A difference for women
In Washington yesterday, some American diplomats testified to what they did and did not know about the men who operated in the shadows of Afghanistan under the Taliban.
In Boston tomorrow, some Afghan women will remember, instead, how it felt the first time they exposed their faces to the sun on a Kabul street.
Far from the foreign policy debates and beyond the search for Osama bin Laden, there are women like Arezo Kohistani, Mahbuba Babrakzai, and Nadima Sahar. They are three of 11 young women studying in the United States this year because of the determination of one American woman to help educate a new generation of female leaders for Afghanistan.
Paula Nirschel was a social worker by training, a busy, car-pooling mother of three, and the wife of a university president when those planes hit the twin towers, the Pentagon, and that field in Pennsylvania. "Like so many of us after 9/11, I felt powerless," she said. "Then I saw videos of the women in burkas, denied the freedoms we take for granted. I could not get the images of those women out of my mind."
The Initiative to Educate Afghan Women, which hosts a fund-raiser tomorrow night at the John Hancock Hotel & Conference Center in Copley Square, was born of the sleepless nights that followed the American invasion of Afghanistan, she said. "I knew education was the key to their future, that if they were educated and returned home committed to help their country that women could make the difference in Afghanistan."
Her husband was supportive but skeptical. Roy Nirschel is president of Roger Williams University in Bristol, R.I., and he knows something about bureaucracy. "He and everybody else warned me it would not be easy," she recalled. "And you know what? It wasn't."
Hundreds of hours of negotiation with the US State Department and its counterpart in Kabul led to the awards of 11 full scholarships to women Nirschel interviewed herself for placement in colleges across the United States. Nirschel hopes to add five more women to the program next fall. Kohistani, Babrakzai, and Sahar are studying at Roger Williams, where the Nirschels' two oldest children are now enrolled. "Our dinner table is bigger these days," she said of the three Afghan women she has come to think of as family.
The 11 women, ages 18 to 32, arrived in the United States with rudimentary knowledge of English and educational histories that included everything from secret schooling in the basement of a home to years studying across the border in Pakistan. Some have suffered medical and psychological damage from the years of war, but all are thriving academically, Nirschel said. "It is amazing to watch. Everything was new. They had to tackle textbooks in English. They had never gone to a library alone, and now they were free to walk all over campus late at night."
During the break between semesters, all 11 reunited at Roger Williams to share their experiences. At the end of the spring term, they will return to Bristol for a week of reflection before flying home to Afghanistan together for the summer.
All 11 will have summer jobs at home, secured for them with Nirschel's assistance. "We can place them with international aid agencies," she said. "The whole idea is that they must be committed to returning home to rebuild their country when their education is done. Going back in the summers also helps them support their families."
In the fall, the women will return to Rhode Island for a few days together before each goes her own way to her own campus. They will meet again at semester break.
For Paula Nirschel, the comings and goings of a handful of young women are the stuff of real social change. "I know my kids are watching," she said. "I hope they see the message here: We can all make a difference if we are determined to try."
Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com.
