Teaching and Learning at Kabul University

Lucy: I've copied below an article about my work at Kabul University that I wrote for my college magazine at Durham University...enjoy!

It is seven o’clock on a Sunday morning when the alarm goes off. Will and I both struggle out of bed, trying to suppress the thought going through our minds that it is Sunday. Unfortunately for us, the weekend is over and the working week has begun. It serves us right for feeling so smug when we slept in late on Friday morning, the Sabbath in Afghanistan.

I put on similar clothes to what I would wear back home, except for the knee length tunic which I throw on over everything and the headscarf which I wind around my face. Fortunately we don’t have to think about breakfast. We live in a guesthouse and the cook spent most of his early years working at the US embassy, so there are thick pancakes with maple syrup or eggs on offer if you want them. There’s even a pack of expensive Dorset Cereals on the table, freshly flown in from the Dubai supermarkets to our local cornershop. Too bad, though, if you’re not a morning person. We live with other ex-pat colleagues, so meals tend to turn into business meetings whether you like it or not. Our home is an old mud fort.

Turquoise Mountain (firuzkoh in Dari) is one of the Prince of Wales’ charities. It works to regenerate the historic old city of Kabul and preserve traditional Afghan arts and architecture by training young men and women in the crafts of woodwork, calligraphy, jewellery and ceramics. Will started working here at its foundation in early 2006. He spent a long time commuting between Oxfordshire, where I was teaching, and Kabul, before eventually persuading me to join him, which I did in 2008.

I climb into a taxi and greet my driver, Aziz. He is a forty year old family man of Tajik background whose family come from the Panjshir valley, north of Kabul. During our journeys to and from Kabul University where I work, he patiently deciphers the Dari that I talk to him, and graciously speaks back to me in the same pidgin tongue. We compare stories about our lives, themes ranging from Bollywood to cooking, and swimming to education, as we make our way towards the university. We pass the Intercontinental Hotel, from where John Simpson broadcast his first news report after the retreat of the Taliban from the city in 2001. Over in the north we see a large white helium balloon that hangs silently above the city. Supposedly it is a big brother style CCTV camera put in place to track the comings and goings of criminal and terrorist groups. Aziz once wondered out loud whether the man sitting inside the balloon would be lowered back down to the ground every day at 12pm in order to collect his lunch.

I have been working at Kabul University for most of the last year. Together with seven other American colleagues we seem to make up the entire foreign contingent on a campus which is about one kilometre square in area and with about ten thousand staff and students coming and going every day. We were employed in March 2009 to implement an English language teaching programme in each faculty of the university. Setting up a brand new department in a faculty that has been there since 1932 is a challenge, especially when the dean doesn’t necessarily know what you have come to do, or wants you there for that matter. We persevered, and drank a lot of tea while trying to establish these fragile relationships with our deans. I did my best with the smattering of Dari that I had learnt. In the meantime we hammered a teaching timetable out of the free time that the students had left after their core lessons, and we amassed a team of teachers from the final year cohort of students from the English department. These amazing young men and women dedicated six teaching hours a week plus preparation time to the programme, alongside the workload of their studies. We repaid them with teacher training sessions, mentoring, and we hope, jobs this coming year, if the funding will allow it.

A typical day at the university is a world away from a day’s teaching in an Oxfordshire secondary school. On a list of ten things to do in a day, I would be hard pushed to achieve two of them. Having arrived at work early to get some work done before my first class, I would spend my first half hour dealing with students who have come to excuse themselves from the lesson, but asking to be marked present nonetheless. A student wouldn’t come alone, but bring five of his or her friends, so that my office is soon full to overflowing. Once through the backlog of students, it is time to print out some teaching resources, however first I wait for the electricity to come back on. Eventually my printer springs into life, only to tell me that the cartridge is empty. I then spend fifteen minutes refilling the printer cartridge using a surgical syringe and a pot of black ink and a further ten minutes cleaning up the mess that I have made. Finally I have my resources, and I’m ready to get on with some administrative work when khala (literally, ‘aunty’) comes in and very kindly starts to sweep my carpet. The resulting effect is a dust storm in the office, so that I am forced to abandon it for cleaner air elsewhere in the building. Finally I arrive at my class only to find an empty room. Upon enquiry in the faculty office I discover that an exam has been scheduled for this ‘free’ period on the timetable, so that my students will not be attending class. The day continues in this way, as did both semesters that I have been there!

It was only when I came home for Christmas recently that I read about the Durham University Chancellor’s Appeal to fund scholarships for five young women from Kabul University to go and study at Durham in 2010 and for more to come every year for the next five years. Immediately the names and faces of my friends and colleagues came to mind, the same ones who have worked so hard this year to support us in our English teaching programme. Sara, Yalda, Freshta, Sweeta… Such vivacious and determined young women as these can and will go very far with the stronger foundations that a Durham postgraduate degree will add to their current education. They are the teachers who will educate future generations of Afghan children, and help to bring about change in a country so ravaged by war. If you're interested to support the appeal, you can find out more about it at http://www.dunelm.org.uk/Page.aspx?pid=410 - I can reassure you that it is a most worthwhile cause.

Winter walks around Kabul

Will: I ran my fingers through my hair today and was only a little surprised to find my fingertips covered in black soot. Kabul might once have been known for its fragrant gardens, exotic bazaars, and opulent palaces but it is now one of the world’s most polluted cities. Several months ago we had a meeting with an official from Afghanistan’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). He told us that the air in the centre of Kabul is almost ten times the level that is considered safe. The news may be dominated by the insurgency and the number of related casualties but the smog that hangs over Kabul probably accounts for more deaths. One in three hospital beds in Kabul are reportedly occupied by patients suffering from chronic lung disease and other respiratory problems. The BBC reported that the EPA director himself has moved out of Kabul, preferring the risk of being attacked by militants on his way to work rather than let his children breath Kabul’s filthy air. At this time of year, people are burning whatever they can get their hands on to stay warm. The air is thick with the smell of wood, diesel, plastic, rubber not to mention faecal particles and dust. Kabul’s first masterplan in 1964 assumed a population of 64,000; it has now reached about 5 million and continues to grow. Despite this pressure, the city still has no sanitation, and the roads are almost at permanent gridlock. The resulting smog often completly obscures the magnificnent mountains that surround Kabul from view. And then the rains comes. I love it when it rains at night because I know that the mountains will be in full view the next morning.

Last week it snowed all night. I emerged expectant the following morning and took a few moments to take in the view. The mountains stood sentinel all around, covered in snow and glittering in the sun. I consciously took my first deep breath since arriving back here in Janurary. I took two friends for a walk up the Koh-e-Badam Bagh ridge behind the fort. We started at the former Taleban HQ, that lay in ruins nine years after having been flattened by a B52 bomb. As we walked past it, Zia remembered the blast as it was hit by the ‘Bee-pinja-e-do’ bomber. It is strange what does and does not get translated here. We walked through a grove of young cedar saplings and up onto the ridge past a lone tree. The snow was several feet deep as we reached the pass. We watched a group of men digging the foundations for a lone house on the side of the mountain. The Koh-e-Daman mountains towered above Paghman and looked close enough to touch. In contrast, the city behind us was shrouded in smog and we struggled to see even the largest landmarks, even the airport. We followed the ridge up to a radar station and tried to creep past unnoticed. The guard dogs strarted barking and before we knew it were right on top of us. We had begun to slip down the icey slope and were therefore at head height with the Alsatian that came bounding around the corner. Luckily, he was in two minds as to whether or not he should continue the pursuit down the slope. Seconds later his handlers emerged from the wire and after exchaging some pleasanteries allowed us to go on our way. We scrambled up a 30ft crack to the top of the peak and slid down the other side to a shrine and back down the mountain. As we climbed down the ridge, the peace was shattered by two attack helocopters who flew just above the minarets up the valley. There was heavy gunfire in the valley below. Zia said there was an army range in that direction. Some of the fiercest fighting of the civil war took place almost 20 years ago in this very valley.

Last weekend a friend took me up a mountain just to the south of Kabul to see a Buddhist minaret, known as ‘minar-e-chakari. The minaret, or stambha, once stood at 85 feet but is probably about half that now, with rubble strewn around its base. It sits on a mountain saddle above a village called Yakhdara (icey valley) on the road to Logar. This is one of many Buddhist sites dating to the Kushan period in the first century after Christ when Kanishka established a Buddhist empire from the Ganges to the Gobi desert. We drove out of Kabul passed the Bala Hissar fort and turned off the road after a few miles, crossing the Logar village and entering the Pashtu village of Shewaki, once the headquarters of Hizb-e-Islami. We did not stop as the villagers are not known for their hospitality, but continued on through the village and across snow covered fields. Our landrover hauled us out of river beds and over boulders until the snow was just too thick to go any further. My friend has been visiting this village for the last 33 years and received a familiar welcome from all the young men. They warned us to beware of the wolves and agreed to keep an eye on the landrover. We gave them bags of fresh fruit and began climbing out of the village up a slope to the north. It did not stop snowing and visibility was about 20 metres. It reminded me of winter walking in Scotland as the clouds occasionally parted to reveal a glimpse of the large peak to our left. Half way way up I noticed three figures striding up the ridge. Very quickly they caught up with us and offered to guide us to the top. Mohammad, Mahmadjan, and Obaidullah cut a trail knee deep in snow to the top, setting a brisk, if restrained pace even in flip-flops. My friend said that he asked one of them several years ago where he had found his boots. Slightly bemused, the boy replied, “well I killed a Russian....obviously.” It felt good striding behind these boys trying to keep pace with them as they effortlessly strode up the ridge. There was no view at the top. We only saw the minaret when we were about ten metres from it. It was a solid column of black stone that had been badly damaged by years of weathering and deliberate vandalism. The boys recounted stories of American soldiers fighting the Taleban in the neighbouring valleys. Their fathers had probaly told similar stories about the Russians and their father before them, tales of Nadir Khan and Bacha Saqqao. On the way down, Mohammadullah tried hard to sell me his camera which he admitted had no film.

When we reached the village, one of our group provoked a snow ball fight which forced us into a hasty retreat. Young boys appeared from all sides and had us pinned down behind the landrover with ferociously accurate shots. A young girl in a brightly coloured dress stood watching, holding hands with her little sister. On the way back, we entered Kabul from a different direction, bumping our way through pot holes and around women sat begging in muddy puddles in the industrial complex of Bagrami. These walks are an important life-line here and a reminder of what a gulf still exists between the city and the countryside.