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Teenage girls in Jowzjan pick cotton after being banned from school
Mahtab Safi* authored this report, translated into English by Rustam Seerat.
Suhila* dreams of being in school with her friends. She’s sitting with her classmates, Sadaf* and Parween*, when the teacher enters the room. He’s smiling and greeting everyone as he begins the day’s lesson: ancient Greek civilization. As history is Suhila’s favourite subject, he asks her to read the day’s lesson. As she starts reading, a voice resonates in her ear, “Suhila, Suhila!”, which causes her to wake up from her dream. “This morning, after I woke up from my dream, I remembered that I wanted to study psychology. I wanted to help women who needed counselling and mental therapy,” she tells Zan Times.
Her eyes fill with tears whenever she thinks of school and remembers her classmates. Seventeen-year-old Suhila was in the tenth grade in Jowzjan province when the Taliban banned girls’ education beyond the sixth grade. Now she picks cotton to help her family earn money rather than learning about ancient Greece. Her school uniform has become her work attire, and instead of a book bag, she carries an orange-coloured sack.
Every day at 5 a.m., Suhila and 13 other women and girls from her village climb into a cargo rickshaw. “There are no covered rickshaws…
