me and therefore I am not going,’” Nadima asks, then “how could we change the negative perspective that people have about Afghans and about Afghanistan?”
Mahbooba’s friend Lindsay, for her part, says that Mahbooba’s presence at Roger Williams has changed her mind. “Having been a freshman during 9/11,” she says, “I think a lot of students had reservations about having students from Afghanistan come over here.”
But Lindsay says that “having met Mahbooba really changed my life. When you start to view people as individuals…to be able to see that people have homes, and families, and love, and go on and live their lives every day, despite the difficulties,” then one really starts to gain understanding.
When she first arrived, Arezo was taken aback by some of the questions that her fellow students asked. “They were asking me, ‘ooh, you’re from Afghanistan? Have you ever had TV in your country? Do you know what apple is? How can you wear such clothes?’ On media, they just show Taliban, and mujahedeen, fighting on the mountain, and women wearing burka. So they think that we are living in the caves.”
Mahbooba was asked how many camels she owns. She was also asked the apple question. “The apple one was really funny,” she says, “because they were like, A-H-H-pull.” Mahbooba laughs when describing her sarcastic response to this question: “OK, no, I don’t know what apple is.”
The women answer each misconception with a careful explanation. And maybe a giggle. For example, Kabul is a big city, a bustling metropolis of honking cars, shoppers, kids playing in the street. For holidays and special occasions, the women wear elaborate and colorful costumes, threaded with gold and hung with beads. But even in Kabul, most days, they wear jeans, or a long skirt, with pants underneath, and a headscarf. Many women in Aghanistan’s more remote providence wore burkas long before the Taliban came to power, but the women explain that Islam requires only that a woman cover her hair. They feel somewhat sad about it, but they’ve decided not to cover their hair while they are here. Since the purpose of the headscarf is to discourage men from staring, the women know that wearing them would defeat the purpose. “Here if you wear the veil,” Arezo says, “everyone stares.”
All of the women’s parents, mothers and fathers alike, went to Kabul University. Their parents have always been proud and encouraging, and pushed the women to live up to their potential. “If you want to be someone,” Arezo recalls her father saying, “be the best one.” She laughs as she repeats her father’s motto to Nadima. “If you want to be teeth, be the top teeth.”
So when their classmates’ questions revealed certain assumptions – that the Afghan women were not street-wise or savvy, for instance, or that they were not valued by their families – the American students, in fact, revealed themselves to have a limited understanding of Afghan culture. “They were feeling very sorry for us,” Arezo recalls, “and I was thinking, ‘What do you mean by this?!’”
The women admit they had their own preconceived notions of the US before arriving, which has helped them to understand where the American students are coming from. To combat ignorance on both sides, Nadima says, “usually when we give any presentations in our classes, we focus a little bit on Afghans.”
Arezo did just that with her final project for Computer Science 101. It’s hard to imagine how an Introduction to Spreadsheets project could relate to Afghanistan, but Arezo constructed a multilayered spreadsheet about opium production and the Afghan economy. The women also give speeches about their country and their culture, both on and off campus. Recently they gave a lecture about Afghan culture and Islam to a lecture hall packed with 200 of their classmates and professors. When the University launched a journal called Reason and Respect: A Journal of Civil Discourse, Nadima wrote a thoughtful piece called, “Ramadan, the Month of Fasting,” in the inaugural issue.
Nadima has also engaged other students, even those who were initially hostile. The Roger Williams University College Republicans, for instance, are a rather outspoken bunch. College campuses tend to be bastions of liberal thinking, but this group has pulled some pretty head-turning right-wing stunts. In February of last year, for instance, they offered a “whites only” scholarship in protest of affirmative action. Shortly after the Afghan students arrived, the group’s chairman, Jason Mattera, wrote an article attacking Islam in the conservative campus paper.
Nadima wrote her final paper for her Expository Writing class in response. It’s an essay Nadima’s professor, Jennifer Campbell describes as a twenty-page dialogue about why Mattera should understand what Islam really is, instead of the misrepresentations he’d made. (Nadima politely describes their conversations as her attempt to clear up a little misunderstanding about Islam.) Even two years later, Campbell remembers this paper for how compelling it was, how earnest, and patient. “She’s…unfailingly sweet and unfailingly polite,” Campbell says. “But at the same time, she is like girl of steel. She will go up to anyone, and in a very loving way, she will engage them.”
IT IS 10:30 ON A THURSDAY NIGHT, and Arezo pads to the door of her dorm to let me in. She is wearing slippers and blue flannel pajamas with clouds on them. On the way to the room that she and Nadima share, we step over empty beer cans in various states of crushed-ness. Arezo jokes that she had a few drinks. I joke that I won’t mention as much in the article so her parents won’t get the wrong idea.
It is an Afghan custom to offer food to guests, so Arezo has prepared classic dorm room fare: a Tupperware full of microwave popcorn. She also offers me sugared almonds, an Afghan delicacy which she brought back from a recent trip to California. They are delicious.
Arezo and Nadima have set up pillows on the floor of the room they share, which reminds them of home. Arezo is sitting on these pillows, rewriting notes from one of the day’s lectures, when Nadima breezes in.
Nadima is a mentor in the Bridge to Success Program, which pairs Roger Williams students with minority students at Newport’s Rogers High School. That night the Bridge to Success crew has gone to the Providence Black Repertory Company’s production of Cheryl J. West’s Jar the Floor. Nadima and her mentees all enjoyed the show, and Nadima fairly glows as she sits cross-legged on the floor of her room and recounts the story of the play, in which four generations of African-American women gather for the family matriarch’s birthday. Nadima is also on the mock trial team, so we chat a bit about the case her team recently won at a regional championship. She loves these sessions, partly because they help her look forward to law school, and partly because they’re good training in seeing every story from many different angles. “Most of my friends in mock trial are Republican,” she says, “but they accept other people’s opinions, whether they agree with them or not.”
I tell the young women about an email conversation I’ve been having with the President of the College Republicans, Mike Martelli. I’ve brought a transcript of some of the emails Martelli and I have exchanged to get the women’s thoughts. “Personally I am not a fan for the Initiative to Educate Afghan Women,” Martelli wrote. “Last I checked, [the Afghan students] would be returning to a culture where women are second class citizens and are not valued…Seems to me that we wasted something there, considering their religious leaders love to oppress them.”
Nadima recalls her conversations with Mattera and is not particularly surprised. “To me, it seems like a really ignorant opinion,” she responds. “It’s the twenty-first century.”
“He was only talking about Taliban,” Arezo says. “Before then, women were doctors, governors, judges, pilots….they should learn about religion and culture and country and then talk.”
“He is expecting a country that has been in constant war for 24 years to have women presidents?” Nadima asks. “Countries with peace have no women presidents!”
Echoing her friend’s sentiment, Arezo asks, “Why does the US have no woman president?”
The women stress that this young man’s sentiment is in the minority on campus. For the most part, they say, their reception here has been warm and welcoming. “Everyone welcomed us with a smile on their face, and was really helpful in helping us to get used to the environment,” says Nadima. But as much as the women dismiss Mattera’s criticisms with a wave of their hands, his sentiment nevertheless strengthens their resolve. “This makes us stronger,” Nadima says. “It makes us more ambitious to prove ourselves…When I become the first female president, I can prove to him that women are truly not slaves.”
“I used to say I want to become the first female president,” Nadima adds. “When I hear things like this, now I say, I must become the first female president.”
I remember what Professor Campbell said about Nadima. Get out of the way, Mattera. Here comes the girl of steel.
NADIMA, AREZO, AND MAHBOOBA might have liked very much to go to Kabul University. Twenty-five years ago, professors came from all over the middle east – indeed, all over the word – to teach there. The University hosted a busy exchange program. But a quarter century of civil war, then a repressive regime that valued obedience over knowledge, followed by air strikes and ground wars to unseat that regime, have left the university in ruins. Mahbooba was a student there for part of one semester, so she speaks from experience when she says that students there are suffering a lot. “A lot of things are torn up,” she says. In the winter, the dorms have no heat, and “the food is not, like, good.” At first, this sounds like the kind of comment any college student might make about cafeteria food. But then she continues. “The government is not rich enough to feed everyone there…Even if there is something to eat, it is not sufficient to give you energy.”
Arezo recalls walking at night with her father. After 9 pm in Kabul, the streets tend to empty out, so it was quiet. It was also winter and very cold. Arezo noticed a group of young people huddled under a streetlight, and she asked her father what they were doing. There was no electricity in the dorms, he explained, so the students had brought their books outside to study by the streetlight.
The Initiative to Educate Afghan Women will be most powerful when it succeeds into obsolescence, when women come to the U.S. to study in order to participate in a rich cross-cultural exchange, not because they have no other options.
The thirteen women will return to their country with U.S. educations. Then they must roll up their sleeves and crouch under that streetlight with the students from Kabul University. Together they will rebuild Afghanistan’s universities, its hospitals, its infrastructure.
“We know that…one or two people cannot do a lot for the country,” Arezo says.
“But we can do our part,” says Mahbooba. “I can’t wait to go and do my part.”
