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.