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September 09, 2010
Eid begins no sooner than the moment the Mullah sees the new moon. That day is today. Three days of festivities commence that resemble Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas all wrapped into a three-day celebration. Try to imagine a month of fasting, no water, no food between 4am and 7pm, praying five times a day (which is quite involved. See entry on 27 June, 2009, 4pm) and then imagine how you might celebrate the end of it. This week I began teaching the “leadership academy” as we like to call it. 16 of our grade 9 – 12 girls meet in our new resource room three days a week for two hours. This is thanks to the grant Andeisha received. The room is completely outfitted, 9 computers hooked up to the Internet, a huge whiteboard on the wall, projector hooked up to computer as well as stereo system and a big projection screen. In the center of the room is a huge rectangular table that CHI President Paul Stevers had constructed for his connectivity project. It is as if I have been transported back to my visit with the students of Philips Exeter Academy last winter, a place where the central meeting table is the physical manifestation of their educational philosophy. There is just enough room for 17 chairs. On the first day I was overwhelmed with excitement. Here I was for the first time in a real classroom. Though I have maintained from the beginning that a real education requires but five things: a board, a marker, an eraser, a teacher and a student, that the core of education is teaching a student how to learn, and the only modem necessary to make that happen is the teacher-student relationship, having graduated from the floor in a bare room of the orphanage, my back and my legs and knees are thankful. There they were, 16 girls I have been teaching in smaller, separate classes for over a year all in one place, looking to me to guide them through the next phase of this journey. The energy in the room was electrified by the added awareness that three of these girls are destined to go to America this winter, the second phase of the grant proposal, wherein they will go on a three-month mentorship tour. In light of this it was necessary first to dispel the intensity of the competition and anxiety that cropped up almost immediately. (Have I not stressed enough throughout this journal how competitive these girls are?) I told them that the three month class they were about to experience was infinitely more important and valuable than the pending three months in the States, the reason being this class happens only once. America, Europe, the world will be there to explore if not this winter then next, and if not then, another year and so on. We have guest lecturers coming from Kabul University, American University, Malalai Joya will visit, and of course Bashardost. We are going to have lectures over Skype conferencing, and films and music and poetry and real-life, hands-on leadership training. Though the girls understood my point, nonetheless their minds are awash with America. How could they not? To begin we generated a list of qualities that we all agree a good leader should have. At first the girls seemed incapable of imagining such a list. Remember where they come from, the notion of leadership so pushed from their existence but for life in the orphanage. Psychologically as well as physically, by and large women are still enslaved in Afghanistan. Finally, it was Maria who broke the inane silence. “A leader knows the difference,” she said. “Between what?” I pressed. “Between what is good and what is bad.” “Yes, but how does a leader know what is good and what is bad?” Maria thought for a moment. All the other girls looked at her. Will she fail, or will she be one of the three to go to America? Maria smiled and her face lit up. “This!” She said. “This?” I knew what she meant. I wanted to hear the words come out of her mouth. “What we are doing in this room.” “And that is…?” “Education,” she said, exaggerating her exasperation with my need to have everything spelled out for me. I secretly push her harder, I always have, and she secretly knows it. Relationship. The dam was broken and soon a list of leadership qualities filled the entire whiteboard. I then introduced the story of Annie Sullivan and her student, Helen Keller. In particular I set up the scene I was about to share from the 1962 classic film version of William Gibson’s play The Miracle Worker. Annie (played by Anne Bancroft) is about to give Helen (played by Patty Duke) her first big lesson: how to behave at the dinner table. The scene begins with Helen turning dinner into a barbaric ritual of a spoiled child getting everything she wants based on the pity her parents feel for her condition (blindness, deafness and dumbness). When Helen gets to Annie, her teacher draws the line. Helen erupts into a tantrum and Annie clears the family from the room. What ensues is an eight minute and thirty second battle between teacher and student that I can't believe has ever quite been matched. There is no dialogue, but plenty of action. At the end when Helen has learned her lesson, two words are finally spoken. Annie signs, using Helen’s fingers, “Good... girl!” As my students watched this scene, I watched them. The room filled with laughter switching to shock and back to laughter and shock again. When the lights came on and the murmuring stopped I asked them to consider three keys to leadership as exemplified by Annie Sullivan. The first was easy to accept and understand: determination. The second, willingness to do the hard thing, is tricky to discuss. But they all clearly understood given the scene from the movie. After all, Helen’s own parents refused to treat her like a normal child, how much more difficult to be an outsider giving Helen the licking she deserves? The third key to leadership I offered my students is even more debatable and frankly speaking probably irrelevant given the plethora of leaders and leadership styles in the world, but I wanted to adhere to those qualities embodied by Ms. Sullivan. “A passionate heart, a steady mind,” I said, and reiterated in Dari. The girls nodded. Every step of the way I must remain aware of how impressionable they are. They trust me too much. But they are not stupid. They are sharp, and they know how to make up their own minds. Now I was ready to begin the program. I had obtained 16 copies of Caged Bird: stories from the safe house and Nadia Anjuman’s poems, and passed them around. To see the girls handle their very own copy of a real book was to see the generation of spirit right before my eyes. We read one of the poems My Garden, first in Dari and then in English. It is a cry of hope in the midst of darkness. Nadia was a member of the renowned (thanks to Chrinstina Lamb’s book) sewing circle of Herat. In the height of Taliban dominance she studied poetry, risking her life to do so. I will turn my garden into a gem, envious of its light / If I were to invite the sun’s flower to this gathering / Time will write tales about my work / I would like to fill history with jewels… The end of Ramadan is a new beginning. Everyone is cleansed. While the world carries on, there are sixteen girls preparing to face it with quiet and patient minds, a willingness to give up much of what western children enjoy as childhood, to do the hard thing in order to help themselves, their families, and their country, to do it with determination and a passion in their hearts.
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