Rediff On The NeT: Teaching street kids to survive in Kabul

Teaching street kids to survive in Kabul

Dozens of barefoot street children are gathered in a classroom, learning reading, writing, and arithmetic as well as how to survive in war-shattered Kabul.

The teaching aids are stark and to the point: drawings of shrapnel spitting out at a victim; a photograph of a young boy, both his legs lost to a land mine.

Aschiana, a Swiss-based group whose name stands for Afghan Street Children and New Approach, knows that these students must be drilled on the dangers of land mines in order to make it through a typical day.

Decades of war have ruined Afghanistan's economy. The children living on Kabul's streets, roughly 28,000 of them by a United Nations survey, live by scavenging for anything of value.

They scrounge for spent shells and mortars they can sell as scrap metal, and for paper and wood that also fetch a price in the market. Their hunt often takes them into the war-ruined neighbourhoods of Kabul, littered with land mines and unexploded ordnance.

Aschiana opened its school and vocational training centre in 1995, using a converted two-story home. By December 1996, it had enrolled 650 street children. The school is the only one with permission from Kabul's current rulers, the Islamic Taliban army, to enroll girls and then only those less than eight years old.

All other girls schools were closed when the Taliban seized Kabul last September. In line with its strict brand of Islamic law, men were forced to grow beards and pray, music and photography was banned, and women were banished from the work force and schools.

"The girls are accepted but they are kept completely separated,'' said Mohammad Wardak, Aschiana's assistant director. The Aschiana teachers and staff are men.

Aschiana gives the children two meals a day and a bath every morning. At noon, the Aschiana scholars become street children again, collecting scrap for two hours until lunch and a final lesson.

"Some of them are the only source of income for their families,'' Wardak said. "They are from the poorest people. They are wood collectors, paper collectors, even beggars.''

Five-year-old Najira, a typical student, gets up every morning at 5 am to trudge outside her home to collect paper. By 8 am, she arrives at Aschiana, where she meets her friends, has a bath and some breakfast, and starts class.

"I like to draw and I can count numbers,'' Najira said in barely a whisper. Her voice gained strength as she talked about her family, the war that has ravaged Kabul, the rockets that killed her brother, which scared her and made her hide in a corner.

Her head scarf tightly wrapped around her tiny head and her hands firmly on her hips, the little girl struck a pose somewhere between compliance and defiance as she explained that she wanted to be either a teacher or a doctor. For now, she has other work.

"Sometimes I get tired and when I do, I just sit down and then I get up and start picking up paper again,'' she said.

Five-year-old Idrees collects wood. A slight boy in dirty beige tunic and pajamas, Idrees says his biggest fear is land mines.

"I try to go far away from them,'' he said.

One of his classmates was absent. He had stepped on a land mine the day before.

Eleven-year-old Ghiyassudin told the story of his friend.

"He went to the hill to collect thorns and paper. His mother said 'don't go,' but he went anyway and he stepped on a land mine and his foot was cut off,'' he said, his eyes riveted to the ceiling as he spoke.

Aschiana, which is partially funded by the European Union, brings in UN instructors who show the children how to spot and avoid land mines.

Instead of swings and seesaws in its front yard, Aschiana has a small playhouse surrounded by fake land mines where the children can practice what they learn in the classroom.

UNI

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